This movie is everything that's bad about music documentaries, and none of the good.
There's no music. There's no footage of the band, and not even much in the way of photos. The filmmaker claims that he was trying to see if he could do a music documentary about a band without including the band. Based on what I saw, the experiment was a failure.
What we get instead is 2 hours of (expletive deleted) interviews with critics and other self-declared experts on the band. Most of it is just critics and musicians talking in meaningless superlatives. When the movie was over, I felt like I needed a shower to get all of that cow manure off of my skin.
There are s few people who have things to say that are relevant - some insiders from Minneapolis and project collaborators. But not enough to make this movie worth watching or renting.
As a historical documentary, the movie sucks. The movie is short on real information, and long on meaningless pseudo-intellectual blathering. The history that is presented is sanitized, and incomplete. There's more than one lie of omission in how people and events are portrayed.
For example, in the discussion of the Replacements appearance on SNL in 1986, Bob's wife describes how the band trashed the dressing room, but there's no mention of Paul swearing at Bob on live television. Also, there's no mention of how Lorne Michaels didn't just ban the Replacements -- he canceled an upcoming scheduled appearance by The Cure, and banned all rock bands for a long time. What we get instead is person after person yammering on and on about how being banned from SNL makes the Replacements one of the world's greatest bands.
An interview with Lorne Michaels, Harry Dean Stanton (the guest host) or any of the members of that SNL cast (Joan Cussack, Robert Downey Jr.) would have been interesting to see ... but this movie contains very few interviews that are actually relevant to anything.
There's a lot of talk about why album XXXX or song XXXX is the greatest thing ever recorded ... and subjecting an audience to 2 hours of (expletive deleted) doth not make a watchable documentary.
Needless to say this movie is a massive disappointment.
There's no music. There's no footage of the band, and not even much in the way of photos. The filmmaker claims that he was trying to see if he could do a music documentary about a band without including the band. Based on what I saw, the experiment was a failure.
What we get instead is 2 hours of (expletive deleted) interviews with critics and other self-declared experts on the band. Most of it is just critics and musicians talking in meaningless superlatives. When the movie was over, I felt like I needed a shower to get all of that cow manure off of my skin.
There are s few people who have things to say that are relevant - some insiders from Minneapolis and project collaborators. But not enough to make this movie worth watching or renting.
As a historical documentary, the movie sucks. The movie is short on real information, and long on meaningless pseudo-intellectual blathering. The history that is presented is sanitized, and incomplete. There's more than one lie of omission in how people and events are portrayed.
For example, in the discussion of the Replacements appearance on SNL in 1986, Bob's wife describes how the band trashed the dressing room, but there's no mention of Paul swearing at Bob on live television. Also, there's no mention of how Lorne Michaels didn't just ban the Replacements -- he canceled an upcoming scheduled appearance by The Cure, and banned all rock bands for a long time. What we get instead is person after person yammering on and on about how being banned from SNL makes the Replacements one of the world's greatest bands.
An interview with Lorne Michaels, Harry Dean Stanton (the guest host) or any of the members of that SNL cast (Joan Cussack, Robert Downey Jr.) would have been interesting to see ... but this movie contains very few interviews that are actually relevant to anything.
There's a lot of talk about why album XXXX or song XXXX is the greatest thing ever recorded ... and subjecting an audience to 2 hours of (expletive deleted) doth not make a watchable documentary.
Needless to say this movie is a massive disappointment.