09-19-2017, 10:39 AM
Saw it last night and enjoyed it. Most of the really striking band comments seem to have been contained in the trailer, which is too bad, but the superb concert footage, and to some degree the backstage stuff, mostly made up for that. I thought the crowd shots strained a little hard to find people with tears on their faces, a maudlin tendency all too common in various media productions nowadays. But again, that's a minor complaint.
The part where I teared up was not where I'd expected to. It was seeing the band hit 'Blow at High Dough' in Victoria - the first song the film showed after all the anxious rehearsals. That performance was vintage Gord, furious, on-point, and even joking around at the end ('*You* blow!...and *you* blow'...) The contrast between the half-destroyed Gord we saw in the build-up, and this vision Full Gord Downie in all his glory, was really moving: a reminder of what it was like to witness one of the greatest frontmen in the history of rock, and that we will never see that again. Indeed, I attended the second Vancouver show and while it was good, you couldn't have called it 'vintage' Gord; entirely understandably, he was less spontaneous and less physical than when he's at his best. But for those specific minutes of footage, he really WAS at his best. And the mad grandeur of it all choked me up.
One undeveloped theme in the film is the specifically generational aspect of the Hip. Look through the crowds, it's mostly 40-somethings, Gen Xers like myself. Nearly all bands have this, i.e., a basic cohort of fans acquired in their commercial heyday. But amidst all the talk about how the Hip 'define Canada,' etc., it's easy forget that they really 'define Canada' for a specific generation. Just a thought.
The part where I teared up was not where I'd expected to. It was seeing the band hit 'Blow at High Dough' in Victoria - the first song the film showed after all the anxious rehearsals. That performance was vintage Gord, furious, on-point, and even joking around at the end ('*You* blow!...and *you* blow'...) The contrast between the half-destroyed Gord we saw in the build-up, and this vision Full Gord Downie in all his glory, was really moving: a reminder of what it was like to witness one of the greatest frontmen in the history of rock, and that we will never see that again. Indeed, I attended the second Vancouver show and while it was good, you couldn't have called it 'vintage' Gord; entirely understandably, he was less spontaneous and less physical than when he's at his best. But for those specific minutes of footage, he really WAS at his best. And the mad grandeur of it all choked me up.
One undeveloped theme in the film is the specifically generational aspect of the Hip. Look through the crowds, it's mostly 40-somethings, Gen Xers like myself. Nearly all bands have this, i.e., a basic cohort of fans acquired in their commercial heyday. But amidst all the talk about how the Hip 'define Canada,' etc., it's easy forget that they really 'define Canada' for a specific generation. Just a thought.