Sound City (Dave Grohl) [Archive]

Henry Gale

02-05-2013, 08:12 PM

Such a compulsively entertaining documentary. Grohl having such first-hand experiences with a portion of the film's events certainly helps give his storytelling an autheticity in its details, but he also manages to craft such an all-around strongly assured, stylish, and incredibly paced debut effort as a director. I happened to check the time when I felt like I had already experienced a whole movie's worth of history, and it was only 45 minutes in. The film packs so much into itself, all while never feeling rushed or losing the great human elements of its throughline.

It also makes a similar structural decision to the recent Foo Fighters documentary Back and Forth, using the first two thirds to paint a legacy, and then finishing it off by giving you an account of Grohl choosing to bringing all of that retrospection in mind to document the crafting of something new. The Foos one showed the making of their most recent album Wasting Light, and the late portion of this movie shows the making of Grohl's eventual soundtrack to it, for which he brought Sound City's signature Neve soundboard to his home recording studio, and invited as many of the major artists from Sound City's glory days as he could to come together and try and make the sort of music the studio allowed them back them. This is all while proposing a bigger question about technology vs. artistry, and if there's anything significant that's been lost that's potentially still worth relegating ourselves to the basics of in an age where everything is theoretically possible.

It's good stuff. The more you love thoughtful nostalgia trips into arguably the biggest and greatest era in rock music, the better.

***1/2

Thirdmango

04-29-2013, 03:10 AM

The sound was awesome.

In regards to the ending It was actually really sad that the whole movie was a documentary about this awesome place and then Grohl is like Oh I'll just take this and now it's about me. The Paul McCartney song should not have ended the movie, it should have been the fleetwood mac one because Paul didn't do anything with Sound City or at least the movie didn't tell me he did. If it weren't for how amazing the sound was I would have rated it lower.