Favorite music-related movies?

I love Beyond the Lighted Stage.
It's a movie even non-Rush fans should enjoy.
 
Jayman said:
That movie with Joan Jett and Micheal J. Fox I thought was really good too. I haven't seen that in a really long time. I can't think of the name of the movie though.
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Light Of Day, around 1987 as I recall.

I saw some old clips from 8 Mile last night, that's another good one. Not great, but at least good.
 
Going back to the Anvil film - I found that most people I talked to about it agreed with me that the main reason for why the band never made it big (at least until the film came out) is because they just weren't good enough. Nevertheless, I see the film as more than a sob story. It's a brutally honest look at all the values we are told to stick to. It's the consequence of the demands of all those Play Classics! Nostalgia fans and ziggyplayedguitars we find on this forum and everywhere who bitch about the fact that Iron Maiden didn't release 15 albums full of songs like The Trooper. Anvil is a band that always stuck to what it did, took no chances or changes of artistic direction, and the result is that they became entirely irrelevant until the advent of the hipster metal fans who are buying the vintage only.
Even more so, it's message can be read outside a strict heavy metal context. If you hold what Anvil did against what all the marketing gurus and motivational speakers indoctrinate you with, they appear to have done everything right. They believed in themselves, they developed their own trademarks and usp's and put their passion into what they were doing. 20% inspiration and 80% transpiration and all that. They marketed their individuality, as we are always told to do, and it didn't work out - because they didn't have what people don't tell us we need: talent, luck, flexibility in personal values and the ability to evolve. In other words, it's a film about losers in a world that is hell bent on winning, and that's probably not a very pleasant thing to see for some. The upside is that it had a happy ending. The band got massive sympathy for the film and now get decent slots at major festivals and headlining club tours, so by metal standards, they sort of made it big now.
 
I get that, but I guess I didn't really like the way the message was presented. The attitude in the film seemed to be more of: "This band isn't at the level of the Big 4 but they should be". Well yea, you could say that sort of thing about a lot of bands. Of any genre really. I wish they would've applied that message to a larger scale; for all the Anvils or Blaze Bayleys of the world. Maybe encourage people to watch the film and then explore lesser known Metal acts because there are bound to be good ones out there. Instead, the takeaway I got was that Anvil didn't belong in that crowd and were somehow better than them. That seems unfair to me. Combine that with their music not being very good adds up to a sour experience for me.
 
Mosh said:
Well they could've thrown pretty much any band in there and people would care. The movie was well done in that it made you feel sorry for them, but that really had nothing to do with the band themselves. Plus that buzz only lasted for a couple albums, now they're back to where they were before the movie.
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I don't think just any band could've been thrown in there. There's a lot of good bands that never made it, but that doesn't mean it would've made for a compelling story that people would want to watch a movie about. It's true they only got a slight bump on the tour after the movie came out. But I don't think anybody expected them to take over the world after the movie came out.
 
The film/band was successful because it was a well made film, not because the band was good or had particularly interesting personalities. There was a lot of drama involved yes, but I don't think you'd have to look very far to find that sort of thing in a lot of bands, big or small. Just look at Some Kind of Monster. The story was compelling, yes. But I think the compelling part was getting to look at how a band at their level operates, so in that sense it doesn't matter who the band was.

And I'm not saying they should've taken over the world. My point is that if they were as good/special as the film made them out to be, they should've been self sustaining afterwards, rather than fading back into obscurity. At this point that film will probably be what they're most remembered for.
 
Whiplash is the ultimate music-related movie. Jaw-dropping, I went to see it twice when it came out, which is rare for me (before that I had seen Revenge of the Sith twice in 2005 and that's it :P). I would easily fit it in my top 5 films ever seen. 10/10. 12/10 if you're a musician.
 
More like 8/10 if you're a musician :p

As a regular movie it's great, but kinda sucks as a movie about jazz.
 
Well, it's about jazz on the same level that Star Wars is about spaceships. Which means it's not about it at all, to be honest. Wasn't meant to be.
 
Exactly my point. The target audience for that movie wasn't musicians and I'm not sure if a musician would get anything extra out of it that a non musician would, because there's nothing relatable in it.
 
The story of self-improvement and self-realization is pretty relatable to aspiring musicians. I certainly wouldn't receive Whiplash the way I did if music and the drive to be better wasn't a huge part of my life. Besides, it's simply more fun when the film circulates around 'your thing' (playing music). It was also a display of some impressive drumming and changed my perspective on jazz (although the genre is a secondary thing in the film).
 
I'd hardly say there's nothing relatable for a musician in a movie about a kid who is so determined to be the best musician that he basically becomes an obsessive sociopath. Whether you like it or not, Mosh, it's hard to argue that any musician (jazz or not) wouldn't at least relate slightly to the material, including yourself.
 
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