Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
The Kinks are an English rock band that came on the scene in the early sixties during what was known as the British Invasion, putting them in the same group as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The music of The Kinks is a form of rock based off of a wide range of musical influences including rhythm and blues, theatrical music hall, folk, and country. The original members included Ray Davies, Dave Davies, Peter Quaife, and Mick Avory.
While they had a couple singles that didn't make it big, they came to prominence with "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night." Although they had their ups and downs, The Kinks continued to tour and create new music throughout the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. You Really Got Me: The Story Of The Kinks is an attempt to tell their story.
Unfortunately, this is not a very good attempt and that is a shame as it had the markings of an entertaining story. The band got off a solid start with top ten singles and then ends up on the bad side of the American Musicians Union and is banned from playing in the United States for over three years in the late sixties. They then get reinstated, resurrect their careers, and go on to play stadium size venues resulting in over three decades of being on the charts. It is a classic sort of structure and could have translated very well for a film. However, as stated, it doesn't.
The two biggest problems with You Really Got Me: The Story Of The Kinks is that the video quality is terrible and the film is so poorly thrown together that it doesn't make sense half the time. There are random cuts between film from the sixties to that of the seventies or eighties. Sometimes songs are left to play and sometimes the narrator just talks over the music. While there are individual segments that work, from an overall standpoint, there is no fluidity to the film.
Additionally, the documentary is too sketched out and not informative — for instance the narrator says that The Kinks were banned from the U.S. but never explains why, only that they were deprived of the world's largest music market. When you add to the minimal information, the fact that the narration is just a modified rehash of the All Music Guide's biography of The Kinks it comes across as something thrown together without any purpose.
Overall the quality of the footage varies from clip to clip and sometimes seems to switch between widescreen and a traditional television aspect ratio. The Dolby sound quality is just as uneven. There are no extras included with this DVD, which has a total running time of 83 minutes. All things considered, I cannot really recommend this video to anyone but the die-hard collector who must own everything ever done by or about The Kinks.
