Record Exchange Boise

Reviews:

You should know better than to expect continuity from a film that evolved from a concept album and took a detour as a multi-media performance piece. Even Neil Young has a hard time communicating what Greendale is all about. In the accompanying documentary, he lazily defines his labor of love as "a bunch of songs that tell a story," and everyone else interviewed struggles to come up with a more fitting description. Young's Lars-von-Trier-makes-a-home-movie concept certainly doesn't match up evenly with the craft of the companion record; footage shot on a pair of Super 8 cameras looks oddly distorted when transferred to 35mm film stock. And the absence of spoken dialogue offers little additional food for thought: actors simply lip-sync song lyrics, while Young provides nasal, omniscient narration throughout.

A workmanlike slice-of-life steeped in dogmatic leftism, Greendale traces the political awakening of teenager Sun Green, who travels from the North California coastline to Alaska to protest the oil industry's concerns. Though subtlety is hardly Young's strong suit, he occasionally delivers a fine sucker punch-when he sings "You can do your part/ By watching others, too," for instance, the camera squares in on an image of Donald Rumsfeld. His simplistic idealism also pays big dividends during the film's enthusiastic finale, as the entire cast piles into an auditorium to perform the environmentally conscious "Be the Rain." But sandwiched in between is a head-scratching discourse on police brutality, terrorism and public corruption that's even more literal than the record would suggest-and the DVD extras barely contain enough concert footage of Young and longtime backing band Crazy Horse to choke down this bitter pill.