8 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.1 |
Chronicles the 16 year history of the Foo Fighters: from the band's very first songs created as cassette demos Dave Grohl recorded during his tenure as Nirvana's drummer, through its ascent to their Grammy-winning, multi-platinum, arena and stadium headlining status as one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.
Starring: Dave GrohlMusic | 100% |
Documentary | 44% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
English: LPCM 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: LPCM 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The internet has made all of us partners in often unexpected, cat’s-cradle-like, interconnections. Nirvana (the band, not the state of mind) had come and gone without me paying a lot of attention to it, until I suddenly started getting inundated with email from fans of the late Kurt Cobain who had found an internet article I had written debunking misconceptions and outright lies about actress Frances Farmer, the subject of course of Kurt's famous anthem "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle." I had known that Kurt had been fascinated by Frances, but his suicide seemed to loosen the floodgates at almost the exact same time as my article started gaining a great deal of international attention from various media outlets. While I had been expecting to hear from Farmer fans, and indeed did, I was somewhat awestruck by the sheer number of Cobain and Nirvana fans who contacted me thanking me for pursuing the truth about Farmer and often indicating they wished that Cobain had lived long enough to have found my research. That, in its very odd and uniquely personal way, is what really turned me on to Nirvana, as I felt an almost preordained obligation to find out more about this band (and frontman) whose fans were so vociferously contacting me. Though I perhaps came late to the Nirvana table, that at least prepared me for Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl’s follow up project, Foo Fighters, an alt-rock outfit that firmly established Grohl as a frontman to be reckoned with on his own terms. Finally out from the sometimes depressive shadow cast by Kurt Cobain, Grohl has shown himself to be an aggressive but likable force on the contemporary music scene, one who is perhaps less prone to navel gazing than Kurt was, but who still can ratchet up the angst factor when push comes to shove. In the synchroncitiy department, Foo Fighters gave their very first live performance in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, at a club where I believe the widow Cobain was reputed to have thrown up on a customer during a Hole performance.
Foo Fighters Back and Forth is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. There's not a whole lot here to get overly excited about, but this video presentation is generally solid given its rather limited ambitions. Most of the footage is simply interview sequences, and those all sport nicely sharp, well detailed images with accurate color. There is also quite a bit of archival footage sprinkled into the mix, and as might be expected, different source elements (and formats) mean different quality, from pretty ragged to very good. The overall image, though, is clear and precise, with good contrast, decent black levels (which occasionally devolve into crush) and a generally appealing look.
There's good news and bad news with regard to the three audio options on Foo Fighters Back and Forth. Let's dismiss the perfectly adequate but lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 track off the bat. Both of the lossless tracks are offered at 48kHz and 24-bit, in uncompressed LPCM in either 5.1 or 2.0. And they sound fantastic. So what's the bad news? Well, there's just not a whole heck of a lot of music, at least uninterrupted or spoken over, throughout the documentary. This is in essence a talking heads documentary, and truth be told, what do you really need a lossless surround mix for in a project like that? All of that said, there are snippets here and there of some great performances, and when those finally roil the sonic waters, the lossless tracks sound absolutely amazing, with great fidelity, awesome low end, and really amazing dynamic range, all the more impressive due to the Fighters'penchant for radically altering amplitude between verse and chorus on so many songs. It would have been great to have been granted at least some supplements of uninterrupted concert footage here, but with the caveat that you're not going to get a bunch of uninterrupted live footage here, these tracks sound great.
About the only real complaint I can imagine any Foo Fighters fan having with this release is that there isn't more uninterrupted live concert footage. This is instead a fairly typical confessional talking heads retrospective of the Fighters' career (so far). While there's probably nothing here that longtime Foo Fighters fans don't already know about, it's still really interesting to hear about all of this stuff first hand from the guys who lived it. It's especially interesting to hear the still raw emotions surrounding some of the decisions to let various players go at certain times, or Dave's decision to step in an re-record drum parts before he would release an album. Through it all, though, all of the guys (with perhaps the exception of Smear) come off as completely likable and well intentioned, certainly a sort of rarity in the wild and wooly world of modern rock. If you want a concert video, this certainly isn't it, but otherwise Foo Fighters Back and Forth comes Highly recommended.
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Led Zeppelin
1976
1991
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The Rolling Stones
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1981
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Special Edition | Warner Archive Collection
1970
50th Anniversary
1973