Last post today, hopefully. I’m trying to make up for the lack of content recently…
This afternoon, I watched the Neil Young movie Greendale, recorded from the Sundance Channel. I’m a Neil Young fan from way back, though I haven’t been real happy with much that he’s done lately. The CD of the Greendale concept album/song cycle didn’t do much for me. It’s about a California family going through some rough times. The story seemed too rambling and all the songs (save the last one, “Be The Rain”) sounded samey and were very long and repetitive. I never watched the bonus DVD which had Neil performing the song cycle live acoustically. I figured if I was that bored with the electric version, the solo acoustic one wasn’t going to improve it much for me.
So, anyway, at the same time that Neil did this album, he also directed this Greendale movie which features the songs from the album and attempts to put them in a narrative context with actors acting them out. There is no dialog per se, though sometimes the actors are shown mouthing the lyrics. The movie is not an improvement on the album. If you put the song lyrics together with the movie images and with the story notes in the CD booklet, you can kind of get a picture of what the story is about. But there’s really not a lot of story there. It meanders terribly and even the attempts at the usual 60s hippyish “save the environment/corporations are bad” dogma are rote and almost seem like an afterthought (although it does produce that one good song, “Be The Rain”). The characters have names like “Sun Green” and “Earth Brown”, so you can see what kind of thing Neil is going for right there. A few of the images are interesting, but the shaky digital video is distracting and it all looks like one long home movie. Obviously the whole thing has to be approached as some sort of tone poem and not taken too linearly/literally, but the attempts at a jumpy narrative interfere even with that type of appreciation. For die-hard fans only. Don’t ingest MSG before attempting to view.
Latre.