I saw this 'film about
radiohead' on
DVD at
Music World in
Waterloo (
Ontario); since
I'm a fan and it had
phat cover art, I decided to pick it up even though it was wickedly
over-priced. Unfortunately, the cover art turned out to be the best part. The cover had cool
radiohead-esque stuff like mysterious bar graphs, diagrams of people driving,
airbags
deploying, etc. and it had subversive writings such as "YOU ARE A TARET MARKET", all of which
closed the sale.
Good points:
- Had some cool imagery
- Decent snippets of interviews
- Decent snippets of live performances
- Very uncommercial
Reasons this "film" sucked the ass:
- snippets... no section is ever very well developed or explained. No real information is
ever conveyed, there's no narrative or flow. It's very dis-jointed. I guess maybe it
suffers from being TOO experimental or whatever. I can take wierd off-beat stuff though; I
love creative approaches, but this is just... poorly executed.
- They keep starting to play some of Radiohead's most popular songs but then stop them... but
then they repeat them later in the video. It's like you hear the same parts of Just or
Paranoid Android like 3 times. Radiohead has really great live shows but the video completely
fails to get this across... in favour of "inspired" footage of zooming in on the band from
outside the venue.
- There is an ill-concieved sequence where all these little snippets of articles and reviews
and headlines about Radiohead fill the screen moving up and down and sideways all faded into
one another. They explain nothing and make it irritating to read and you only get to glimpse
tiny sections of text. I'm sure this was the desired overall effect to give the viewer an
overview of the press coverage of RH's career, but I found it insanely irritating and ugly
looking.
There's no reason this movie should have been boring and gruelling for 3 avid RH fans to watch.
That seems like a miserable failure to me. I think one day I might try editing this thing down
to it's best moments... then I might enjoy it more. It would be like a good 10 - 20 mitnutes of
quality footage.
Here's some information from imdb:
Meeting People Is Easy (1999)
Directed by
Grant Gee
Genre:
Documentary
Plot Outline: An entertaining "rockumentary" about Radiohead that shows some of the tedium of
being a rock star, as well as some of the fun stuff.
User Rating: 7.4/10 (393 votes)