Neil Young Journeys

Deb 8    Me 2

I'm a fan. We go see Neil whenever he's in town. I like his willingness to experiment and stretch and grow. He has stayed valid in his themes, able to cross all kinds of cultural lines and stayed a consistent and reliable talent. The story of he and Jimi stealing a truck together is icing on the Neil cake. There have been several movies made featuring Young performances and they're all pretty weak. Not the performances, but the movies. That's a big distinction here, separating the subject from the movie, my score reflects that, Deb's doesn't. The last one I remember was a quickly put together affair at the Grand 'Ol Opry which featured out of sync footage, weird angles and a hat shadow hiding the performer's face most of the film. It was done by Jonathan Demme, who directed the outstanding Stop Making Sense and a total of four Neil Young performance movies. It looks like they reviewed the failures at the Opry and made some adjustments. The scenes shot in the car were now done in HD instead of HandiCam; it appears they actually did rehearsals and planned some shots and lit Neil so you could see his face even with his battered hat on. But they made some new mistakes. There were some useless camera angles, one was a "mic cam" that was appalling, offering way too much information about Neil's bridge work (no relation to the Bridge school). Even when the view is distorted by the singer's slobber they stick with the shot WAY too long. Where's the editor when you need him?

In the movie Neil drives around and revisits his hometown with his brother. This is a highlight of the movie. Here he shows some personality and almost grins a couple times. Everything sort of leads to the performance at Massey Hall in his beloved Canada. Nowhere do they mention that this a revisiting of the Hall, that he played a pivotal concert there in 1971. It seemed like an important point, the point of the whole movie, yet they never mentioned it or about anything else that would have added a story element to the film. A little context of who, what, where, why and when would have made this a much better experience.

Then there's the performance. Except for an occasional and faint sound of applause you'd think this was a sound check. There's no contact or interaction with an audience (either in the concert theater or the movie house) and no shots of the room to let you know this is a real concert. Near the end they let you in on it, but by then the entertainment ship had sailed. It is mostly new songs, I liked that, and the few oldies were appropriate. "Ohio" got special treatment with bold graphics and nice tributes to the victims; maybe other songs could've used this punctuation for consistency. I really liked the tonal range created by processors and he has developed Jimi's idea of turning feedback into a musical component and run with it. 

Another opportunity lost. I'd like to see the 1972 Neil Young directed "Journey Through the Past" reissued, I liked it.