Trying again to watch all the movies on Apple TV, a feat I've let slip for a fair bit of 2022, I watched this documentary about The Velvet Underground, a band that I like quite a bit. Whilst there is plenty I enjoyed about this - I did feel it was a little too interested in feeling like a Velvet Underground performance, to feel like a definitive documentary.
The Velvet Underground were an avant garde Rock Band, formed in New York in the early 1960's. A marriage of the songwriting of Lou Reed and the experiment music of John Cale, the band were managed by Andy Warhol and were key to both his studio and to his travelling multimedia show The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Whilst not universally loved in their time, their style was undeniably influential on the bands that followed.
Todd Haynes tries, I think to capture the feel of one of Andy Warhol's multimedia shows creating a documentary that is an endless kaleidoscope of footage, set to the music of the band - and with talking head style interviews cut in and around. I was never sure whether some of the interviews, with the surviving cast of characters, was actually shot for this film, or taken from another one, but it's mixed with old footage of interviews, so you do hear from Warhol and Reed, who are no longer with us. That commitment to recreating the experience, does rather come at the expense of the information contained with it. Particularly I really struggled with a sense of the timing of things, how long they performed with Warhol, how much success they had at which points, when the albums were released, things like that.
Again, I don't want to come across as too negative, because generally I enjoyed it - but I'm not sure I really learned that much about them that I didn't already know.
The Velvet Underground were an avant garde Rock Band, formed in New York in the early 1960's. A marriage of the songwriting of Lou Reed and the experiment music of John Cale, the band were managed by Andy Warhol and were key to both his studio and to his travelling multimedia show The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Whilst not universally loved in their time, their style was undeniably influential on the bands that followed.
Todd Haynes tries, I think to capture the feel of one of Andy Warhol's multimedia shows creating a documentary that is an endless kaleidoscope of footage, set to the music of the band - and with talking head style interviews cut in and around. I was never sure whether some of the interviews, with the surviving cast of characters, was actually shot for this film, or taken from another one, but it's mixed with old footage of interviews, so you do hear from Warhol and Reed, who are no longer with us. That commitment to recreating the experience, does rather come at the expense of the information contained with it. Particularly I really struggled with a sense of the timing of things, how long they performed with Warhol, how much success they had at which points, when the albums were released, things like that.
Again, I don't want to come across as too negative, because generally I enjoyed it - but I'm not sure I really learned that much about them that I didn't already know.