Do I need to see a 3D Billie Eilish concert?

When I went to see Project Hail Mary in IMAX a few months ago, there was a trailer for the new James Cameron-directed Billie Eilish concert movie, which of course was expected to use all the latest tricks in the technology-forward director's arsenal. 

Because I wanted to see what a concert looked like when given the same care as filming a Na'vi, I thought I would probably go.

Strangely, though, it isn't even playing at the IMAX theater where they advertised it, at the Melbourne Museum, which is unusual. When you see something in IMAX, usually they only show trailers for other things that are almost definitely going to play at that theater. IMAX is a different animal, where you don't get any of the filler ads for local restaurants or telecom companies, and you get straight to the movie while only seeing glimpses of other future ways you will be awed in these very seats.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft is indeed opening today, but is normal 3D, in normal theaters, enough of a draw for me?

Should a slight difference in size really matter that much in determining my interest in this film?

You see, I don't love Billie Eilish. Her music, to me, is a bit like Charli XCX's music, which is that I mean it is exactly adjacent to all sorts of bands that I have, historically, loved, but that this particular brand of what she does -- of what they do -- does not quite work for me. For a person who has been as popular as she's been for going on ten years now, I don't even know that many of her songs, and the one I probably know best, "Bad Guy," is probably my least favorite of the songs I know.

But still, I'm kind of interested in a 3D concert with James Cameron's imprimatur. 

But it's not like this is the first 3D concert I would have ever seen at the movies. Almost exactly 16 years ago, on May 2nd, 2010, I went to see Phish 3D with my friend Gregg, since we are both Phish fans. In fact, I wrote about it here, though you should probably only follow that link if you want to see a blog post with really ghastly formatting. 

The gist of that post was to discuss five total hours of two very long movies (the other being The Baader Meinof Complex) I saw on the same day that really knocked the wind out of me. If I lost my wind even from a band I used to, and possibly still do, consider one of my favorites, what chance do I stand listening to that much music that mildly annoys me, when I've already gotten the 3D concert experience in an inherently more favorable setting? 

(Side note: Looking up the date of my viewing of Phish 3D, which I originally tried to do on Letterboxd before having to opt for my Microsoft Word document, acquainted me with the fact that I never put in a retroactive logging on Letterboxd for this viewing. Since, at that time, I was just going down my movie list from this Word document to add my movies, I have to imagine Phish 3D wasn't available to add to Letterboxd when I first tried to do that. It is now, so I've belatedly rectified that.)

To be fair, Hit Me Hard and Soft comes in under two hours, and I know it's not only concert footage, as Phish 3D was. I know this because my younger son and I had a joke about one of the things in this trailer, which was that the big "dramatic moment" in the trailer was Eilish crying because her brother couldn't be present with her on tour. Not because he was sick or anything had happened to him, just because he wasn't present.

And just writing that last paragraph made me realize: The whole premise of this post is wrong.

It wasn't Project Hail Mary where I saw the Hit Me Hard and Soft trailer, it was Avatar: Fire and Ash. My younger son was with me for that one, not for Project Hail Mary. And we saw that in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, not my local IMAX theater. Which, therefore, did not actually create an implicit promise to screen this film that it did not fulfill. 

So yeah I guess I'm not going? I don't know. 

Audient Authentic: Stop Making Sense

This is the 11th in my 2020 series watching classic documentaries from prior to the last three decades that I haven't seen, chronologically. 

I've just watched my third music documentary for this series -- and last, I assume, though I haven't yet chosen the series' final film -- but it's the first one that can properly be described as a concert movie. There are snippets of performance in both Dont Look Back and Gimme Shelter, but Jonathan Demme's 1984 film Stop Making Sense is chock full of it. In fact, there's nothing else but the concert. (Actually, an assemblage for footage from four different concerts at L.A.'s Pantages Theatre.)

As it turns out, concert movies make me drift off a bit. 

That's not to say that they make me sleepy, just that they don't fully hold my attention, even with bands I really like. Which might be why I don't watch all that many of them.

I think back to the experience of going to see a concert movie of a band that I consider one of my favorites of all time, Phish. I actually wrote about the experience here, when I went to see Phish 3D. (It's probably not worth going to the link, as I just noticed that several updates to blogspot have really thrown off the formatting on that particular post.)

