Tag Archives: heavy metal

[REVIEW] God Bless Ozzy Osbourne

God Bless Ozzy OsbourneYou may recall that a couple of months back I commented on a documentary I’d just seen called God Bless Ozzy Osbourne. In that entry, which could probably double as a mini-review, I expressed my misgivings about Ozzy in the wake of watching it, and I must reveal now that my feelings have not changed much in the interim. I was very much bothered by God Bless Ozzy Osbourne and will attempt over the next few hundred words to explain exactly why.

I must say at the outset that God Bless Ozzy Osbourne is not a bad documentary at all. In fact, it’s about as good of a documentary about the life and career of Ozzy Osbourne as you are ever likely to get. Delving into all corners of his life, it tells the tale from beginning to now with thoughtfulness and care. It should receive full credit for doing this, especially since it’s because of this thorough approach to the subject matter that leads one to the almost inescapable conclusion that, whatever else Ozzy Osbourne might be, he is not a particularly good person.

The film begins with Ozzy as a child, talking about his family and his hardworking parents, especially his father. Ozzy’s relationship with his father was contentious, largely because Ozzy was such an inveterate ne’er-do-well. When the police came for a teenaged Ozzy in connection with a robbery he’d pulled off with some friends, his father told the cops to take his son away and put him in prison. They did.

You can’t really blame Ozzy’s father for feeling the way he did. Ozzy seemed destined to be an eternal screw-up, a drain on society. For a man dedicated to his career and family, Ozzy must have seemed like some kind of alien being. Certainly he did not share any of his father’s upstanding traits.

It was only when Ozzy fell into music that things began to change for him. He got into the band that would eventually become Black Sabbath on the strength of having his own amp. That he had a unique singing voice didn’t hurt, and the band proceeded to develop a signature sound that would later catapult them to mega-stardom. As of this writing Black Sabbath has sold over 100 million records. Yes, you read that number right.

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God bless Ozzy Osbourne?

Ozzy OsbourneI will do a full review of God Bless Ozzy Osbourne at some point, as it’s gone at the bottom of my review backlog along with my most recent views, but I have a few thoughts to share ahead of time that I believe are worth discussion. Hopefully you’ll agree.

Before I say anything else, let me reiterate for those who have not been reading this blog for very long that I am a huge Ozzy fan. I saw Ozzy for the first time in concert two years ago last month, and I expect that my fandom had a big impact on how much I enjoyed the show. Ozzy is well past his prime musically, and his vocal performance was fairly middling, but I found I didn’t care too, too much for the simple fact that there I was, watching Ozzy, in fulfillment of a dream I’d had for thirty years. My biggest wish coming away from that night was that I had seen him earlier: 1) because he would have been able to handle the singing duties more effectively, and 2) because my hearing would have been more resilient. We are both older gentlemen now.

Anyway, we were talking about God Bless Ozzy Osbourne. The documentary came out in 2010 on the fortieth anniversary of Black Sabbath’s first album and it reached all the way back to his childhood to tell the story of this guy’s unlikely rise to fame.

I knew most of this story already. Ozzy was from an extremely poor, working-class family in Birmingham and he was a screw-up almost from the very beginning. He served time in prison. He couldn’t hold down a job. He seemed destined to live on the dole for his whole life, contributing nothing to society, until he finally died and saved anyone further trouble. I think he would have been the first one to tell you that he did not expect the way his life turned out.

On the one hand, this is a very inspiring tale, so I didn’t mind hearing it again. It was the stuff I hadn’t paid much mind to that bothered me.

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[REVIEW] Heavy Metal

Heavy MetalI’ve seen some rather age-inappropriate films in my time. You may recall from my review of Alien the story of how I, at nine years of age, managed to get a ticket on my own to see that movie in the theater without any inkling of what I was about to witness. As a result, Alien is probably going to follow me to my grave as the single most intense moviegoing experience I ever had.

I could also make a sizable list of other films I saw as a child that I shouldn’t have and Heavy Metal is one of them. I wasn’t yet quite 11 years old when I went to see the movie with my aunt. My aunt, I should say, was pretty liberal when giving me access to her copies of the Heavy Metal magazine, something that was then (and continues to be) something kids should not be allowed to get hold of, if not for the violence then for the sex, sex, sex.

Anyway I did read the magazine and I did see Heavy Metal and now here I am revisiting that experience some 30 years later. I’ve come a long, long way since then.

The first thing I should say about Heavy Metal is that whatever flaws it might have, it does an excellent job of translating the experience of reading the magazine to the screen. If you’ve never picked up a copy of the magazine, you’re probably unaware that each issue isn’t a self-contained story, but features a combination of serialized tales and short one-shots. There wouldn’t be a sequel to Heavy Metal — the almost completely unrelated Heavy Metal 2000 doesn’t count — so we’ll never know if the filmmakers planned to tell more stories involving the various characters we meet, but the sensation of flitting through a series of disconnected tales united only in their shameless violence and sexuality is definitely present.

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[REVIEW] Iron Maiden: Flight 666

Iron Maiden: Flight 666I’ve never been an enormous fan of concert movies, though I can’t really explain why, since they represent a kind of opportunity. Certainly some concerts are priced way, way out of the range of ordinary folks — even a mid-size concert from a less than huge artist/band can cost $100 or more — and many tours fail to come through your neck of the woods at all. There’s also this little detail: sometimes a concert or tour happened years ago and absent a time machine, there’s no way to actually see the show in question. That’s where concert films come in.

It helps if a concert film isn’t just video of a performance. I have watched, and probably will watch again, DVDs where we see a particular stage show from beginning to end, but these are the kinds of concert movies I have that niggling problem with. It’s nice to hear the music and see the performers, but it seems like there could be more to it. I could not have articulated what that “more” would entail, though, until I saw Iron Maiden: Flight 666. It has more. So much more.

Back in 2008, Iron Maiden decided to embark on an ambitious world tour unlike any tour that had happened before. Hitting cities that rarely, if ever, saw large international acts come through, and traveling to countries Iron Maiden had never even been before, the “Somewhere Back in Time World Tour” would average 2,000 miles between shows and take place in a matter of a couple of months.

Iron Maiden was able to do all of this by trying something completely new. Rather than transporting the band and their stage gear the old-fashioned way, Iron Maiden would travel via a customized Boeing 757 that would hold everything in its belly, allowing the whole show to arrive in the same place at the same time in a hurry. And they would be in a hurry to get all of this done. You don’t travel from hemisphere to hemisphere, even to opposite sides of the world, in two months without putting the pedal to the metal (so to speak).

To make the process of transport even more unique Flight 666, as it was called, was piloted by none other than Iron Maiden’s lead singer, Bruce Dickinson. Die-hard Iron Maiden fans know that Dickinson is a devoted pilot, but this may come as a shock to people who know little to nothing about the band. Dickinson is not only an incredibly gifted vocalist, but he’s a driven perfectionist. Learning how to fly a jumbo jet is not something for the fainthearted.

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