Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

March 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 87

Total Comments: 44

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Neil Young: Heart of Gold / USA / 2006

Jonathan Demme’s film bears some of the stylistic markers of his previous Talking Heads film, but here the photography is only occasionally inspired and much of the editing (particularly the culling of footage from several performances into a single run-through) is distractingly sloppy.

As a document of Young’s Prairie Wind performances in Nashville, the film finds the singer in his less laid-back, more stagey, legacy-building mode, à la Live Rust and Decade, collating some greatest hits, spinning some self-mythologization, and paying tribute to his forefathers and contemporaries.

As such, and in spite of some hasty (and badly shot) interviews at the film’s outset, Demme’s emphasis on the performance rather than the event might well have pushed the whole show into an even more onanistic tone. But Young’s presence, his heartfelt delivery, and the audience’s fore-knowledge of his brain aneurysm and his father’s death add enough weight to make the film a surprisingly emotional experience.

And all this despite the fact that Prairie Wind is not even a very good album. In fact, its main value here is to spawn some revealing (and very occasional) anecdotes, as well as connections to better albums, like the masterful and often overlooked Comes a Time. On that note, it’s puzzling to me why the film is named after “Heart of Gold.” Of course, it’s Young’s most famous song (and Neil Young: The Needle and the Damage Done would be less appropriate), but it has very little to do with the film overall, and the rendition of it here is particularly perfunctory. My suggestion: Neil Young: Old Man.

Rumsey’s thoughts.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Paramount Classics 35mm Print
30 Mar 2006 12:18 PM | Submit Comment

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