Synopsis
Carved from over 1,200 hours of footage spanning the band’s career, Pearl Jam: Twenty is the definitive portrait of Pearl Jam. Part concert film, part intimate insider-hang, and part testimonial to the power of music.
2011 Directed by Cameron Crowe
Carved from over 1,200 hours of footage spanning the band’s career, Pearl Jam: Twenty is the definitive portrait of Pearl Jam. Part concert film, part intimate insider-hang, and part testimonial to the power of music.
Pearl Jam - Twenty, Пърл Джем 20, 珍珠果酱二十年, 펄 잼 트웬티
When I was in a coma, my wife would put Pearl Jam on. It was not clear if I could respond but one day, she put it on, and my eyes started pouring. Somewhere in the state between conscious and unconscious thought, life and death, I experienced the music that ultimately served as the soundtrack of my actual life.
And when I heard Pearl Jam when I was awake, the context had changed. I was in recovery now. It was no longer the band that defined the excesses of my youth. It became the sound of my recovery.
It was the sound of my first concert. My first relationship. Many nights by the campfire. Nights inside Seattle bars, with friends…
aka Almost Famous 2: More Famouser.
Top 5 tearjerkiest moments:
1. Chris Cornell breaking down talking about Andrew Wood.
2. Eddie Vedder breaking down talking about bonding with Jeff Ament in the early days.
3. The Jumbotron image of Eddie breaking down at Roskilde.
4. Eddie getting slightly choked up about meeting Pete Townshend.
5. Me feeling sad about the minimal mentions of Dave A.
Original grade: 4 stars
Rewatch grade: 4.5 stars
Nostalgia grade: 11 stars
Been thinking a lot about Chris Cornell these past few days and listening to his music. I grew up and have grown old with it. Some is otherworldly and menacing, some saccharine and cliched...but all of it was heartfelt.
I thought I'd rewatch Cameron Crowe's stoic monument to Pearl Jam as it was really the only thing I had in my collection that would allow me to relive a part of that era. For those of you that haven't seen this doc, Chris appears quite a bit in the first hour or so of the film. There is old videotape of a young Cornell holding court with Stone Gossard…
Pearl Jam and Cameron Crowe are a great match. Crowe the guy that helped put the Seattle alternative rock scene on the map and produced a genre defining soundtrack with Singles and followed scene defining bands such as Green River, Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden. Pearl Jam being one of the breakout artists and longest enduring bands that became one of the biggest concert attractions in the world for a bit and then settled into a more comfortable smaller level of success; An argument could be made for PJ being the most successful if the criteria is 1.) They are all still Alive and 2.) Still producing quality albums and touring.
The doc follows the group thru the 90's as…
Watching this again four years after it's one and only watch was something of an eye-opener. I always thought I was fairly good at retaining information from a documentary that I was really interested in, apparently not. I'd missed the small but important section about Temple of the Dog and the release of Hunger Strike, something one of LB's members reminded me of a few months ago. That part of the doc also featured Chris Cornell, yet another rock casualty who'll be sadly missed following his untimely death in May of last year, and this time that was what really hit me about this documentary, just how many artists go long before their time. Here we had Andy Wood, dead…
I find music to be an incredibly difficult beast to tackle when it comes to fully fleshing out why a song or band means so much to me, so instead of doing that I'm just going to say two things:
1. Eddie's ethos on music is why he is probably the most important figure in music to me. I love when he talks about how "Black" holds just as much meaning to him now as when he wrote it, and this video is probably my favorite tidbit about music from any artist ever.
2. While I dig each member's aesthetic, a young Stone Gossard may be the pinnacle of style, period.
I'd be a liar if I said that I'd liked everything Pearl Jam have put out on record over the years. There has been the odd missed-step for me here and there, but I think their music has certainly progressed over the now twenty-odd years they've been together. Cameron Crowe's in depth documentary however doesn't miss any steps in a career blighted only by drummer changes and the passage of time. Only Martin Scorsese does music concert/biographies better than this. See The Last Waltz, Shine A Light, or Living In The Material World to see what I mean, but Cameron Crowe obviously has invested many years in his appreciation of Seattle's Grunge pioneers and this is a fascinating documentary that…
the hold that these middle-aged white men have over me?? not very #girlboss
first things first: eddie vedder i love you with all my heart
truly incredible how much footage there is. a music documentary overflowing with heart, cameron crowe knows how to capture a band for their fans.