Neville’s movie serves as a splendid jukebox, offering rapid-fire clips that bowl you over anew with just how rapidly McCartney’s own synapses were firing on ingenious hit after hit.
If you’re a big Ozzy fan, you probably already love him for being brave enough to go out and meet his public one last time, against what we can now see from this film were nearly all odds. But the greater bravery might have been going on camera repeatedly for this doc, and allowing himself to convey that old age is not for the faint-hearted, even as it renders you fainter of heart.
Bombach’s movie finds its real flavor in exploring the differences in the duo’s two very distinct personalities, which up till now might have seemed like a fuzzy, singular unit by all but the most hardcore fans.
For this warm and lovely film’s most natural audience, which will most likely be families struggling with illness, the documentary’s final inconclusiveness may feel like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony.
In the Court of the Crimson King is really about as good as rock documentaries get, in capturing the essence of a group of musicians and how they relate to each other, the world and a muse whose demands result in literal and figurative calluses.
For most fans, this show isn’t so much about watching her career flash before their eyes — although there’s that — but their own roller-coaster lives. It’s sort of Broadway, kind of psychotherapy/church, and all too well-executed.
Jazz and animation make for strong bedfellows in They Shot the Piano Player, a film from Spanish directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal that represents an intriguing hybrid in all sorts of ways.
Watching this film satisfying tie up Case’s loose ends, you can still lament the lost promise of the Plimsouls, or wonder what might’ve happened with a more copacetic label/artist relationship.
