Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb, Andy Gibb
Intro:
It’s hard to think of any conceivable way it could have been done better...
There’s an appropriate pathos in the subtitle (and song title) of this brilliant documentary, given that Barry is the sole surviving Gibb brother. But for the most part, watching it is a joyful experience, both aurally – there are just so many great songs – and in its visual evocation of periods from the Fifties to the present day.
The Bee Gees’ saga is long and complicated. It starts in Brisbane – where the Gibb family had emigrated from Manchester – and then there’s the move to London and all the chart success and chaos of the Swinging Sixties… A downturn in the early Seventies … A chance move into falsetto singing and the colossal global phenomenon that was Saturday Night Fever, and the subsequent anti-disco backlash… Deaths, divorces, internal tension, bad habits … and quite a bit more.
It’s all presented through a rich and gorgeously crisp mix of archival and studio footage, home movies, TV and concert material and interviews both old and new. Most of the latter come from the horses’ mouths, but there’s also a (mercifully small) amount of commentary from other people such as Eric Clapton, Lulu and Noel Gallagher.
In the end, it all comes down to the sheer beauty and memorability and melodic and harmonic variety of those songs: “New York Mining Disaster 1941”, “Massachusetts”, “To Love Somebody” – the list goes on. And to think, as we find out here, that they wrote most of the lyrics in the studio on the day they recorded!
This is a fascinating film on a really interesting subject. It’s hard to think of any conceivable way it could have been done better, but the quality is really no surprise coming from the makers of The Beatles: Eight Days A Week.
Emphatically recommended.
