I am watching Anvil! The Story of Anvil, and it is breaking my heart.

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/deadspin/2009/10/lOlxxb8GKL0.jpg

"if you're energetic and enthusiastic you're gonna make a shitwack of money"

i've watched tons of movies and read tons of books about bands whose music i didn't know well, so i know that wasn't the problem, but really this movie didn't move or entertain me at all. just kinda dull, don't see the big deal about it.

Enjoy your heartless life then.

don't see how anybody couldn't be moved by the shot of them taking the stage in Japan

will be curious to see if this gets nominated and/or wins doc Oscar...

reminded me most of 'king of kong' in a lotta ways

finally saw this and find it incredulous anyone couldn't be moved or entertained by it. loved it.

¯\(°_o)/¯ don't know what to tell you guys...the Japan scene was nice, I guess, but honestly I'm a pretty big sap, doesn't take much to make me feel something but I just did not get much out of this flick.

The scene that got me was when they were fighting during the recording session and Lips was all, "Who else am I going to blow up at? You're all I got!" and his bottom lip was quivering as the tears welled up.

Easily one of the best things I saw this year.

I'm in the mostly indifferent camp as well, but liked how attentive to the class difference between the two of them the movie was.

The book is even better than the film.

liked this; Lips is a great character.

(obv the music is swill)

(obv the music is swill)

That's not obvious at all. I liked their most recent album a lot.

(obv the music is swill)

Completely untrue, but they definitely had their share of lean years, no question. Forged in Fire and Metal on Metal are classic. And yeah, This is Thirteen surprised me.

If you can get through the very extended interview with Lars Ulrich in the DVD Special Features, the director gets extremely choked up at the end and exposes his utter fanboy relationship with the band, which is touching in itself.

I can't believe I only just got around to seeing this. I'm not especially a metal fan, although I like some, but that's irrelevant, this is like Some Kind of Monster where the individuals are likeable crossed with Spinal Tap. Its really engaging and bighearted.

Finally watched this and there were tears shed.

Now I know what it means to never give up on a dream...

This movie makes an interesting comparison with Exit Through The Gift Shop. If only these guys weren't so earnest, they would be huge!

If only these guys weren't so earnest, they would be huge!

Yeah, I dunno. Their music's fine, but it's not terribly interesting. Compared to the artistic advances their peers were making in the mid to late eighties they seem to have always just been chugging along to the same groove.

I adore this movie, but did indeed miss an honest opinion about the quality of Anvil's music. Their third album was released in 1983, was killer, and ahead of the game. For some reason it took the band 4 years to follow it up. In those 4 years metal expanded considerably. Trash metal happened, death metal, doom metal... hardcore and metal got mixed, funk became part of the equation, etc. When Anvil dropped their new album, they sounded very old fashioned. What also didn't help was that every Anvil album had one or two overly poppy songs and that their new album was now made up almost exclusively of these. I think that this is what damaged the band's career. Not bad luck or what have you. Just bad management. All the follow-up albums are also mediocre at best. It is nice, but not nice enough, and definitely not as good and special as their first three albums were. I wish these guys all the success in the world, they are sweet and lovely, but once the documentary becomes old news, they have to keep the momentum with the quality of their new releases. I seriously wonder if they are able to pull that off.

In re the previous post -- now you can judge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEZICHQ-4LM

Thing is, by just staying at doing what they do, they sound perfectly placed for all the retro metal worship now.

Yeah, this is the best Anvil song I've heard in a good 24 years at least.

A detailed look at the new record:

http://www.hellbound.ca/2011/03/first-look-at-anvil-juggernaut-of-justice/

The Story Of Anvil is on netflix streaming now! I'm going in.

Still streaming for another week. Watched it last night, I'm with some dude, sorry to say.

Out.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51TPW2PDC0L.jpg

saw them twice last weekend. Lips plays a guitar solo with a vibrator.

"Mothra" is dope live

saw them twice last weekend. Lips plays a guitar solo with a vibrator.

what a jawdropping revelation to people who only know them from this movie

actually hadn't seen the movie prior to seeing them, didn't realize they showed him doing this in the flick.

