U2 - Best of 1990-2000
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Canada
Movie Reviews of U2 - Best of 1990-2000
Movie Review: Sound
Summary: 5 Stars
Could someone PLEASE tell me how to change the sound settings on the DVD...my DVD lists Dolby Digital on the box as a sound setting, however when I play the DVD I can not change the settings. I also can not play the additional videos. Do I have a bad DVD?Movie Review: U2 THE MOON!
Summary: 5 Stars
Simply an amazing collection of videos! I love the graphic design. Props to the guys who but this one together. Gotta love being able to watch 2 videos on several songs... and the bonus videos!These guys know what they're doing!Movie Review: PAPER DVD SLIP IS SUPPOSED TO BE THERE!
Summary: 5 Stars
FYI: The extra DVD slot the comes with a cardboard DVD is supposed to be there. It is for the bonus DVD called "The History Mix" that comes with the limited edition of the "Best of 1990-2000" CD set.Movie Review: A MUST FOR ANY U2 FAN
Summary: 5 Stars
if you like U2 you know the songs now see the videos with documentries for most of not all. a true 5 stars, great stuff!!!!Movie Review: technicolor decadence and glorious foolishness
Summary: 4 Stars
There's a great story about U2 that appears in Bill Flanagan's book, "U2 at the end of the World":It's early 1992, and the band has just begun its ZooTV tour, to promote "Achtung Baby." The sprawling stage, the giant television screens, and the glowing trabants are set up and ready, the band is beginning to play, and bono, decked out in full Fly uniform of leather and shades, is about to mount the elevator that will take him to the top of the towers, and the beginning of his performance. Suddenly, the singer panics-- he hasn't fully figured out what he's going to do when he gets out there. As he hits the runway, he decides on a "drunken" set of stumbles and gestures, blowing smoke, and generally behaving like the most obnoxious stereotype of a pop star imaginable. The audience eats it up.
That story is '90s U2 in a nutshell. Throughout the 80s they built themselves into the world's biggest band through a combination of sixties-based musical anthems, outspoken advocacy, anton corbijin's black-and-white photos, and generally positive press. Following the debacle of Rattle and Hum, the band decided to throw out this time-tested, commercially successful game plan, but did so without knowing precisely what was going to replace it. As they would sing on their first song of the 90s, they were ready for what's next-- but what was next?
The answer was a gloriously contradictory, beautifully muddled mixture of industrial rhythms, multi-media barrages, and playfully ironic personas that traded in the earnestness of the previous decade for something far more complex. Recent revisionist history has painted this decade as the band's folly, and the recent All That You Can't Leave Behind as some sort of return to form (sadly, the band seems to have embraced this view, too), but that's not really the whole story. '90s U2 did not abandon the politics or passion of the previous decade (as even a cursory listen to their albums or a glance at their concert videos indicates), but recognized that the links between the private and the personal, and the manner in which media transmitted ideas, was far more complex than their prior work admitted. "Right in the middle of a contradiction, that's the place to be," the band (quoting sam shephard) noted at the time, and it was this willingness to be self-critical, and to admit and play with their contradictions (as opposed to the moralizing of the decades that preceded and followed) that allowed the band to create a body of gorgeous, deeply underrated work throughout this ten-year period. Aging punks can keep shaking their copies of october or the joshua tree at me, but this is u2's finest decade.
Far more so than the spotty greatest hits CD that was released a couple of months ago, this DVD collection captures that decade in its full technicolor glory. The 23 videos here are by turns sexy, moving, funny, and dowright bizarre and misguided, but never dull. See the glitter disco balls, the fly sunglasses, the cartoon superhero alter egos, and the television word jazz barrages! See funky concert footage, the "arrogant" interviews, the pop star kissing the camera lens! See not one, not two, but three videos for their finest single, "One," and realize that all three are interesting, worthwhile interpretations (and very different from one another). Watch three interesting, if somewhat truncated, documentaries on the band! Best of all, take the opportunity to see and hear the crucial songs ("The Fly," "Mofo," and "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," among others) from this period that the band foolishly left off their greatest hits CD.
When asked recently in Q magazine what he'd learned from the '90s, Bono replied that it was to "not spend too much time on the wrapping paper. No matter the occasion, your loved ones only care about what's inside." The problem is, this gets it completely backwards-- in pop music, the "song" and the "wrapping paper" (in terms of arrangements, production, videos, and general imagery) are inseperable (after all, the band's recent return to an earnest "realness" is just as much of a package as that giant lemon from the POP tour, even if advocates of this faux-authenticity don't care to admit it). '90s u2 seemed to understand this, and this DVD is a pleasant reminder of the pop glories they used this knowledge to achieve.