Maestro DVD
DeeRock
1,836 Posts
Anyone here seen this? I watched it today, it's pretty good. It's about the histroy of disco/dance music centered around Larry Levan "Paradise Garage and david Manacuso "The Loft". Features Tee Scott, Frankie Knuckles and others.
Comments
i thought it was pretty amateurish. this was the theatrical release.. i know there's alot of unedited interviews and bonus stuff on the dvd which probably makes up for it though.
alot of good moments but overall it came off as half ass... i can only imagine most of the audience had no idea what was going on half the time... i hated the way the chronology was all haphazard.
read love saves the day if you want the real deal.
Eh, quarter-ass...maybe. Amateurish, hagiographic, and chock-a-block with poor directorial decisions, this thing is, at its top-dollar best, a second-class tertiary source (first, listen to a lot of fuckin' records, second, read some good books, starting with the absolutely unfuckwithable Brewster/Houghton jernt), and even then, its merit rests almost solely in the raw footage and the interviews, which this documentary apparently accumulated with all the skill and finesse of a blind man tripping over money in the street.
And I know that clearing music can be a bitch, but really: Was the only other choice to gravy everything in the same monotone original score which, in some (unforgivable) cases, was actually synched up to the archival dj footage(!), giving the impression that Nicky Siano, Larry Levan, Ron Hardy, and Superstar DJ Lastweek all trafficked in the same genre of dimly spiritual dishwater house?
Any project of this nature (and I'd also send this out to the dudes pumping iron-poor prose in Scratch Poetics or what have you) should have a dual purpose: 1) To convey something resembling at least one of the realities of the situation at hand, and 2) to make it clear why the audience should give a shit. On that score, this flick succeeds in too few moments, and spends most of its running time with both fists full of donut. I suspect that anyone interested enough to watch this documentary also knows enough to be disappointed by it.
I'd agree with undertheradar, though, that--perhaps apart from the teeth of David Mancuso--the most sublime moment in the whole thing comes early ("that's okay--it happens to a lot of guys"), with Antonio Ocasio explaining why he liked The Garage. "One..one memory that I would like to share about, um, The Garage, is..." It's so simple, and it's only about forty-five seconds long, but it cooks everything down to crystal like nothing else in that whole flick.
the only decent musical part i recal in the whole thing is at the very begining with Timewarp goin over the paradise garage dancers... the music in the rest of the film was WTF?
the montage of DJ's was
K in Canada.
K.
as i recall from the movie...
K.