The Velvet Underground

Viewed October 15, 2021. If you’re looking for a comprehensive history of the band, The Velvet Underground isn’t exactly great storytelling — too opaque for beginners, too scattered for diehards, and it doesn’t have any interviews with Doug Yule. But Haynes, consistently one of the great filmmakers working today, has provided us with a truly impressive formal object.

Loses points for not going into detail about the Doug Yule solo Velvet Underground album. But, this is a great documentary that is not only about the VU, but also gay subculture and the avant-garde art scene in New York during the 50s and 60s.

It's all just about image and sound and how Haynes elegantly puts together a collage panel on 60s NY to try to explain the roots, the impulses, the very fabric of such an unique rock and roll group, one that united arts with a weird, yet simple sensibility towards music making and still managed to sound so catchy and pop, so deeply human and so otherwordly.

... and they were roommates!

For a band that was so paradoxically poorly documented on film, this is probably as good as we're ever going to get, and I can only be angry that Haynes didn't get to do this before most of the people involved died. It's just a story of a band, with none of the usual praise from 45 talking heads of later generations or of conflict with the zeitgeist, just the people who were there and got it. "And then the song stopped and you could count 1-2-3-4-5 before the applause... they'd hypnotized them."

Magnificent portrait of arguably the greatest, and definitely the coolest, American rock band of them all. Todd Haynes - he of the divisive Dylan movie, I'm Not There - plays this one straight(ish), and it's so much better for it. There's no need to embellish what is already a wild, colorful, unlikely story of these dark and iconoclastic NY hipsters who didn't register with most of us until they were a memory.

Interesting.

For the newcomer, I'm not sure this is the best introduction to the band. And for the mega-fan, it can be disappointing that the doc skims over certain things. In particular, their last two albums, just as worthwhile as the first two, are essentially reduced to footnotes. And, most unfortunately, the doc continues the regrettable trend of sidelining the fantastic Doug Yule. Still, Haynes manages to paint a beautiful portrait here not just of the Velvets but of the entire 60s New York art scene.

No added value.

começa muito bem, é bem impactante visualmente, é uma história sensacional, mas falta

É bom, mas eu esperava bem mais de um um documentário do Haynes sobre o Velvet. Explico: acho que o Haynes só faz obras-primas e o Lou Reed faz parte da minha santíssima trindade pessoal (junto ao Bowie e o Iggy), mas apesar do belo trabalho de edição, não foi capaz de transmitir todo o potencial do Velvet ou do próprio Haynes. WEBRip no MakingOff.

I enjoyed the film, but I don't think I got much out of it. I didn't know that Jonathan Richman knew them personally as well as he apparently did. I learned that.

☆ A psychedelic documentary that embraces the style of that Warhol-inspired clique. Loved the editing, and I reckon it was as much of the documentary as the content itself. ☆