Review of Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who

Average Cable Music Television Journey

When you see "produced by VH1" in the opening credits, you have a pretty good idea of what's coming. It's a competent documentary featuring a lot of great music and live footage, but a fairly pedestrian one. Most of the story is told through loads of recent first hand interviews with Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend, with a great deal of archival interviews with John Entwistle added to the mix. The material covering the early years of the group is especially good, including a substantial amount of material of the band's days as The Detour and The High Numbers. There is also a good amount of attention paid to just how important and ground-breaking The Who was in terms of changing that standard of the three minute pop song and ushering in the era of the record-album-as-art. The problem comes in late in the film. It suffers greatly from far too much coverage of The Who in the early eighties and after which, lets face it, no one gives a fuck about. The worst moment of the movie by far is the series of talking heads glowing with stories of how incredible and moving their reunion performance at the 2001 9/11 tribute Concert for New York was. Really, Eddie Vedder? Really? This portion lessens the energy of the film to a crawl and ends things on a very weak note. If Daltry and Townsend feel like playing the old songs with session musicians till the day they die, great. Do I want to see it? Nope. The Who are a great band, so if you just play it straight and show them playing as much as possible your documentary is going to come out alright no matter what. Amazing Journey is not entirely useless, but I'm not convinced it's necessary. I thought it was decent, but as a casual Who fan I doubt I am the target audience. Judging by the crowd and applause around me, if you were in grade school when Tommy came out this movie will blow your ass off. NOTE: this is not a three star movie, but Filmcatcher isn't equipped to handle my half-star sensibilities. Please consider this a 2.5 star review. Thanks. Aaron. whatsaninternet.blogspot.com

Posted on 09/16/07 by: Aaron 07:15 PM