First off, the promotional poster rips off Brian Eno's comment that only 5,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground's first record, but they all started bands. The poster for this movie says "They didn't sell a lot of records, but everyone who heard them started a band". Heard who? The three bands at the top of the list actually sold quite a few records. My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything sold 60,000 copies in a few years after its release going Silver in the UK. Pretty good for being on a an indie label like Creation Records. Cocteau Twins and JAMC both got picked up by majors because they were selling decent amounts or records. This was obviously director's Eric Green's first movie and he forgot to do research or have a premise. Yeah, you want to research a topic if you make a movie about that topic. If you actually do the research, the whole Shoegaze "genre" which isn't even arguably a genre as there's nothing that these band have in common, all started as a result of MBV's Isn't Anything in 1988. No one ever mentioned any larger trend surrounding the releases of the Cocteau Twins or JAMC before 1988. He just rewrote history to include a million bands. The shoegaze thing happened when these bands tried to copy MBV starting around 1990 but they did it using guesswork and modulating pedals (echo, reverb, chorus, phasing, flanging, etc) that MBV avoided. (MBV used reverse reverb combined with the unique tremolo system on the Jazzmaster as their starting point, but no one even tried to copy that as a jumping off point. If he'd done any research, he would have understood that.) But the movie doesn't tell any story; its literally a collection of random interviews with no form. Its just a mess. The bands in the British Invasion were all British or from the UK; I've no idea what this random collection of bands has in common. People have been using pedals for years to make nebulous sounds. Except for MBV, for the most part, none of these bands did anything that the Beatles hadn't done already, and done better. I like most of these bands, mind you. I just don't see what the premise of the movie is. Its all so random. Watch it and see if you can figure out the premise or story it's telling. I haven't a clue. But he edited a lot of random interviews together so I guess that's something requiring skill (if you're a monkey.) Completely wasted opportunity. Ane he crowdfunded this nonesense. Glad I didn't know about it or give money.
Review of Beautiful Noise
