Incoherent review ahead:
The Arclight and the AFI have a yearly series of music documentaries which run for about a month. Metallica's Some Kind of Monster is the third film in this, the third edition of the music documentary series.
Metallica hired the documentarians responsible for Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (or something along those lines... a great documentary about the West Memphis 3)to document the making of their first studio album since Reload in 1996 (was it that long ago?... can't remember)... by the way... the same guys are also responsible for the forgettable sequel to The Blair Witch Project...
Anyway... it is an interesting film... albeit about 35 minutes TOO long...
We get to see Metallica go through the loss of Jason... and Jason gets his say... not to Metallica, but to the cameras, and you can tell that saying his piece is very emotional for him.
We see quite a bit of their therapy sessions with a guy who counsels sport figures who have trouble playing in a team or some crap like that.
We also get to see Dave Mustaine pour it out to Lars (James was in rehab at this point, so the "tell off" session was somewhat incomplete for Dave), that part is quite emotional. Dave and Lars both get teary eyed, but not much gets said by Lars, other than he feels guilty. But... I don't think he understood Dave's point at all.
Lars doesn't come out very well at points. He only cements the already solid image that we have of him as a self-serving asshole. But, at some points he comes off very sincere and you can tell at those moments that he's really scared for the band's future and he wants to try his best to fix it (too bad the record was crap...) His dad has one of the best lines in the film. There's a point when his dad (RIP) is sitting in the studio listening to some of St Anger, and he tells them that they should "delete it." (they should have taken his advice and scrapped the whole record... fire Bob Rock and start over)
James shines in a whole new light for me. I absolutely adored the man, even through the Napster shit (I hate downloading stuff on the net... I have NO patience for it... even though I have high speed). In this film, he comes off as a well-spoken, very sensitive man. He does admit to being wrong when he told Jason that he couldn't do a side project while in Metallica... but he did seem very sincere when he told Robert Trujillo that he made the band play better. I had to chuckle when he said "His fingers are his picks" (Robert plays with his fingers, like Cliff did, while Jason only plays with a pick).
it's good...
A bit long... A must for 'Tallica fans... even those of us who have lost faith over the past few years... since it isn't a sugar coated view of the most commercially successful metal band of the past 30 years.
The Arclight and the AFI have a yearly series of music documentaries which run for about a month. Metallica's Some Kind of Monster is the third film in this, the third edition of the music documentary series.
Metallica hired the documentarians responsible for Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (or something along those lines... a great documentary about the West Memphis 3)to document the making of their first studio album since Reload in 1996 (was it that long ago?... can't remember)... by the way... the same guys are also responsible for the forgettable sequel to The Blair Witch Project...
Anyway... it is an interesting film... albeit about 35 minutes TOO long...
We get to see Metallica go through the loss of Jason... and Jason gets his say... not to Metallica, but to the cameras, and you can tell that saying his piece is very emotional for him.
We see quite a bit of their therapy sessions with a guy who counsels sport figures who have trouble playing in a team or some crap like that.
We also get to see Dave Mustaine pour it out to Lars (James was in rehab at this point, so the "tell off" session was somewhat incomplete for Dave), that part is quite emotional. Dave and Lars both get teary eyed, but not much gets said by Lars, other than he feels guilty. But... I don't think he understood Dave's point at all.
Lars doesn't come out very well at points. He only cements the already solid image that we have of him as a self-serving asshole. But, at some points he comes off very sincere and you can tell at those moments that he's really scared for the band's future and he wants to try his best to fix it (too bad the record was crap...) His dad has one of the best lines in the film. There's a point when his dad (RIP) is sitting in the studio listening to some of St Anger, and he tells them that they should "delete it." (they should have taken his advice and scrapped the whole record... fire Bob Rock and start over)
James shines in a whole new light for me. I absolutely adored the man, even through the Napster shit (I hate downloading stuff on the net... I have NO patience for it... even though I have high speed). In this film, he comes off as a well-spoken, very sensitive man. He does admit to being wrong when he told Jason that he couldn't do a side project while in Metallica... but he did seem very sincere when he told Robert Trujillo that he made the band play better. I had to chuckle when he said "His fingers are his picks" (Robert plays with his fingers, like Cliff did, while Jason only plays with a pick).
it's good...
A bit long... A must for 'Tallica fans... even those of us who have lost faith over the past few years... since it isn't a sugar coated view of the most commercially successful metal band of the past 30 years.
