The Greatest Night in Pop -
If you think there's an interesting story behind the effort to get dozens of the most popular musicians in the world at the time to record a song, you would be right, and this documentary does a pretty good job of telling it. I've found that talking head documentaries go from passable to good or great based on how much of the margins they cover, i.e., trivia that is not common knowledge, which this one has plenty of and it is never not amusing. Lionel Richie's account of meeting Michael Jackson's snake while writing the song is a hoot, as is the moment where Cyndi Lauper's copious jewelry causes recording complications. I went into this hoping it would have individual accounts beyond the leaders of this project, which it does, and they're all interesting regardless of whether or not the artist participated. The mystery behind the oft-memed confused expressions of Bob Dylan is made clearer, for instance. The way he was able to become less baffled is bound to surprise you and make you smile. Again, while not everyone participated in this for reasons beyond the obvious, the copious behind the scenes footage makes you feel like you are there and provides immediacy to Bob Dylan's story and more. Director Nguyen and company also deserve credit for looking beyond the famous faces. if you are interested in what happened in the booth and in music production in general, it's got that covered too, mostly thanks to insight from participants like the recording engineer, audio engineer and others who you do not always hear from in these kinds of docs.
This movie does a great job of going behind the music, but is it a great movie? Not quite. Not only is the commentary pretty much entirely one-sided, but a good chunk of it is also vague and obvious. You could probably make a drinking game out of how many times someone says something along the lines of "to see all these musicians in one place was unbelievable!" Even so, I'll admit to asking, "really?" when Lionel Richie kicks off the movie by saying that nothing was ever the same again after recording We Are the World. The important thing is that when the movie ended, I understood why.
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