Some great noises in this one. Screams, gasps, things breaking etc.
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David Byrne's American Utopia 2020
Obviously exists in the shadow of Stop Making Sense, the nearly inalienable Greatest Concert Film Ever Made, but that lens does it a disservice. Where Stop Making Sense is a purely musical experience, American Utopia is distinct both as a film and as a stage show. It makes Stop Making Sense's implicit narrative explicit, tying together the songs with questions of human connection and identity. Stop Making Sense is the most joyful movie ever made- and it is still my…
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LCD Soundsystem: The Long Goodbye 2011
It's weird to watch something so implicitly hagiographic given the context of their reformation, but I don't care too much, because the emotion captured on film here is real. This really was their last show, until it wasn't.
I can't really be mad that they came back, because I've seen them play and I wouldn't trade that hour and forty-five minutes for anything in the world. That guy crying during Home is the most represented I have felt on screen since I watched True Stories for the first time.
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The Swan 2023
"At the end of “The Swan,” Peter Watson takes flight, borne aloft by the swan’s wings strapped to his arms, and flies home. He crashes violently into his back garden, where his mother finds him. Ralph Fiennes, playing Dahl, looks into the camera and takes a deep breath before reading what Mrs. Watson says when she rushes outside to tend to him. “My darling,” he recites, his voice wavering, “my darling boy. What’s happened to you?”
Even as he lays…
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Talking Heads - Chronology 2011
Basically the filmic equivalent of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, charts their evolution as a live act rather than prioritizing one virtuosic performance like Stop Making Sense does. Obviously not as good as that movie, because nothing is, but there isn’t a single Talking Heads live document that isn’t essential. The versions of “Animals” and “Artists Only” in this compilation rival the best performances from Stop Making Sense and Live in Rome, and the interstitial footage of…
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Stop Making Sense 1984
I have ranked all of the songs performed in Stop Making Sense according to Science (how I feel about them at the moment):
1. Heaven
2. What a Day That Was
3. Girlfriend is Better (the suit song)
4. Burning Down the House
5. Once in a Lifetime (the glasses song)
6. Life During Wartime (the cardio song)
7. Psycho Killer
8. Found a Job
9. This Must Be the Place (the lamp song)
10. Swamp (the evil song)
11.… -
True Stories 1986
The definitive filmic portrait of humanity. Byrne manipulates the inherent constructed artificiality of cinema to illuminate the constructed artificiality of the social world we inhabit. The notion of normality is as illusory as the world constructed onscreen, and that world couldn't function without its weirdest inhabitants. A humane masterpiece.
“If this is being nuts, then I don’t ever want to be sane”