Lou Reed Berlin
by Julian Schnabel
List Price:
Our Price: $2.05
You Save: $22.90 (92%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Category: DVD
See more DVD releases
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: Lou ReedDirector: Julian Schnabel
Brand: Wellspring Media INC
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Running Time: 81 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-09-30
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Model: 81525
Studio: Miriam Collection
Product features:
- Lou Reed's 2006 live concert performance of his 1973 concept album "Berlin", Filmed over five nights at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES Rating: PG-13 Age: 796019815253 UPC: 796019815253 Manufacturer No: 81525
Movie Reviews of Lou Reed Berlin
Movie Review: Lou at his most lyrical and introspective
Summary: 5 Stars
The 1973 album, Berlin, is a dark operatic song-cycle about speed junkies Caroline and Jim. Both of them work the streets but when it is determined that Caroline is an unfit mother and her kids are taken away by social services the story gets even darker and Caroline and Jim's lives take separate but equally horrific turns for the worse. Taken individually songs like "Men of Good Fortune" and "How do you think it Feels" are very good but not quite equal to Lou's greatest. But together these songs build upon each other and combine to create one of the most viscerally wrenching experiences in modern music. Admittedly, much of this sounds like it was written on cocktail napkins during a very dark, albeit painfully lucid, night of the soul. But the result is the most sublime music of Lou's career.
Though Lou always tells his stories through his character's eyes, this feels like confessional music written by an artist who is intimately acquainted with what life feels like in the dark aftermath of vanished love and vanished hope with nothing but the alchemy of his fevered brain to work with. And he produces not just a series of darkly beautiful and hauntingly introspective songs but a magnificently structured rock libretto replete with crashing rock chords, quiet cello and flute interludes, and a soul-replenishing choir. Its as if the artist had confronted oblivion itself, wrestled with it, and come up from the lower depths (or the Hell's Kitchen of the soul) with this magisterial orchestration with which to enchant himself back into life. And then he caps it all off with the most achingly beautiful rendition of "Candy Says" (sharing vocals with the fragile and tender voiced Antony) that I've ever heard. And thankfully so because even though the song is equally nihilistic in its vision of self-escape ("What do you think I'd see if I could walk away from me") it is a much-needed deliverance into the familiar after the soul-tormented foreign tour that is Berlin. "Candy Says" is followed by the rarely performed "Rock Minuet" (another of Lou's epic visions of street struggle), and then Lou finishes the set with "Sweet Jane" to provide emotional catharsis and closure.
Julian Schnabel perfectly complements the fragmented narrative with a collage of disjointed visuals that underscore but never intrude upon or threaten the integrity of Lou's composition. Its a perfect marriage of audio and visual art (Schnabel wisely takes a minimalist low-tech scrapbook approach using wallpapered panels, slides, and, occasionally, super 8 footage to create layers of visuals to complement the layers of sound). Its such a seamless and pleasing blend that I would not be surprised if this concert/art event does not become the new paradigm for concert/art in the decades to come.
Its so intimate and so intense that you feel like you are a kid again listening and responding to an album you just bought. In fact I was not familiar with this record so that is precisely the feeling that I had with this piece of music.
I'll admit that I do not love everything that Lou has done, but this is music that stirs the creative self and the heart and intrigues the ear in endless ways! I can think of very few albums that succeed on so many levels (Lou goes places no other artist goes) and get you responding on so many levels. This is music made and performed by an artist with all cylinders (light and dark) firing; Lou holds nothing back here and so you too respond with everything that you've got.
Highest rating.
Summary of Lou Reed Berlin
LOU REED BERLIN - DVD MovieHow do you adapt a record once described as "the most depressing album of all time" into a multi-media stage performance? Rather well, when it comes to Lou Reed?s Berlin. The former Velvet Underground mainstay was already established as a solo artist, buoyed by the hit "Walk on the Wild Side," when he released the Berlin recording in 1973. That it was not a commercial success, to say the least, is unsurprising, given its relentlessly grim lyric content and music that, while often very appealing, is hardly the stuff that Top Ten dreams are made of. Still, it made sense when Reed revived the work some 35 years later for a single world tour and concert DVD. Working with film director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Reed brings a quiet power to his weary tale of hopeless junkies Caroline and Jim, whose lives, already bound for the gutter when the performance begins, completely bottom out little over an hour later (the 81-minute DVD includes a few encores, notably the Velvet Underground classic "Sweet Jane"). The songs, played by a standard rock band but with subtle touches of horns, strings, and choir (Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons adds vocals as well), are for the most part strikingly prosaic; Reed has never been much of a singer, and his words are anything but flowery, closer to prose than verse (many lines, like "All of her friends call her Alaska when she takes speed," are more spoken than sung). Schnabel does a superb job matching the downbeat mood, relying primarily on the use of low, filtered lighting and film (in which Caroline is portrayed by Emmanuelle Seigner). Not for everyone, certainly, but Berlin is a work to be admired. --Sam Graham
Similar DVD Movies
Lou Reed: Rock and Roll HeartRelease date: 1998-08-12; DVD
Best price: $49.88
Lou Reed - Lou Reed - Live at Montreux, 2000RED Distribution; Release date: 2005-11-01; DVD
Best price: $5.98
Price in other shops:
Lollapalooza LiveRelease date: 2011-07-19; DVD
Best price: $12.46
Price in other shops:
MiralABE; Release date: 2011-07-12; DVD
Best price: $6.96
Price in other shops:
The Diving Bell and the ButterflyEBH; Release date: 2011-06-07; DVD
Best price: $2.97
Price in other shops:
Lou Reed, Metallica - LuluRelease date: 2011-11-01; Music CD
Best price: $12.59
Price in other shops:
The Velvet Underground - Velvet Redux: Live MCMXCIIIWEA DES Moines Video; Release date: 2006-01-24; DVD
Best price: $3.18
Price in other shops:
Lou Reed: A Night with Lou ReedRelease date: 2007-06-05; DVD
Best price: $8.29
Price in other shops:
Lou Reed - Berlin: Live at St. Ann's WarehouseRelease date: 2008-11-04; Music CD
Best price: $8.99
Price in other shops:
Lou Reed - BerlinREED,LOU; Release date: 1998-03-24; Music CD
Best price: $3.07
Price in other shops: