Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Starting as I mean to go on, there’s not an awful lot to say about American Utopia, so I won’t belabour this too much. It’s a Spike Lee directed capture of David Byrne’s stage show / album tour for his American Utopia album, with a good number of classic Talking Heads tunes interspersed throughout.
As such, I suppose how much you enjoy this will depend on how much you like David Byrne and Talking Heads. Thankfully, I like them a lot, so I like this a lot. To be critical, as a stage show it’s perfectly engaging, with some interesting choreography for a live band, but to be honest it’s not adding a lot more than just listening to the album on Spotify. It’s a straightforward recording, really, not a Spike Lee joint in any meaningful sense, so don’t go expecting a huge amount of flourishes in the visuals.
But that is really to be expected, given the nature of it, and does not detract from the enjoyable performance of enjoyable tunes. Two far more critical, er, criticisms – there’s one dancer / backup singer that is, as again I suppose should be expected, playing to the back of the house, which unfortunately on film comes across as wild mugging and gurning. More worryingly from a health perspective, and I know the ‘rona has consumed a lot of mindshare in the prevention narrative of late, but let’s not forget the horrors wrought by verrucas and athlete’s foot, by which I mean, for the love of God someone get these people some socks. Christmas is coming up, just sayin’.