Heaneyland!

Some kind of movie

So Rose and I saw "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" yesterday afternoon, and it turns out to be a pretty remarkable documentary. As you may or may not know -- and, gosh, isn't that true of a lot of things? -- the movie covers several years in which the members of Metallica were having group therapy to help deal with intraband tensions.

I expected this to be amusing, and it was -- though honestly less for the sight of the members of Metallica talking about their feelings (because those guys all come across as people who are making an honest effort to learn how to be grown-ups without changing who they essentially are), and more for the contrast between the band and the extreme touchy-feely laid-backedness of the therapist -- but what I didn't expect was that I would find the film as moving as I did. Seeing lead singer James Hetfield's transformation over the course of the film, through the band's therapy sessions and an offscreen year of rehab, is pretty fucking remarkable.

I mean, I'm not a heavy metal fan in general or a Metallica fan in particular, and I'm probably not going to go out and buy any Metallica albums after seeing this movie, but I came out of the theater feeling pretty warmly towards the guys in the band (even the onetime inadvertent RIAA tool Lars Ulrich, who appears to have realized that he had been kind of a twit about that whole Napster thing, and that maybe he should be content with the fact that he is a freaking millionaire). All this did not prevent me from coming up with some alternate subtitles for the movie:

Kill 'Em All (And Let Our Therapist Help Us Sort Out Our Guilt Feelings About That)
Enter Sadman
...And Intense Discussions for All

Also, I'd like to point out that I would buy Metallica's "Master of Puppets" in a second if it were called "Pastor of Muppets" instead.

Posted by Francis at 06:49 AM