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Movie Review: Gigantic

Posted by krow on from the no-not-a-groupie,-not-me dept.

"Its like being the world's tallest midget" is how Flansburgh describes They Might Be Giants fame at one point during the bands documentary, Gigantic. I was lucky enough to score tickets to the opening screening here in Seattle of the movie and was delighted with what I received for the price of admission. Of course having one of the John's, Flansburgh that is, plus the director AJ Schnack show up to the screening only added to the value. I am a fan of They Might Be Giants. The fact that I will have seen 26 films by the time that the Seattle Internal Film Festival is over also means that I am a fan of film too. Despite being a fan of film, this documentary could have been two hours worth of the TMBG's videos, or even two hours worth of staring at a black screen, and as long as they played some music I would have loved it.

The documentary is a solid mix of band history and irrelevant pieces (would you expect anything different?). While I can not say that I got a good history on how the two Jon's actually started playing together from the documentary, I did learn a lot about their early successes and the director did a wonderful job of putting together scenes from different periods to give the audience an idea about how the band's early years were. The documentary does reveal how "Dial A Song" got started after a biking messenger accident left Linnell unable to play. We even get to see some photos, complete with price tag, of the actual machine. Flansburgh talks for a bit about how personal "Dial A Song" is and the entire experience of getting to be one with the machine.

The documentary was shot in video and in places comes out a little grainy. Some of the concert scenes definitely show off some of the short comings of the medium (this is not Lucus style digital filming). Despite this the film had a fully packed house during its opening in Seattle and the theater had to turn away 150 people at the door.

The director mentioned that their last showing of the film at SXSW had similar sized crowds. Hopefully this will mean that some distributor will pick up the film so the more people will get a chance to see it. If you are lucky enough to live in one of the cities that it will be playing in, and you love the band's music I can easily recommend going to see it.

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "...even two hours worth of staring at a black screen, and as long as they played some music I would have loved it."

    Doesn't this make your review pretty worthless?

  2. You've missed the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They aren't about being funny. They are about making the music they want to make. They cover many styles of music across their 9 albums. Their songs sometimes describe very odd people or settingsm but they usually tell a story too. In fact, "I've Got a Match", for example, is a song about a guy fighting with his girlfriend and finally leaving her. He's calling insensitive and hurtful, and tell her "I've got a match - Your embrace and my collapse". They tend to use somewhat silly lyrics, but they get the point across.

    (BTW, the original phrase is "I've got a match - your face and my as*")

    1. Re:You've missed the point by TomHandy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sure they're about being funny too. They do serious songs, but they have well-honed senses of humor and write excellent humorous music too. I don't think this is anything to be ashamed of. It just is another example of their versatility compared to some bands which can't write anything but generic love songs or meaningless music.

  3. Re:Hello Music Club Kills TMBG by TomHandy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hello Music Club was really a Flans project, not a TMBG project. I don't see any reason to become disillusioned with TMBG because of a side project of one if its members then I would of any band if one of its members did some side project. Both Flans and Linnell have done numerous side project (Flans also did Monopuff, Linnell has done his State Songs album), which probably keeps them sane and makes it so they aren't constantly doing TMBG stuff 24/7/365, which is probably why the band is still around and as creatively fresh as ever. So for that, I will allow for any weird problems with projects like Hello just because it helps keep them around.