The Velvet Underground

Very much enjoyed this, as a fan of the bands music, I'm not sure I learned much that I didn't know before but I loved seeing a lot of this archive footage and photographs, which I don't think have been seen before publicly.

Its very much a celebration of the bands music and legacy and a few of the interviews made me laugh and the closing montage may have made me cry a little. What more can you ask from a film?

I did find the Warhol style a little jarring at the beginning, with some of the flashing imagery, but it did calm down and seems fully appropriate to the subject and so much better than it being a dull series of interviews with talking heads... And while there were interviews with the remaining members of band and the scene they were all completely relevant, thankfully we didn't get a series of other fans or celebrities talking about the band and themselves. The film also did really well including those members who are no longer with us and it really felt that the whole band was featured and represented here.

It is not an encyclopedic history of the band which some people perhaps wanted, I guess you'd need a six or eight hour miniseries to cover that, or you could just read one of the many books and biographys that exist. Like I say I love the bands music and the artists subsequent careers, I don't know how the film would play if you were not familiar with Warhol and the band already but for me it was a perfectly judged and very enjoyable two hours.

The Velvet Underground: Documentary about the band and their artistic/social milieu. Many interviews, some bitterness fro Lou reed: "Andy Warhol produced The Banana Album in the sense that he was live in the studio when it was made". But y0u also see them together when Warhol was dying, friends again. Split screen is used to good effect, often using a loop of John Cale or Reed blinking when more info/clips are on the other half. Moe Tucker the VU drummer and sometime singer didn't like hippies, the West Coast or Frank Zappa. Demo tapes of Venus In Furs and Waiting For My Man plus many other VU songs. Great Music Social History film. Directed by Todd Haynes. 8/10.

It was not the full three-sixty on the band, but centers on their sound in the Reed-Cale era and rather than spend much time on theory, it focuses on who Lou and John were as people in order to explain it, delving into the environment they lived and created in. It also eventually compares them to contemporaries, but again, here it prefers to compare who they were in attitude and emotion. When John and Lou split, when the band starts winding down, the movie also starts winding down. I'm fine with all that. Visually, I felt like it was interesting, but not mind blowing. Personally, I didn't need to it to be a visual masterpiece to be satisfying. I didn't need it to interview every former flat mate or girlfriend, I didn't need it to chase down every subplot in the band, I didn't need a happy ending. I wanted a piece on Lou and John and what made the band what they were. It's a two-hour piece on that.

Oddly limited in scope. I knew it was a standalone two hour job but found myself doubting that- given the first half was given to pre-band. This was of course fascinating.

But we end up with a 20 minute breeze through the Doug Yule era and I adore those albums.

No reformation covered either.

Visuals wonderful - but bizarre sound mixing (at least for my experience anyway) which meant you couldn't hear the commentary over the music so I had to watch with subtitles on. Which gave an interesting experience in realising that "my" Velvets lyrics have subtle, distinct differences to those that are apparently true.

As "The Velvet Underground" (2021 release; 115 min.) opens, we are introduced to young Lou Reed, whose family moved out to Long Island when he was 7, the start of a long journey that eventually sees him landing in Manhattan in the early 60s. We then shift to John Cale's background and early life in Wales, where he learns the viola. He ends up in New York in 1963. The movie reminds us what life in New Yok was like in the early 60s: "we are not counter-culture, we ARE the culture." At this point we are 10 min into the film.

Couple of comments: this is the latest film from acclaimed director Todd Haynes ("I'm Not There", "Carol", "Dark Wates"). In other words: this pretty much guaranteed that this would not be your typical rock documentary . It's also not just about the Velvet Underground, but the whole New York arts scene in the 1960s including Andy Warhol's Factory. "It was Andy Warhol who made the first album possible", claims a talking head (implying that without the famous cover art and with Nico's presence, the debut album would've never seen the light of day). Ah yes, Nico. She gets her due as well, and then some. Along the way we get treated to a slew of rare if ever before seen film footage and photos from that era. The first hour of this documentary, which carries us up and through 1965, is a perfect 5 stars, and had me just watching in complete fascinations with it all. The second hour of the documentary is not nearly as good. Much of the talking heads' (including surviving members John Cale and Maureen Tucker) interviews was filmed in 2018. (Did you know that Jackson Browne regularly played with Nico during her early solo gigs?)

"The Velvet Underground" premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival to immediate critical acclaim, and Apple TV eagerly snapped it up. The movie was released in select theaters for a limited run, and thankfully my art-house theater here in Cincinnati had it in its lineup as from this weekend. The Saturday matinee show where I saw this at was attended so-so (7 people in total including myself). If you are a fan of the Velvet Underground or are simply interested in a slice of rock history. I'd readily suggest you check this out, be it in the theater (while you still can), on VOD, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray, and draw your own conclusion.