On A Saturday built for night baseball, my friend Sherry Davis and I went to Citifeld secure in the thought we wouldn’t have to sit through another disastrous performance by Omar Minayas bunch of also rans the Mets.
And we didn’t.
But if anybody is King Midas in reverse it is the Mets so instead of getting what we’d paid for, the projection of Billy Joel’s two day stand at the old Shea Stadium in September 2008 before it closed forever, what we got was a mix and match of the show, Billy’s bio and the Met’s history.
And the connection? Tenuous at best, but essentially it boils down to Shea opening in 1964 and Billy forming his first band, the Echos in 1964 and Billy’s assertion that Queens is Long Island (sorta like saying the US is Canada)
Which is all well and good but apparently the director of this documentary has never actually been involved in the music business at all and/or any level whatsoever because in a 90 minute documentary not one single song is presented without interruption ..
Perhaps that wasn’t anybody’s intentions but then put a HUGE FUCKING WARNING LABEL STATING THIS ISN’T WHAT YOU PAID TO SEE.
However, if you are in the market for reliving 1969 and 1986 again, you are in the right place, and absolutely if you need to be reminded who Robert Moses was you are in the right
place.
But the Billy Joel bio stuff while interesting is all a matter of record and facile in the extreme: if you wanna do a Billy Joel doc good -put HBO on it, but if you wanna do that you can’t gloss over his marriages, his drinking problems, you can’t gloss at all. You gotta get to it. It’s a great story, so tell it.
As for the Mets? You get more depth on an average night on SNY
So essentially they are trying to a) tell the story of Shea, b) tell the storu of Billy and c) show the concert. And they end up sucking at all of the above.
Butall of this could be forgiven if they would let the fucking music breath. The footage we get to see is beautiful and glorious and would stand up to a pre and post interview and 90 minutes of music. These imbeciles interrupt Tony Bennett… I was there that night and can assure you the Bennett-Joel duet on “New York State Of Mind” was well worth listening to. You can just about guess this from the ridiculously, preposterously, edited bits of the Shea concert we get to see.
There is an exciting commentary towards the end of the movie by Paul McCartney and Billy Joel about how Paul arrived at Shea for the encore. Paul, travelling from London, isn’t gonna make it. The air traffic controllers give his plane preference for landing, the Customs department rubber stamp him, and a police escort get him from JFK to Shea in 11 minutes. He gets on stage and starts to sing “I Saw Her Standing There”.
And the director cuts away to somebody discussing the audiences reaction.
Typical brain dead New York Mets.
Pathetic..