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Directed by: Alan Parker Starring: Bob Geldof, Bob Hoskins This is sort of a tough film to review. Based as it is on Pink Floyd's best-selling album The Wall, it's almost easier to think of it as the world's longest music video than as a film with a coherent narrative structure or plot. But it does have a plot, and includes a lot of deeply moving meditations on war, society, and and human emotions. If you haven't heard the album already, it may be somehat difficult to get what's going on, but if you have, this will add a new dimension to the often fairly oblique and mysterious refernces. It's about a rock star (cleverly named Pink Floyd), who is basically telling the life story of the real Pink Floyd's bass player, Roger Waters. Drawing on Waters' real life experience with losing his father during World War II, suffering at the hands of abusive teachers in school, and with the pressures and unpleasantness of being a rock star, the film also takes a look at the nature of what it means to be famous, and how people protect themselves from hurt and pain by withdrawing from the world. The movie follows the album almost exactly, adding in the song When the Tigers Broke Free, extending Empty Spaces, and dropping Hey You. Most songs are played behind Boomtown Rats member Bob Geldof acting as Pink, but some, like Goodbye Blue Sky and The Trial, receive startlingly weird animated footage drawn by Gerald Scarfe. It is an extremely faithful reproduction of the music and the stage shows, completing Roger Waters' vision of the music as a sort of tryptych: movie, album, and show. While this film can be depressing, bitter, and a little overwhelming to watch, it really gives a lot of life to the excellent music that the band recorded shortly before Waters left the band due to creative differences. This is Pink Floyd at its most grandiose, pretentious, and touching, all at the same time. The song Comfortably Numb, my personal favorite on the album, is almost overwhelming, and the fantastic expenditure of $10 million (quite a lot at the time) really shows in the extravagant attention to detail and realism, such as the actual skinheads that direction Alan Parker hired for the In the Flesh and Waiting For the Worms scenes. One of my personal favorite movies, and definitely the peak of the rock opera trend in the Seventies, beating even The Who's Tommy. A must-see for the Pink Floyd fan, but recommended for anyone who likes to see talented musicians try to tackle some larger themes in a big way. RATING: 5.0 PROS: Fantastic music, inspired direction, great animation CONS: Very depressing, a little disjointed ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084503/
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Aug 2, 2004 00:16
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 17:06 |
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