The gist of what I wrote was that it was really hard to stay focused on the movie when it was literally just them playing their songs. Even though they were songs I loved, I needed a bit more of a narrative spine to remain fully engaged. I did notice that without that narrative spine, nor breaking away for interviews, there was no reason for me not to treat it like a regular concert -- in other words, to talk to the guy I was watching it with, if the mood struck us, and to go the bathroom if I needed. Which is something I would never ordinarily do outside of the most desperate of circumstances.

I didn't have anyone to talk to while watching Stop Making Sense in the hotel last Friday afternoon ... but that didn't stop me. In fact, I found myself carrying on several different chats on Facebook while the movie was playing, and I'm pretty sure I went to the bathroom at least once. 

You'd think this might have diminished my enjoyment of the film. It did not. 

Just because I wasn't watching every second of the movie didn't mean I didn't totally appreciate the experience that Demme and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne were bringing me. I credit Byrne specifically because the staging of the show was his concept, according to the credits. But really, the whole band was bringing the experience to me, enthusiastically, with incredible musicianship, great set design, and great costumes. (Byrne's "big suit" has become kind of a famous image.)

I don't like Talking Heads anywhere near as much as I like Phish, but I like Stop Making Sense a lot more than I liked Phish 3D. Talking Heads are one of those bands where I never bought one of their albums, but I'd be a great candidate for a greatest hits album (presumably one exists out there). There are probably a dozen Talking Heads songs I know and can sing along with, about half of which get played here. But I liked the sound of even the songs I didn't know.

At first I thought there was maybe nothing groundbreaking about this film, but then I realized, what qualified as groundbreaking was a lot different in 1984 than it would be today. This whole series, in fact, is about pioneering new forms of non-fiction storytelling, and Stop Making Sense certainly does that -- to the extent that you can call what it's doing "storytelling." 

The most groundbreaking aspect of it is something I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not read about it afterward. According to Wikipedia, it is the first film made using entirely digital audio techniques. That's probably more a convenience on the filmmaking side than an observable difference by the audience, but it was a significant enough part of the process to make it into the opening paragraph on Wikipedia. 

What I was more likely to notice was the techniques Demme and company used to get the cameras right up in the faces of the band members, something that was probably also fairly unusual at the time (though I think the Maysles brothers may have actually done a bit of that 14 years earlier in Gimme Shelter, if memory serves). I did actually wonder how they went from long shots to close-ups in the same song, yet you don't see the camera operators all over the stage, ruining the long shot. (I also thought it was probably something of an annoying price to pay for those who watched the show live, that there would always be a crew filming all over the stage.) 

Of course realizing that it was shot over four nights helps explain that. The close-ups were likely from one performance while the long shots were from another, but it's all blended so seamlessly that you really would have no idea. That does, however, probably mean that the band had to wear the same outfits each night, to create the illusion of one single performance. Fortunately, they'd have the days in between to launder them and remove the sweat stench.

Although all the Talking Heads stuff was, of course, great, I may have most enjoyed the mid-movie song "Genius of Love" performed by the Tom Tom Club, which has some Heads band members in it. In terms of sheer practicalities, the song exists to give Byrne time to do a costume change, but the musicianship in this particular song is just off the charts, and I found myself grooving along to this even a bit more than to the Heads songs.

Really, there's just great showmanship all over this thing. It may be hard to isolate Demme's role exactly here, and it's something I think I might appreciate better if I watched his other prominent concert movie, Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids from 2016. He also made a Neil Young concert movie in 2006. Though of course neither of those fit in the current series. Anyway, to the extent that this is a really captivating movie and someone had to oversee all the various choices that got made just as they needed to be, Demme deserves praise.

Captivating? In a movie I spent talking to friends online and playing my turns in Lexulous?

Yes indeed. All versions of captivation are not equal. This one captivated me visually and sonically, perhaps not in equal measure, but one more than made up for the other, alternating throughout.

Okay! We're on to the last month of Audient Authentic. I don't know what the grand finale will be, but I can tell you it will fall during the years 1985 to 1989, to put a capper on the faithful chronological sequencing I've kept going all year. 

