Meeting People Is Easy

As a long time Radiohead fan, I was very very excited about the release of Grant Gee's documentary. Needless to say it lived up to all my expectations. It showed the band as people, not huge rock stars or snobs or whatever the public might take them for. It was the daily routine of photo shoots, interviews, and touring that helps us realize what hard work is needed to be a success. New song previews were a plus too. An excellent look at an excellent band.

I'm not going to tell you that if you don't know who RadioHead are, or if you don't like them, that you should watch this. If I weren't a fan (or if I lived so deep inside a cave I'd never heard of them), I would have gone crazy trying to wrap my head around this movie.

However, since I am a huge fan, I absolutely loved this video. Artfully done, it has more crammed into it than I would have thought possible. The Irony, the Agony, the Frustration, the Fans, the Good Times, the (never-ending) Interviews; and of course the vicarious thrill you get from this rare look into the real back-stage life of a serious rock-n-roll band.

This is not an up-lifting film. It makes you glad you never seriously pursued a career in the popular music industry.

As said Colin, "we don't learn much about Radiohead in this thing". That's true. Whatever, it's a real pleasure and pain to see and follow a great band on the road, listening to dumb journalists questions. Makes ones think about the fan status and the star status, which one is enviable, who could be ashamed of stalking people. Meeting people is easy, yeah. but you must want it first.

Grant Gee, following Radiohead around with cameras during their international tour to promote OK Computer, does not do much that has not already been done in like documentaries of popular musical artists. But what he does is remarkably involving, despite the fact that the audience will most likely be limited to fans of the group and people interested in non-fiction filmmaking. Meeting People Is Easy recaptures all the trappings of rock superstardom: fawning groupies, jealous journalists, relentless photo shoots, sterile airports, lonely hotel rooms, and above all, the horror of performing once exciting songs over and over, night after night. Gee's greatest strength, however, lies in the editing, as sound and vision constantly overlap and compete. Texts of many of the glowing (even raving) critical responses to OK Computer periodically scroll up or glide across the screen, making a not inconsiderable effort to explain how a galvanized media community can seemingly alter the destinies of a handful of young men who just enjoyed making music. The embrace, Gee seems to suggest, brings fame and fortune -- but also a unique kind of pressure that undeniably alters the world-view of the artists, thereby affecting all future recordings (lead singer Thom Yorke has a number of bitter musings on this very subject). At times self-indulgent, Meeting People Is Easy is more often engaging and hypnotic -- a film that reaches just a bit beyond its immediate milieu to explore a meaningful idea or two.

"Meeting people is easy" is a pretty good documentary of Radiohead's OK Computer world tour. It abruptly begins with concerts (bits and pieces), photo shoots, behind the scenes and interviews with the media through Europe, USA, Japan, Australia and ends back the UK where you hear them recording music for their next 2 albums (Kid A and Amnesiac).

Its not really a coherent documentary, with scenes cutting back & forth and some arty stuff chucked in for the sake of it, but this DVD shows the media attention and coverage they received, all because of their highly regarded album OK Computer... they were the in band at the time.

From this the stress and tension builds up throughout the world tour and we clearly see them getting emotionally drained.

You get to hear them playing bits of new and unfinished music which would be later added onto there next 2 albums, but don't just expect live performances (as there is hardly any). They're a band that's not afraid to experiment with their music. Though this DVD is more about their experiences throughout the tour, then that of their music.

Some people might have found this boring but I actually quite enjoyed it. It would've been great to get some full length live performances than that of small snippets (though there is good full length performance at the end) but I found the media's attention towards Radiohead and how it was eating them up, very interesting indeed.

4.5/5