Having watched my Blaxploitaudient movie on Friday (and written about it yesterday), yesterday I finished watching David Byrne's American Utopia, which was my monthly assignment for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. I started it Sunday night, expecting to watch it by myself as a thematic rejoinder to having watched the Taylor Swift concert movie on Saturday night.
But then my wife walked into the room near the beginning, and my ideal condition for watching it -- with her -- suddenly came to fruition. She is more of a Talking Heads fan than I am (I really like them but never bought their albums), but usually when I approach my wife with an idea to watch a movie, she suddenly feels the pressure of needing to adhere to my schedule. She knows I don't usually ask her until I have a need to watch the movie in question one of the next few nights -- either to review it, or because I have to watch it during this particular month for commitments on my blog or in the aforementioned series whose acronym I will use on second reference (FFFF). Lately, I've just been avoiding the discussion altogether.
Now, Sunday night might not have been her ideal night to watch it. But since I'd already pressed play, the 48-hour rental clock had already started ticking. As a compromise for what worked best for both of us, we agreed to watch half of it on Sunday night and the other half on Monday -- which was her birthday. (We ended up watching slightly less than half on the first night, since Byrne and company's performance of "Once in a Lifetime," which concluded at the 45-minute mark, seemed about the perfect place to close the curtain after Act 1, if you will.)
I might have been slightly less engaged on Monday night than I was on Sunday night, and that was just enough to knock the whole experience down from a possible 4.5 stars on Letterboxd to 4 stars. I don't want to just hand out 4.5 stars like candy, something I've been guilty of in the past. This at least gave it an additional half-star over Taylor Swift, which felt important to me. I definitely feel like I liked American Utopia at least a star more than The Eras Tour, whose 3.5 rating was probably generous since I was already conscious of coming off as a Swift hater. What can I say, star ratings are fickle creatures.
(And I think the main reason I felt slightly less engaged was the two drinks we had at Mexican dinner, as well as a number of blunders committed by me at dinner, including ordering her the wrong item through the app, and miscalculating the dessert options that would work as a birthday cake. These left me feeling like I'd fumbled her birthday. I don't think she felt this but I can be hard on myself.)
Having emerged from an actual three days of celebrating her birthday in small ways, I'm a bit too burnt out this morning to go into the detail American Utopia deserves. I'll say generally that it was very cleverly conceived and executed and stood out in stark contrast to the performance histrionics of a typical rock concert like the one I'd seen the night before. Byrne always has been a lot more of a dada performance artist type, and both his sense of humor and social compassion came shining through in the Spike Lee-directed film. I did think it would have a slightly more definitive conceptual shape than it did, but I greatly appreciated all the little thematic tangents, which were either delightful or thought-provoking in isolation.
Plus, it was clear the additional thought that went into staging this with someone like Lee at the helm. I've never been entirely clear the role a director plays in a concert movie, but it's a "final product" sort of thing. I know Jonathan Demme directed Byrne the first time, in Stop Making Sense, in a way that wouldn't have been what it was if more of a hack had been making the decisions. Again, I'm not sure how much of this is Lee's doing, but I was particularly impressed by the number of cameras and camera angles, and how I could never seen any of the cameras in any of the shots.
And now that I haven't watched a movie with a narrative since Friday night, I think I'll take a break from concert movies for a little bit.
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