Is it as good as everyone says?
A resounding yes. From the movies opening scene, a tubby Tweedy with a scribbled face on his tummy, ciggy secured in belly button with a piece of gum to the movie's end (sans guitarist) it was a captivating piece. I saw the movie with one minor Wilco fan, and one person not familiar at all with their work save for the recent hype. Consensus.. Good film. The movie was entirely in black and white which really gave it a Documentary (capital D) feel. Wilco fan's will love the alternative recording of Kamera (My easy fav. off the cd). The viewer gets a very MTV paced stage of the events surrounding the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, jumping from label trouble to internal band trouble, to a touching moment between father (Tweedy) and son, to a point in the not so distant past when the whole album came together and was awaiting release, all wrapped up in a cacophany of clippings of Wilco songs and outtakes.
The movie was interesting from a general "Rocumentary" perpective as well as from it's inside baseball take. You get a taste of the frustration, the liquor laced woodshedding, the comfort Wilco had with it's finished product and the confusing world of audio technology. It is really a nice sampler of what goes into getting a band from idea to conception for a new release, that and a whole heck of a lot of pretty packaging in the form of music clips from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.. A worthy view and a warmly introspective look at the making of a cd rejected from a major label that turned into the charttopper of the summer. I was not quite dancing in my seats, but I was grinning at the labels stupidity and with an urge to return home to my bass and launch my own music career.
Watch it.. That said, Visions Cinema is a great place to see a show. Sierra Nevada on tap, food from the Lebanese Taverna amoungst other places.. smallish screens, but comfortable seating and plenty of hot indie guys behind the bar. Get there early on weekend nights to beat the crowd, shows often sell out.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Rock on Jen - sounds good.
2 - joanne
You should check out the Slate review:
If you don't have the potential to sell a million copies of your record, the philistine suits want nothing to do with you. This was a well-worn theme in the reviews of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it's made explicit in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, where one critic describes Reprise's rejection of Yankee Hotel as "a measure of what corporations that own record companies are willing to put up with." There's an inherent conflict, we're told, between the time it takes to understand and appreciate a great album and the bottom-line mentality that demands success on a quarter-by-quarter basis...
There's only one problem with this story: Both Nonesuch and Reprise are owned by AOL Time Warner. In other words, the same suits who supposedly found Wilco's approach too artistic to tolerate when the band was working for one part of the company apparently found it commercially viable when the band was working for another part. In the movie, this comes across as simply an ironic twist of fate. But it's more than that. In fact, Nonesuch's move makes the whole "victim of multinational capitalism" narrative look rather suspect. After all, if Reprise's axing of Wilco was really the inevitable result of a corporate ethos that privileges commercial appeal over artistic integrity, then Nonesuch's decision makes no sense. If Wilco wasn't going to be profitable enough for AOL Time Warner when it was at Reprise, it wasn't going to be any more profitable for AOL Time Warner at Nonesuch.
3 - Kenan Hebert
What, might I ask, is a Documentary with a capital D?