Entertaining

For such a dedicated movie viewer as TS1, she had never seen Bridget Jones’s Diary so we watched it before the US match at Grenada. Still cute. On the other hand, Festival in Cannes was simply not at all entertaining and I hit the Delete button about 15 minutes in, nothing like what I expected from a Henry Jaglom film.

The eponymous Led Zeppelin DVD is five hours and twenty minutes of musical excellence, real thunder and lightning, all recorded during the band’s actual lifespan. As opposed to some of the crud put out after failed solo career reconstructions or the death of original members by some bands, if you know who I mean.

Visually one might be forgiven for wondering if the various cameramen forgot that the band had four members since 96% of the shots featured Jimmy Page or Robert Plant or both. During the acoustic set recorded in 1975 at Earl’s Court, I kept waiting in vain for a shot of John Paul Jones who was doing some enjoyable finger picking but all we saw was a constant flickering between Page, Page’s hands and Plant’s face. Watching Page is quite interesting, he is blasting power cords and blues runs with a nonchalance that makes me speculate that in his head he’s thinking, “Yeah Clapton may be God but bugger him.”

Some of the material, most of the first disk, was filmed quite early days while some, a batch at the end of the second disk, was pretty much the last show the band did before Bonham’s death. Comparing the two comes via versions of Whole Lotta Love from each set. Both blow the audience away but the second shows a sonic maturity reminding us that death has robbed rock of far too much.