Change Your Image
bryanlawrence
Reviews
Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90 (2023)
3 Hour Cookie Cutter Concert Doc
A friend got two free tickets so it seemed like a nice way to spend a Sunday evening. We went in unaware of the run time. Oops. Way, way too long. I found myself wanting it to end before even 2 hours had gone by. That would have been plenty. Six stars because maybe about half of the musical performances were okay, to good, to very good. And the theater we were in had a very good sound system. The rest of the music-meh. The direction and editing were generic seen-it-a-hundred-times in other run of the mill concert docs. Very few of the scenes lasted more than 3 seconds before a jump cut, and the cameras were constantly panning and zooming. Panning. Zooming. Panning and more zooming. Why do the employers of these techniques think that making the audience feel like we're in a low hovering drone is a good thing? And after about every five or so of of the jump cuts we'd get the obligatory up close three second audience shots of smiling, happy fans dancing and singing along. Lather rinse repeat. On and on it went, one performance after the other. After two hours of it, I was struggling to stay awake. And the celebrity emcees, Ethan Hawke, Helen Mirren and Woody Harrelson among them, added very little to the proceedings and were pretty lame. You'd think that for such a monumental milestone as a musical icon's 90th birthday, they could have gotten a director with some imagination and creative vision instead of settling for a three hour long, bygone era MTV/VH1 music video. Willie deserved better.
Untold (2021)
A Three Ring Circus On Steroids
A story illustrative of so many things wrong with American society. Social media, "mainstream" media, online dating, tabloid TV (Dr. Phil? Really?), the over emphasis on the importance of college sports, particularly the deification of Notre Dame football, to name a few. This doc did a good job of showing a lot of the repercussions that result when that toxic sludge is stirred. But wow, the presentation, particularly of the catfisher/perpetrator/instigator of the whole thing, was baffling and disturbing. Her attitude was about as tone deaf as you can get. She's talking about her involvement like she's describing something as innocent as taking a dog for a walk, or getting her hair done. She almost seems proud of her role in this. Is her gender identification and how she is dealing with it supposed to elicit sympathy for what she did? Sorry, you don't get a pass for being a reprehensible person because you are trans-gendered. And since the ending was so abrupt, we got no epilog telling us what, if anything, happened to her, and also what happened in Manti's life since all the dust settled.
1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (2021)
Huh?
I have a book called, "Never A Dull Moment-1971 The Year Rock Exploded", by David Hepworth. It's a very good book about all the GREAT music that came out in that year. I was 15 years old then and was just beginning my album buying adventures, exploring and enjoying a lot of that great music. So I was excited when I saw this series was available. Well...one of the very first things I noticed was in the opening credits, and I quote: "Based on the book, 1971 - Never A Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year, by David Hepworth." Huh? So I thought, maybe I missed the other book with a different, but similar, title by Mr. Hepworth. Strangely, I have not been able to find that he wrote a book called "1971 - Never A Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year." So from the beginning, the producers of this have committed either an error, or a deliberate deception, that is a little ridiculous. I mean, how do you get that wrong? Especially when Mr. Hepworth himself is listed as a "consultant" for this series! And then they change the title of their production to the grandiose and tepid "The Year That Music Changed Everything". Huh? Honestly, that claim could be made about a lot of years that came before 1971. Mr. Hepworth's book is more about the music than the zeitgeist of the times he was writing about. He does mention some of the current events that were going on (he gives two lines in the book to the Kent State shootings, whereas this series devotes a segment of the opening episode to the tragic event, telling us how important it was in the grand scheme of things musically. There's also a long segment on Hunter S. Thompson, who is not even mentioned in Hepworth's book), but his emphasis in the book is on the musicians and their creative output in 1971. Some of it was of course reflecting the times, but a lot of it was just being music for music's sake. I mean, I didn't buy "Aqualung" or "Led Zeppelin IV" or "The Allman Brothers Band At Fillmore East" because I thought they were making some grand political commentary. I just liked the music. This series picks and chooses the music of the year that fits its contention that "Music Changed Everything" in 1971, (umm, not really) and ignores a lot of the other great music that came out that year.