![]() Shut Up and Play the Hits can be streamed on Kanopy, Tubi, and Pluto TV, while I Am Trying To Break Your Heart can only be found on DVD. ![]() Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is considered a masterpiece these days, but this film by Sam Jones shows how Wilco's groundbreaking fourth album became a battleground for the band and their studio when the finished record was outright rejected, and they were dropped by label Reprise. (Murphy wound up reforming LCD Soundsystem in 2016, partly at the urging of fan David Bowie.) The show itself is a riotously energetic showcase for LCD's mix of dance, art rock, and punk, with Murphy, as ever, orchestrating a dazzlingly eclectic goodbye to a rapturous crowd.įor a movie about a band that was almost written off but refused to die, check out I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco (2002). Interviewed prior to the farewell by writer Chuck Klosterman, Murphy is shown trying to convince everyone, himself included, that walking away in favor of some sort of normal life is the right thing to do. Interspersing clips of the perpetually rumpled Murphy both before the big show and the morning and days after, the film from directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace captures the frontman's mixed feelings with palpable ambivalence. Selling out Madison Square Garden for one last show before being disbanded at the peak of their artistic and commercial success by founder James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem goes out of the music world the way Murphy brought them in - witty, weird, and endlessly danceable. If The Last Waltz is a funeral for a band, then this later final concert from indie dance-rockers LCD Soundsystem is a party. Awesome I F-in' Shot That is currently only available on DVD. The Last Waltz is available to stream on Tubi and Pluto TV. The result is as anarchic as it is bracing. A typically bold exercise in punk-ethos rockumentary filmmaking from punk-rap pioneers The Beastie Boys, this 2006 film concert film was pieced together after the fact by band member/director Adam Yauch/MCA from raw and unpredictable footage gleaned from 50 hi-def cameras handed out to fans at the band's Madison Square Garden concert. Of course, if you want to abandon all semblance of auteurist creative control, look no further than: Awesome I F-in' Shot That. (And a predictably chaotic one, as a reluctant Dylan had to be talked out of walking at the last minute, endangering the entire project, while The Band's fractious nature saw them later diluting the film's impact by repeatedly reuniting.) But what emerges is a prodigal bounty of disparate but complementary sounds and styles, all caught by Scorsese's cameras with elegance and verve. John, to Emmylou Harris, Neil Diamond (yes, really), Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, Ringo Starr, Pinetop Perkins, Muddy Waters, and The Staple Singers (among others), was a monumental achievement. Pulling together a concert with everyone from Bob Dylan, to Dr. Scorsese's interviewing style, indeed, tends toward the verbose and worshipful, but that's all forgotten when the director turns all his skills toward documenting what was an all-star tribute show for a band of consummate energy and infectious drive. Rob Reiner may have patterned his squarely earnest documentary director Marty Di Bergi in 1984's mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap partly on director Martin Scorsese's onscreen presence in The Last Waltz, but that doesn't take away from how expertly Scorsese captures the last performance from the legendary country-rockers The Band. What she and her massive team pull off is one of the most rousing (and, to the traditionally white Coachella crowd, undoubtedly eye-opening) tributes to Black music - and the indefatigable Beyoncé - anyone could have imagined. Flashbacks to that rehearsal process (complete with an increasingly ominous countdown to Coachella) see even Beyoncé wondering if she can pull off her grand plans in the wake of the difficult, C-section birth of twins that saw her canceling the year before. There's a reason why that year's festival became known as "Beychella."ĭirected by Beyoncé herself, the film kicks off with an explosive entrance, with Beyoncé revealing the enormous backup band she'd been rehearsing with for eight grueling months - a 100-strong mix of marching band performers, steppers, and dancers, all culled from the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) whose long musical and cultural traditions the singer celebrates throughout. Homecoming, expertly pieced together from the singer's two-night stint headlining the festival (the only Black woman to have done so) also serves as testament to the ambition and costs of spectacle. If this film about Beyoncé headlining 2018 Coachella were just a concert film, it would go down as one of the most astounding, triumphant musical performances ever.
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