Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 7, 2018

Has Eagle Rock Entertainment become a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Life all of a sudden? That’s a joke, in case anyone is wondering, but it’s one fostered by the fact that in just the span of a few weeks, Eagle Rock has released Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story, and is now coming out with Genius Amplified: Eric Clapton Life in 12 Bars, which has led me to wonder if there’s one of those new “subscription series” devoted to Rock Guitar Gods or somesuch title, much as Time Life used to be famous for marketing back in the day (I’ve actually joked in other reviews about being kind of a Time Life “junkie” and needing to collect “complete sets” of any given series, so I’m not complaining one way or the other, mind you). This is another really interesting if not exactly revelatory documentary devoted to one of the seminal guitar players of our era, though in some ways it’s more emotionally raw and visceral than the overall cheerier ambience of the Beck piece. I mentioned in the Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story Blu-ray review how Beck is sometimes weirdly slighted in terms of how his contributions are assessed, and that perceived deficit is certainly not part of Clapton’s own “baggage”. But as is addressed directly in sometimes brutally honest terms throughout this piece, Clapton has had his own “issues” to face (like anyone, I guess), including some self destructive behaviors and the now legendary tragedy which gave birth to one of his most defining hits, “Tears in Heaven”.

Unlike Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story, there’s no (needless) “framing device” like the car shop that serves as a kind of basis for Beck’s tale to unfold. But Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars doesn’t pretend to be anything “innovative” in the rock biography genre, instead chronologically moving through Clapton’s life with quite a few (often audio) interviews with Clapton contextualizing things, while also providing a glut of archival stills and video to help illustrate the passing years. As with the Beck piece, I doubt there’s anything here that will truly surprise longtime Clapton fans, or even those who are cursorily aware of the star, but the information is always well organized and some of the archival video especially is quite winning.

Without getting into specifics (for those who don’t know some of the “fine print” of Clapton’s life and who may consider information verging on “spoiler” territory), Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars gets into some history that is fraught with emotional upheaval. It’s here that the documentary really becomes rather surprisingly forceful, detailing a man supposedly on top of the world who nonetheless discovers he’s far from being completely in control, either of himself or (tragically) of what happens to his loved ones.

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Vision, an imprint of Eagle Rock Entertainment, and Universal Music Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (often but not exclusively) in 1.78:1 (as can be seen in several of the screenshots accompanying this review, a lot of the older archival video tends to hover around Academy ratio). I'm scoring this a 4.0, as I tend to do with documentaries cobbled together from a disparate array of source material, but I would forewarn fans that a lot of the archival video in this piece is pretty ragged looking. There's also the somewhat odd choice to have Clapton appear via what looks like video captured from a cellphone (see screenshot 14), certainly not the most stunning, crystal clear video technology available. That said, there's nothing overly problematic about the transfer itself, and a lot of the archival stills are clear and precise looking.

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars does feature a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix, the fact that this is a biographical documentary and not a pure music video means that the also included LPCM 2.0 mix may suffice perfectly well for many listeners. There is music here, as should be expected, but it tends to exist more as support rather than focus, though, that said, when brief snippets showing Clapton playing through the years dot the landscape, the surround mix does offer a more spacious accounting of the tunes, and there's noticeable improvement in the lower frequencies as well. All of the interview segments sound fine, and aside from understandable archival audio issues related to age, fidelity is also fine throughout the presentation.

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Eric Clapton and Lili Fini Zanuck in Conversation with Jools Holland (1080i; 24:36) stems from the London premiere and was shot at BFI South Bank in London in January 2018.

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If, as I mentioned in the Beck review, Jeff Beck never really gets his full due as a guitar god, in some ways, the reverse might be said of Clapton, in that he's regularly lionized to the point that people tend to not even pay attention to his virtuosity anymore. Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars probably won't provide any major surprises to any diehard Clapton fan, but it is still a really winning compendium of archival video and stills, and it features some salient commentary by Clapton and others about what this giant of contemporary music has contributed over the years. Perhaps because so much archival video is offered here, there's arguably more of a quality variance than is sometimes seen in documentaries of this ilk, and so those expecting a crystal clear "high definition" appearance throughout this piece should probably set their expectation meters accordingly. Some of the archival audio also tends to show its age, but perhaps not to the level of some of the video elements. Recommended.