20000 Days on Earth - Nick Cave

[Tairy_Green]

Is anybody else at one of these screenings?

I'm wondering how much of the charisma vacuum of Edith Bowman I can handle, and whether it's worth it to hear the old fella trudge through some new material.

[Noodle Lizard]

How much were tickets?  I was gonna see him do it over here, but he was charging $80 (before fees) to see the movie and see a little solo performance, which supposedly only lasted twenty minutes or so.  Needless to say, I told him where to shove it.

I'd still like to see the film, though.

[Tairy_Green]

It was live streamed from the Barbican last night, so I saw it in Milton Keynes for £6 with my cinema membership.

The film itself is very interesting, blurring the line between fiction and reality nicely, and helping to further complicate rather than solve the enigmatic subject. There is a bit too much footage of the Bad Seeds recording their last album that I could have done without, but this is offset nicely by an appearance by Blixa earlier on. No Mick Harvey though.

The 'live event' afterwards was DVD extra worthy. Edith Bowman interviewing the directors and Cave, who became visibly irritated after the first question.

EB - Was making the film challenging?
NC - Not really. We shot it quickly and I got to go home early.

This continued until she gave up trying to talk to him and let him do some songs: The Weeping Song, No More Shall We Part, God Is In The House, Into My Arms, The Ship Song and a new one I didn't recognise (with 'special guests', er, Warren Ellis and Barry Adamson).

Very pleasant, but I doubt it was worth the prices for a seat at the Barbican.

[DrunkCountry]

Why is Edith Bowman?

[The Always Red Society]

It was live streamed from the Barbican last night, so I saw it in Milton Keynes for £6 with my cinema membership.

The film itself is very interesting, blurring the line between fiction and reality nicely, and helping to further complicate rather than solve the enigmatic subject. There is a bit too much footage of the Bad Seeds recording their last album that I could have done without, but this is offset nicely by an appearance by Blixa earlier on. No Mick Harvey though.

The 'live event' afterwards was DVD extra worthy. Edith Bowman interviewing the directors and Cave, who became visibly irritated after the first question.

EB - Was making the film challenging?
NC - Not really. We shot it quickly and I got to go home early.

This continued until she gave up trying to talk to him and let him do some songs: The Weeping Song, No More Shall We Part, God Is In The House, Into My Arms, The Ship Song and a new one I didn't recognise (with 'special guests', er, Warren Ellis and Barry Adamson).

Very pleasant, but I doubt it was worth the prices for a seat at the Barbican.

I really didn't think Cave was visibly irritated - a bit shy and self-conscious about being on stage but not being 'on' I thought, but he was clearly very fond of the directors and quite tolerant of Edith all told.

I loved the film, it's really quite beautiful. It's also very funny at times and I thought the device of showing Nick with different people (Kylie, Blixa, Ray Winstone, Warren his kids etc) to bring different sides out was great. It was nice seeing Blixa back, and interesting after all the speculation to here his main reason of leaving being that he got married so wanted more time and had to choose between two bands. There was some really well-written bits of prose by Cave in the narration. Very much enjoyed the stuff at the archive too.

I enjoyed seeing the recording of the last album, particularly the improvised beginnings of things with Nick and Warren, but then that album has grown on me immensely - I initially was a little underwhelmed by it but it really embedded itself with me, and seeing them live twice last year they were the best they'd been in years, furious and re-inventing new stuff like Jubilee Street and Higgs Boson Blues into huge aggressive beasts on stage. I was very sad when Mick Harvey left, but the band have ended up being on amazing form at the moment.

[Tairy_Green]

I saw Cave 'solo' in Manchester in 2005 (with the Grinderman trio) and it was easily a top five gig experience; like being punched in the face by melancholy. Strange, then, that I'm so averse to a Harvey-less Bad Seeds (wasn't too keen on seeing them without Blixa, to be fair) but particularly the last (awesomely edited) performance from the film has rekindled my interest in going back.

Live Seeds hasn't left my stereo since.

[The Region Legion]

So as someone who doesn't deify musicians - particularly singers - is the ridiculous pretentiousness of this film (Woooooaahhhh Nick Cave is so totally otherworldly MANNNNNNNNN) justified in any way?

[checkoutgirl]

Edith Bowman

Why? Every time I see the words Edith Bowman the same word pops into my head. Why?

Why? Why? Why?

[Noodle Lizard]

I was really enjoying this right up until I realised it was about to end, at which point I did a complete 180 and went "actually fuck this".

It's the sum of a bunch of (often good) individual parts which ultimately add up to quite little.  All in all it felt like it didn't know what it wanted to be.  It feels a lot like an overcooked idea - probably started off as a Noisey sort of documentary idea and then over the months veered off into whatever it is now.  At the end of the day, it actually made Cave seem far less interesting than he actually is.  Maybe that was the point, but it was sort of negated by the affected profundity of his narration, and didn't really accomplish anything either way.

It all felt too disingenuous to be particularly informative about Cave himself (which, again, is possibly intentional) and anything it did offer up can just as easily be inferred from any number of interviews he's done over the past two or three decades.  I'm also fairly amazed they only managed to utilize some of the dullest Bad Seeds concert footage I've ever seen.  Of course it doesn't help that a good deal of it focused on the recording/rehearsals for Push The Sky Away, which really wasn't a good album of theirs (not the fault of the filmmakers, mind).  Also ... was this all meant to have taken place in one day or what?  It's all over the place.  Fair enough if it wasn't, but then why not just drop the whole "this is my 20,000th day on Earth" angle implied by its title?

Maybe I was expecting something different from this, but it all felt a bit aimless to me and I was certainly left disappointed by the end of it (despite really enjoying certain parts).  So I'm kind of confused.  B minus.

[Buttress]

I thought this could have been more as well. It just kind of ends, and on the pretense that the film is actually more about Brighton than Cave, but for fuck's sake you know very well that's not true.

I liked the bits where Nick Cave was interviewing people or being psychoanalysed but none of it really came together very well. Interesting ideas in the air, but they're left there rather untouched.

[AllisonSays]

I thought the hagiographic approach stifled them a bit; I was at one of the simulscreenings as well, and even in their round table-type interview they seemed almost in awe of Cave - which is boring! Winstone and the psychiatrist were the only ones who injected some energy into the whole process, by challening yer man to step out of himself a bit.

For all that it had a few clever ideas and nice shots (the one of Brighton at the very end, from the sea, especially), it felt airless, in a wee bubble of praise and egomassaging. I like Cave but it was all a bit much.

[Van Dammage]

"Why does it always piss rain when I come down to Brighton"

"It's science innit, if it's warm in here and cold out there, yer gonna get steamy windas"

[Doomy Dwyer]

I'm not really sure what this film is meant to be. It's nice enough. Could have done with a bit more of the psychiatrist and Warren's cooking.

There's a great bit at the start of the Ray Winstone section when he makes a weird unintelligible sound, just a solid block of garbled cockney white noise. He's really pulling a Dyer these days, exaggerating his USP well past the point of parody. I do like uncle Ray, he's done some fine work. But he may as well be dressed as a chimney sweep and participating in a complex rooftop knees up during his scene.

I enjoyed the JFKesque reconstruction of Tracey Pew being pissed on by the German man. Also nice to see an angry looking Blixa Bargeld explaining that he's not angry, angrily.

Has anyone seen the DVD extras?