Roger Waters: The Wall (2014) Reviews

• World's Most Amazing Spectacle!

  vendettabr2016-02-27

  The best band ever biggest album gets a new approach, making it sound fresh as ever and surprising once again. Thirty-six years after the original release, a great number of tours, a movie and a few concerts released on video, some could say Roger Waters wanted to release a "The Wall" concert in 2015 only to cash in, taking advantage of nostalgia and of the value and influence of the work to music: however, this one would be completely wrong. The movie is a new, and once again, genius approach to the Rock Opera masterpiece. The work was updated carefully, even though it is, almost entirely, timeless. Waters is vulnerable during the cutscenes of this documentary, showing his traumas and personal life, allowing the audience to understand how his loss experiences related to both World Wars forged his personality, while simultaneously creating identification through loss, revolt or the inability that, unfortunately, meets us all in some moment of contemporary life. But if Waters is vulnerable on the cutscenes, at the stage he is self-assured, proves to be a great frontman and leads his work like no one else could ever do. "The Wall", played in its entirety in this movie (three songs were added to the original album's tracklist) is, undeniably, one of the most important art works of the 20th century. Terrorrism's evil, in any of its forms, and the alienation of the human being due to the lack of empathy of modern society underpins Roger reflections, and allow him to insert his anthropological and social questionings, going way beyond Pink's character. The movie is very well-directed, with great editing and cinematography. The concert, as fans know, is a spectacle of rock 'n' roll classics played beautifully, an unprecedented visual production and energetic performances from Roger and the band. The audience's catharsis during Comfortably Numb is something ridiculously emotional, Bring The Boys Back Home can bring us all to tears and Another Brick In The Wall summarizes why Pink Floyd was and still is one of the most enchanting bands ever, justifying The Wall's mythology. A must-see for rock lovers and highly recommended to people interested in complex narratives, social criticism and great audiovisual spectacles. 10 out of 10

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• I Now Have an Even Greater Appreciation for 'The Wall'

  mph-940-4716382015-09-30

  Great experience! A staggering production and intimate insight into a classic album that in the blink of an eye is; irritating, stunning, frightening, beautiful, angry, powerful, simple, complex, disheartening, and uplifting. The segments with Roger Waters away from the stage gave me a rich insight into how he came to create the story of 'The Wall'. No doubt that creating this production was cathartic for Mr. Waters. The common thread that 'The Wall' shares with the 'classics' of all genres is that it is as relevant (if not more so) today as when it was originally penned.

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• The wild man at the heart of Roger Waters' "The Wall"

  matthew-228532016-01-11

  During last week a friend and I watched The Wall at the wonderful Avoca Beach Picture Theatre, not quite knowing what we were going to see. Was it going to be a remake of the original movie or a documentary reflecting on the album that was first released 37 years ago? It turns out to be an edited version of Roger Waters' 2010-2013 concert tour, with concert footage interspersed with Waters' pilgrimage to war memorials where his father and grandfather died. 37 years! Makes me feel old, because I remember buying that album at the time. Now, when I listen to a lot of the music I loved back then, it sounds pretentious and musically lame, but The Wall is one of a handful of albums that continue to be inspiring: the music is still catchy and complex, the lyrics profound, and the artistic vision monumental. Pink Floyd was always known for the extravagance of their light shows, and Waters raises that in this concert to amazing heights. I mean "raises" literally -- the stage crew gradually build a brick wall at the front of the stage during the concert, so that by half-way through the musicians are completely obscured by a 10m wall and continue to perform behind it. The wall has always been the central metaphor of the whole project, and Waters has worked that metaphor to the limit through multiple re-interpretations over three decades. We build personal walls to protect ourselves, but they end up isolating and imprisoning us. As he emphasised in the Berlin concert in 1990, the wall can also isolate and imprison nations. I've always been a great fan of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave, and even pretty impressed with Michael Jackson's posthumous This Is It. But from a creative point of view, The Wall has a scope and attention to detail that surpasses them all. The staggering visual effects complement the storyline of the music and amplify the audacious vision that is both a commentary on war and fear, and a semi-biographical reflection on modern masculinity. It is that last point that stood out to me as I watched the movie. The lasting value of the whole project is likely to be not the creativity, or the music, or the visual effects but the insightful portrayal of the modern western male psyche. Waters has captured the angst I feel, and I think many of my male peers feel. The ambiguity of whether walls protect or imprison. The shame of expressing emotions. The demoralising outcome of modern education. The distrust of government. The misguided aspiration for rock-star status. The disappointment that life has not delivered what we hoped for. The depressing thought they we are no more than a single brick in a huge impersonal wall. In another review of this movie, Leslie Felperin accuses Waters of misogyny. I think Felperin is wrong about that, mistaking an honest portrayal of the male experience for a denial of the female experience. The movie is almost devoid of females. All the musicians are male. Waters' travelling companions are male apart from a brief scene with someone I presume is his daughter. The story in the lyrics reveals a youth who had difficulty separating from a perhaps over-protective mother. The original movie (from memory) had more to say about how that psychological rut was transferred to his wife. That's coupled with an absent father. The commentary in this movie explicitly notes that war caused not only Roger Waters to grow up without a father, but that the same thing was true of his father. Waters is a man castrated, but consciously on the journey to discover what it means to be a true man. Along that journey he notes -- and discards -- false ideals of the masculine. Waters' repeated use of faux-Nazi characters and symbols satirically presents the emptiness of the supposedly masculine will to power. Woven throughout the piece is a criticism of the tendency to judge those who are different and the way that is ultimately expressed in the stupidity of waging war against the Other. When it comes to male attitudes to women, he notes the pathetic expression of lust for a "dirty woman", and couples that with a fear of being eaten by a vagina. One of the best outcomes of feminism is that it has forced men to think about the meaning of masculinity. Waters hasn't resolved that here, but he clearly rejects some possibilities, and I think points towards two more helpful possibilities. In "Nobody Home" he sings "I've got wild staring eyes \ and I've got a strong urge to fly \ but I got nowhere to fly to." What I think Waters is attempting here, or at least pointing towards, is to reclaim the wild man archetype. The problem is, how does one get there from here? We feel trapped behind the wall we have conspired with society to build around our male identity. But let's at least affirm the will to break free. The second direction Waters points to is the demolition of the wall. Sometimes it can be a conscious deconstruction; other times it is forced upon us as a shameful punishment "to be exposed before your peers." But in the end, as is clear from "Outside the Wall", we need each other.