Five long hours

I don't usually schedule two movies that both run two-and-a-half hours for the same day. If you do cross that 130- to 140-minute barrier on one film, it's much more palatable to keep any other films you consume that day to snack size (85 to 95 minutes). Otherwise you'll burn out.

But it's even worse when you get yourself involved in two long movies with no discernible end -- either because of the way the plot is structured, or because there is no plot.

This is what happened to me yesterday.

First it was The Baader Meinhof Complex. This German language film caught my wife's eye last year, and she had wanted to see it in the theater. Me, I've seen a couple movies about German terrorist groups of the 1970s, and I always find them to be a mixture of interesting and tedious. But I pushed it to the top of my queue as a surprise for my wife, and was looking forward to giving this one a shot.

Knowing it was 149 minutes, we scheduled our viewing for a Sunday afternoon, when we'd be sure to give the movie our full attention, without succumbing to exhaustion if we tried to watch it one night after dinner. The fact that it was in German only made that a smarter decision.

And for the first 90 minutes, I was totally with it -- I was happily nestled on the "interesting" side of the interesting/tedious continuum. Because of this, I wasn't checking my watch, nor did I know precisely how much of the movie had elapsed. (I didn't note the exact time we started watching, either.) This is always a sign of a good movie -- when you note the passage of time not by the clock, but by the events of the script as they reach their natural conclusion.

Unfortunately, The Baader Meinhof Complex continues to exist for almost an hour after it reaches its natural conclusion.

The terrorists we're following are eventually arrested, and in a film like this, we expect that to be the end. Outlaws and others on wild criminal rides always end up either dead or in jail, so when the suspects started getting rounded up here, we were expecting the credits to roll at any time.

Uh uh.

In fact, we were both watching the prison scenes and thinking "Okay, this is the last shot and then the credits will roll." When it became clear that this was not going to happen quite as soon as we thought, my wife took the opportunity to go to the bathroom. And I took the opportunity to see how much of the movie had elapsed. Incredulously, I saw the display stopped at 1:32. I thought "That can't be right. This movie is almost over. The display must be broken."

Well, the display was not broken. The Baader Meinhof Complex still had 57 minutes remaining, and we felt every single one of them. The people we were following were still in prison, mind you, so the film gave us a handful of new people to follow, new people to start caring about, in addition to those we were already following, those we were quickly beginning to no longer care about. We started laughing at our own misery, started mocking the movie, first gently, and then not-so-gently. The interminable final hour of The Baader Meinhof Complex ended up driving it dangerously close to a thumbs down for me.

I was reminded of a couple things here. First there was Clint Eastwood's Changeling, which would have been a great film if it had been 45 minutes shorter. That movie reaches its logical climax and then extends on endlessly from there, to the fatal detriment of the film. Then there was the more traumatic experience of horseback riding on my honeymoon in Belize. Having survived several experiences that I considered to be near-death on the back of that horse, I finally couldn't stand it anymore and asked our guide how close we were to getting back. It turns out he had taken us a different way home, and we still had more than an hour left before we'd reach our destination. I wanted to give up right then and there.

Somehow, watching The Baader Meinhof Complex seemed to chew up the entire afternoon, from 2:30 to 5:45, even though we only stopped it once or twice for breaks of less than one or two minutes each. So not only was the movie longer than the story structure called for, and not only did it seem like we'd been sitting there longer than we had, but the movie also mysteriously ate up more of the clock than it seemed like it should have. Overall, quite exhausting.

So you can imagine my concern when I realized I'd gotten myself into a second such situation.

A friend and I had plans to go see Phish 3D, a concert video shot in 3D and playing for a one-week limited engagement at just two theaters in Los Angeles. One of those theaters happens to be a five-minute drive from my house, so my friend met me for a beer at my place an hour before, and then we drove over. We both have seen Phish live several times -- me four times, him between 15 and 18. In fact, he was at the show documented here, which was out in Indio, California over Halloween weekend last year, a festival nicknamed "Festival 8." We both thought this special show would be pretty close to the experience of seeing them live.

Yes, indeed -- much closer than I could have anticipated.

