Ride, Rise, Roar is another perspective on new wave veteran David Byrne and, in that light, it is an important component of his catalog. Watch the performance art of “I Feel My Stuff”, the music is slicker than the early Talking Heads when Byrne brought his younger, harder rocking self to the Rat in Boston and ruled.
Sure, the guitar cuts through but the subtleties are more pronounced and the dancers pick up the slack from the angst that is left behind in another time. The cast/ crew sure look like they are having fun, but when Iggy Pop brings the first few rows of the audience up to the stage the pandemonium is more in line with what a rock crowd expects.
As the P.R. states: – RIDE, RISE, ROAR is a David Byrne concert film that blends riveting onstage performances with intimate details of the creative collaborations. The film trailer has lilting Velvet Underground guitar tones with Byrne noting “I thought, it would be nice to do something unexpected, that also makes it a little bit more of a show. I thought – how could we do that? In one way it would be through dancers and movement.”
This David Hillman Curtis film has footage with Brian Eno, the enigmatic exile of Roxy Music and, as a follow-up of sorts to Jonathan Demme’s 1984 epic “Stop Making Sense”, a documentary from 1983 concerts by the Talking Heads, David Curtis could have pulled a Dan Curtis.
What this critic would have liked to have seen was a sort of mocking of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic “The Silence of the Lambs” with Eno playing the role of Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill and trapping the dancers one by one until only he and Byrne are left.
Perhaps I’ve just written their sequel.
Joe Viglione is the Chief Film Critic at TMRZoo.com. He was a film critic for Al Aronowitz’s The Blacklisted Journal, has written thousands of reviews and biographies for AllMovie.com, Allmusic.com and produces and hosts Visual Radio. Visual Radio is a fifteen year old variety show on cable TV which has interviewed John Lennon’s Uncle Charlie, Margaret Cho, Ray Manzarek, John