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• The Wall is still rock solid

  rutonder2015-09-29

  It isn't sad to be a Pink Floyd enthusiast when a timeless musical piece such as The Wall comes around and magnetize new and older generations with is powerful story, graphics and of course - the music. Not sure what to expect, Roger Waters The Wall is not a motion picture like Alan Parkers The Wall. It is a documentary of Roger Waters life integrated into The Wall's storyline. Most of the film is taken from a jaw-dropping big scale concert somewhere in Europe. Roger does a god job as a protagonist and musician, balancing seemingly casual between personal life and the professional creative universe he created with The Wall. If you like Pink Floyd - hit the wall

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• Who let all of this riff raff into the room?

  Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki2015-09-30

  Ex-Pink Floyd bassist/ co-singer Roger Waters delves into some of his motivations for writing The Wall, specifically the war-related death of his own father at a very early age, and his father's loss of his own father in an earlier war. Very moving footage of Waters travelling to Anzio in the present day, to the actual scene of the battle in which his father died during, and going to his grandfather's grave with his own adult kids is shown between footage of several concerts, in the UK, Italy, Greece, and Argentina, edited together to give us a full and complete live rendition of all 26 songs from The Wall, as well as two extra songs (the unreleased More Bricks In The Wall, and a favourite of mine, What Shall We Do Now?) performed live, as The Wall is progressively built between Waters' band, and the audiences, and as animation and graphics are projected and dance on The Wall. This is preceded by a very well done filmed intro by Liam Neeson, describing his reaction to hearing The Wall for the first time, and his experience seeing the subsequent shows Pink Floyd staged in London in February of 1980, which brought back memories of the two times in 2010 that I saw Waters perform The Wall (in Tampa and Atlanta). Complete with dominant, overbearing Mother, derisive schoolmarm, dive bombers, and cracking thin ice of modern life, and marching hammers, it was one of the most amazing concerts I've ever seen (second only to Waters' own Dark Side Of The Moon tours, from 2006 and 2007, which I saw in Cleveland, LA, Hong Kong and Shanghai, Dubai, Zurich, Rio, and Philadelphia- I even met Waters and his band a couple of times. Waters, his then sax player Ian Ritchie, and guitarist Dave Kilminster was especially cordial, even going so far as to walk around the stands before the show, talking with people and taking photos with fans) It brought back incredible memories of foreign countries and peoples, who might not even know any other words in the English language other than the words to The Wall, which they belt out right back to the band every night. The Wall's songs of isolation and loneliness are what those millions of people have in common. Comfortably Numb was a highlight, musically and lyrically; one of the finest songs ever recorded, and it sounds even better when performed live. This partially autobiographical concert film is rounded off with an interview session with Waters and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. My only complaint, and it's a MAJOR one, is the film began with an incredibly lengthy intro, a grey brick wall, very slowly moving to the left, very slowly, to very slowly reveal the phrase, "Please take your seats the show is about to begin", which had various non-Floyd/ Waters songs playing while it happened, and lasted for nearly 20 minutes. It was like a bad opening act who overstayed their welcome.

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