A friend got two free tickets so it seemed like a nice way to spend a Sunday evening. We went in unaware of the run time. Oops. Way, way too long. I found myself wanting it to end before even 2 hours had gone by. That would have been plenty. Six stars because maybe about half of the musical performances were okay, to good, to very good. And the theater we were in had a very good sound system. The rest of the music-meh. The direction and editing were generic seen-it-a-hundred-times in other run of the mill concert docs. Very few of the scenes lasted more than 3 seconds before a jump cut, and the cameras were constantly panning and zooming. Panning. Zooming. Panning and more zooming. Why do the employers of these techniques think that making the audience feel like we're in a low hovering drone is a good thing? And after about every five or so of of the jump cuts we'd get the obligatory up close three second audience shots of smiling, happy fans dancing and singing along. Lather rinse repeat. On and on it went, one performance after the other. After two hours of it, I was struggling to stay awake. And the celebrity emcees, Ethan Hawke, Helen Mirren and Woody Harrelson among them, added very little to the proceedings and were pretty lame. You'd think that for such a monumental milestone as a musical icon's 90th birthday, they could have gotten a director with some imagination and creative vision instead of settling for a three hour long, bygone era MTV/VH1 music video. Willie deserved better.
