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Movie Review: Gigantic
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.
It bothers me when people refer to people as 'terrible musicians'. Music, like many art forms is subjective. I never got the appeal of Picasso, but I don't think he's a 'terrible painter'.
The thing about TMBG is you have to have very eclectic taste in music to appreciate them. Their style is all over the place, and you can't just hear one or two songs and know what they sound like. If you were to play 'Boss of Me', 'Particle Man', and 'A Self Called Nowhere' next to each other, a newcomer would be hard pressed to believe it's the same band.
The depth of their songs comes from figuring out what exactly they're about. Their songs are rarely simply nonsense, they just don't ever directly tell you what they're supposed to mean.
'Birdhouse In Your Soul' for example. Here's a song that seems to make very little sense at all. The trick is that if you pay attention, it's a song written from the perspective of a nightlight shaped like a canary.
Someone once told me song lyrics are like poetry with a learning disability. TMBG lyrics are like poetry with a severe case of insomnia that can't stop giggling...
TMBG used to have an inovative service called "dial-a-song". You call a phone number which is answered by a restored vintage answering machine and listen to an unreleased song. A computer hooked up to the answering machine changes the song to another unreleased song once an hour.
The album liner notes always said something like "Remember, the call is free if you call from work".
I just noticed that they now have a dial-a-song webpage, which is also free when you connect from work!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I work for Seattle International Film Festival and from what I know, films such as Gigantic will do the festival circut in attempts to pick up distribution. I was speaking with the director of Who The Hell is Bobby Roos last night, and he was telling me about how rough it is to get your film picked up, even getting a deal for video.
So depending opon the response at the festivals, and the eyes that see the film, it may or may not get picked up.