On the drive over, my friend told me that the running time was two-and-a-half hours. Having survived getting beaten up in my basketball game that morning (for which I required a one-hour nap) and The Baader Meinhof Complex, I was a bit taken aback. But I love the band and thought the 3D should be plenty entertaining, so I was only mildly concerned.

Until the movie started ... and it was exactly like being at a concert.

No narrative spine. No voiceover. Just musicians playing their instruments. Musicians I liked playing songs I liked, granted, but nothing mentally to connect to -- which is something you need desperately if you're going to be sitting there for two-and-a-half hours.

The real problem was that although it was like a concert in many ways, it wasn't in others. For example, at a real concert, you can carry on a conversation with your friend. You can wander off and look at the lights. You can go get a beer and still hear the music. You can smoke a cigarette, if that's how you're inclined. You can text somebody who isn't there, to tell them what a good time you're having, or someone who is there, to tell them where and when to meet you. You can check your websites and email on your phone. You can dance.

It's a different story in a theater. You have to observe the rules of theater etiquette. You can't yell over the music to your friend to tell them how awesome it is. You can't dance in the aisles. And if you ignited any substance, you'd probably set off a fire alarm and get arrested.

As I was watching Phish 3D, and decided that it was not going to have any of the traditional narrative aspects of a documentary, I started to wonder what I'd gotten myself into. If the band had just taken a single two-hour-and-thirty-minute set and put it on film, it could be a long night, especially starting at 9:40 after the day I'd had. I'd have to check my watch repeatedly just to figure out when it was time to start expecting it to wrap up, because the movie itself was not going to give me any cues, any build toward a logical climax.

Fortunately, my friends, this story has a happy ending.

I soon realized that the fact that it was like a concert was also a good thing in a lot of ways. It didn't take more than ten minutes before I realized that I could lean over and make comments to my friend, even carry on a running dialogue with him. Our conversation wasn't going to distract other viewers from the band's jamming, any more than it would at a live show. So we talked this way on and off throughout the movie, never concerned that we were bothering anyone. It was liberating, in fact, to be talking during a movie and knowing that it was not considered toxic social behavior.

Another thing you can do at a concert is leave to go to the bathroom whenever you want. You're not going to miss any part of the story. It's especially true with a band like Phish, whose four-minute album recordings frequently turn into 14-minute jams during their shows. I selected one of these 14-minute jams, and not only went to the bathroom, but also updated my facebook status on my cell phone. Didn't matter. With no plot to return to, I could have stayed out for ten minutes and not really "missed" anything. In fact, I thought of going to the snack bar to replenish, except that I'd preemptively stocked up before the movie started, out of instinct.

The atmosphere was fun. People came and went, and there were a couple times when I thought some people might actually start dancing, though no one ultimately did. During one of the slow songs, someone flicked a lighter and held it aloft for a moment, and got laughter from those around them. Another group of people were actually smoking something, passing it back and forth without any response from the theater staff.

And the movie itself was a lot more involving than I originally thought it might be. The 3D wasn't anything special -- it wasn't going to give Avatar a run for its money. But it was nice and consistently engaging to see everything exist with a multi-plane depth, the future direction of 3D as a mainstream entity. What's more, the band did not just include one long set. Parts of three different sets were presented, the middle one being an acoustic set that occurred during the day. The outdoor setting looked especially beautiful here, and the camera took in a lot of crowd stuff, really giving us a feel for the other sights and sounds of the festival. Still no narrative, but at least some variation from four musicians standing on a darkened stage. Though I should say, I found even the four musicians on a stage part engrossing -- I was able to lose myself in the music and remember why I had always liked it so much, in my carefree days of youth.

I did get a little sleepy in the film's final half-hour, and then realized another brilliant thing: If I dozed off a little bit, so what? That's another thing you can't do in a regular movie and still expect to get the full experience of it. But as the clock approached midnight, if I wanted to just close my eyes and listen, and possibly catch a couple Zs, I wouldn't lose anything. It was liberating to just close my eyes in a movie theater without considering it some kind of failure. I could give in to the sleep impulse and not feel like I'd missed the movie.

And then a funny thing happened: The movie ended at only two hours in length, after all.