I've become quite enamored with concert vids of late and was searching Amazon for one from the Police. I ran across this review which tickled me.
This is a killer set, well-performed, with an adoring audience, directed by Martians.
All of the Synchronicity material goes down brilliantly, from the breakneck pace of Synchronicity 1 to the jazzy, floating ambience of Tea in the Sahara. The old stuff goes down great also. They turn on the jets for Walking on the Moon, which Sting plays on an upright bass and which sounds brilliant. So Lonely sounds terrific even after all the times they'd played it before. O My God becomes De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da without missing a beat.
However, whichever village idiot directed this thing needs a new career, far, far away from an editing board. Should you choose to buy this DVD, your eyes will be treated to:
- Terrible video special effects that were clearly put in just because the technology making them possible had just been invented and the directors were extremely excited about this, and not for any reason of artistic merit whatseover apart from lending fuel to those who disparage the 80s
- Random switches in the color scheme from color to black and white, and then to blue to red to yellow tinting (because, didn't you know? blue red and yellow is the color scheme of the Synchronicity album. You didn't know? Well, we'll do it five more times and then you will know. We'll also splice in footage of fans wearing Synchronicity shirts, too, right in the middle of the songs. Because, didn't you know? It's the SYNCHRONICITY TOUR.)
- More excessive arbitrary use of slow motion than in Peter Jackson's King Kong
- Pointless swirl effects during Tea in the Sahara
- Random and extensive shots of devoted fans with bad 80s hair singing boisterously along.
- Endless closeups of the three highly unnecessary backup singers, who appear to have borrowed their costumes and dance steps from an SEC marching band.
- A Sting worshipper shrieking and then swooning during One World Not Three. And you thought that only happened at Beatles concerts.
- Virtually no footage of Andy Summers or Stewart Copeland at all during the whole concert. Now granted, given Stewart's penchant for wearing shorts so miniscule that they would make John Stockton blush, I can see where the filmmakers were coming from aesthetically (maybe the only time this is true), but the bottom line is, he's only one of the best drummers of all time. Let's see the man in action. Fortunately, four of the songs are put in as bonus tracks where you can choose from any of four camera angles, so if you want to focus on the band members playing their instruments for a change and not on hi-jinks or Sting's chin, you can do it for at least those songs.
I got this and I'm glad I did. The music's excellence, in my opinion, off-sets the horrendously dated campiness of this video. It's just a shame, because it didn't have to be this way. After all, the same year as this came out, Jonathan Demme was directing the brilliant rock video Stop Making Sense for the Talking Heads. Maybe Demme can get access to the raw, unedited and unspoiled footage of this show someday and do it properly.
Funny stuff IMHO. Dunno whether I'll spring for the disk after this!
