12/29/2023 0 Comments With american utopia familyAt one point Byrne even refers to the show as a movie, which only enhances the sense that the audience members we see dancing in the front row are there for our benefit as much as their own (they make for great reaction shots).Īs to which master filmmaker was behind the camera… well, that remains a mystery for the better part of an hour, until the question suddenly answers itself in a most righteous fashion. From the close-up immediacy of the frame frame and the invisible architecture the camera then seems to build with each cut, it’s obvious that you’re not just watching a performance that was recorded for posterity, but rather a film that happened to be shot in real-time. Like “Stop Making Sense” before it, you can tell that “American Utopia” was made by a master filmmaker by the end of the first song (which is “Here” in this case, and finds Byrne sitting alone in a gray box as he dissects a human brain with the same wonder and curiosity with which he once broke apart the building blocks of modern life in songs like “Found a Job”). To some degree, that aspect was always baked into Byrne’s recent Broadway show of the same name, a single performance of which is captured here audience members were handed voter registration forms as they walked into the theater, and - in one of Byrne’s amusing interstitial monologues - shamed with the statistic that only 55% of eligible Americans voted in the last presidential election (a record high). In other words, “American Utopia” isn’t just a concert doc, but also a life-affirming, euphoria-producing, soul-energizing sing-along protest film that’s asking us to rise up against our own complacency. If a word like “Utopia” can mean “good place” and “no place” at the same time, a word like “America” can too. In his own sweet and quakingly sincere way, Byrne implores us to admit that we’re lost, to ask for directions, and to steer toward the country we were promised with both hands on the wheel before it’s too late. So much is the same as it ever was - some of the songs literally remain the same - but where one film wondered where we were going, the other confronts the fact that we’ll never get there on our current path. If “Stop Making Sense” was a polite request to slow down, “ American Utopia” is a desperate plea to change course. Now, on the eve of an election that has a queasily climactic feel to it, he’s back on our screens with another concert film: A softer, wiser, and yet far more action-able sequel to “Stop Making Sense” that resolves into one of the best movies of its kind that anyone has made in the 36 years since. And you may ask yourself: “How did I get here?” But that was always a rhetorical question, and Byrne watched the last several decades play out on TV like the rest of us. Cut to: 2020, a year that became synonymous with dystopia as soon as it started, and might be straight up post-apocalyptic by the time it’s over. That was in 1984, a year that became synonymous with dystopia long before it began. ‘The Boys in the Boat’ Review: George Clooney’s Inspirational Crew Drama Is Too Hokey to Stay Afloat “Stop Making Sense” was like a “Koyaanisqatsi” you could dance to, and it’s star was just as lost as we were, the only difference being that he could find the rhythm in a world that felt like it was spinning off its axis (when Byrne “tripped” over the drum fill at the end of “Psycho Killer” it almost felt like the music was playing him). Rogers welcomed us into his neighborhood by singing about the building that he wanted to live in and pointing out the highway that would lead us there he bent the confusion of being alive into an olive branch and mapped out how our race to the future left us speeding along on a road to nowhere. ![]() As radical in his humility as he was humble in his radicality, art rock’s very own Mr. ![]() The signature image from Jonathan Demme’s totemic concert documentary “ Stop Making Sense” finds Byrne getting lost inside his own comically large silver business suit maybe it was a Kabuki-like expression of a man being swallowed alive by runaway capitalism, or maybe - as Byrne maintains - he just wanted to make it look like his head had shrunken down to a funny size. Even in an era when rock shows were all about orgiastic excess, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne made a warm and inviting spectacle out of his own smallness.
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