The re-release of Stop Making Sense, 1984 concert film featuring The Talking Heads, arrived with understandable hype. The 40th anniversary of the film's release is fast approaching, and its 4k restoration (taken from "the original camera negatives") seemed to match the huge amounts of praise expected for the film. I mean, this is a movie that's coming to theaters with the phrase, "THE GREATEST CONCERT MOVIE OF ALL TIME" right there on the poster. 

No wonder I was underwhelmed. 

Don't get me wrong; I love The Talking Heads, David Byrne is iconic, his oversized suit is a stroke of genius. But at the end of the day, Stop Making Sense is, at its essence, just a filmed concert, and a pretty straightforward one at that. 

There's not much of a plot to review here. The Talking Heads were an American rock band that began playing music in 1975. They were celebrated for their new-wave sensibilities, punkish yet awkward style, and all-around endearingly weird vibes. They played music for about a decade before starring in Stop Making Sense, releasing "Burning Down the House", "Pyscho Killer", and top-ten hit "Once in a Lifetime". 

Stop Making Sense, then, is a snapshot of their style, skills, and fame, documenting several nights on their tour for Billboard-charting Speaking in Tongues which would prove to be their next-to-last album before David Byrne's departure and the band's split. 

The film is just that: a snapshot. It leaves out many of the trappings of a traditional concert film, eschewing complex multi-day cuts, choreography rehearsals, backstage interviews, or, broadly, the more cinematic aspects of concert films. Rather, we see Byrne and co. perform on the same stage for an almost-completely unidentified audience for about 90 minutes. (This is weirder than I expected it to be; audience reaction shots are so ingrained in our post-American Idol world that to not see spectator interaction was odd.) 

The performance is very solid; their tracklist is unbelievably strong, and the stage design, choreo, and bandmates' interactions all bring good energy. But it's not one of the more engaging or memorable concerts I've ever seen in real life, let alone worth celebrating through a feature-length film. Starting with a bare stage and then adding on individual bandmates is minorly clever, as is character-defining moments such as Byrne sprinting around the stage in a frenzy or wooing a lamp. But these don't carry the rest of the relatively rote setlist choices or stage movements, and even the tightest, clearest cinematography (from Jordan Cronenweth of Blade Runner fame) or the capable sound design can't elevate it further.

So the movie is fine: probably great if you're a Talking Heads mega-fan and probably bad if you can't stand 1980s dweeb rock. But no matter how positive I myself was about the band's music, I couldn't overcome a general blah feeling about the movie. 

(I later figured out that my opinion was likely exacerbated by having seen the more interesting, more diverse, better-choreographed spiritual sequel to Stop Making Sense, the filmed concert movie for American Utopia. I believe it's the superior film, and is so thematically similar it's hard to give Stop Making Sense a pass.)