Yeah, I dunno. Their music's fine, but it's not terribly interesting. Compared to the artistic advances their peers were making in the mid to late eighties they seem to have always just been chugging along to the same groove.

― A brownish area with points (chap), Monday, 13 December 2010 00:58 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

many of their more successful peers did exactly the same thing!

I do kinda wish they were a four piece again tho. that kinda 80s heavy metal sounds weird with only one guitar live (unlike doom, which would work fine in that setting)

their new bass player is cool, he looks like an ex-hockey player. Robb's drum solo was awesome.

I always wondered what they meant when they said that most of their albums sounded like shit. The songs or the production?

I did find it odd and a bit disappointing that a fan made film didn't include more of their music or discuss the merits of more of their albums.

in context I think he meant the production of the albums, but I'm sure he was probably also talking about the songs, because in recent interviews he's said ultimately the production doesn't matter if your songs are shit.

Would be nice to see a comprehensive interview, album by album.

he even admitted in an interview recently that the fans mostly come to shows for the first three albums, and that they base their setlists on that and just cherrypick the rest of the setlist based on their newer material. I wouldn't be surprised if the comments on those late-80s/mid-90s albums were "don't remember it", "oh, that one", "hmm I remember one of those songs".

he also confirmed that they no longer have regular jobs, that Anvil provides all their income now, so apparently the post-movie bump has maintained itself, though I will say they played to very small crowds both times I saw them. but Lips looked like a toothy grinning kid who just picked up a guitar for the first time, it's impossible not to enjoy that.

Robb Reiner's drum solo was dope too.

I don't know how anyone thought this film could be a hoax. There was plenty of evidence the band existed on the internet with lots of fan discussion and it would have been an incredible feat to fake all that old footage with the band looking much younger and get actors who were that convincing.

One of my favourite parts is when Lips goes around the metal bands looking to talk about old times. One guy has a good story and another guy doesn't remember him at all.

yeah, Vinnie Appice looked mortified but it was cool seeing Lips still be a fanboy at his age. Glad they didn't selectively edit that sequence for melodrama, they could have gone one or two ways with it, ie, purposefully only showing the "wtf" reactions of the other musicians, or the opposite, just showing the Twisted Sister/Motorhead meetups.

I also think it's a little weird that in all of the Motorhead/Lemmy soundbites it never got mentioned that Lemmy asked Lips to replace Fast Eddie Clarke in Motorhead, and Lips declined. kind of a big detail!

I do wonder how many bands are in Anvil's situation before the film. I mean there are hundreds of great bands who never were able to give up the day job but I don't know how unusual it is to have to go back to your day job after diminished success and keep releasing albums that long.

yeah, didn't Northside split up only recently?

I think many old metal musicians avoid this because they subsidize their livelihood by playing in/touring with multiple bands at a time. lots of long-standing metal bands would ostensibly lose members over time, so you'd see people like Sharlee d'Angelo, an otherwise unexceptional bass player, filling these roles and cashing in by being a part of an already established act (I think one year he played on like five albums I bought). I think even Dave Lombardo admitted to joining Testament for the paycheck in the late 90s. And then there was Savatage, who, ok, were on Atlantic for years, which helped, but managed to help create a spinoff band (Trans-Siberian Orchestra) that was lucrative.

not that this was a road to riches, mind you, but if you're getting touring/merchandise incomes, possibly even a songwriting credit or two from more than one act, you have a better chance of staying afloat and not having to work a day job.

but someone like Lips would never be into that - Anvil is really an extension of him (hell, the band was originally named after him).

got Juggernaut of Justice last night and really like it. As far as their post-movie albums, This is Thirteen and Juggernaut are the best, but the newish one, Hope in Hell, is a bit of a dropoff. There's tunes on it for sure but nothing like on the previous two.

so far the new one (terribly titled Anvil is...Anvil) is actually pretty fun! the opening track is a cornball "arrgh we're pirates" song, the second one seems musically like an homage to Motorhead.

way better than the cheesy blandness of Hope in Hell. Nothing surprising but hey I will take authentic classic heavy metal anytime.

third song is called "Gun Control". really cheesy 'message' song.