It’s Byrne sitting at a table by himself, looking at a plastic model of a brain, then Byrne accompanied by two singers and dancers, then Byrne with more and more musicians.Īlso Read: David Byrne's 'American Utopia' Filmed Version Directed by Spike Lee Goes to HBOīut the ensemble has far more to do than just play music their movements are choreographed as well throughout the string of dramatic musical vignettes that make up the show. Like “Stop Making Sense,” it starts out simply and builds from there. And they carry their instruments, which means that instead of a drummer sitting down at a full kit, the show includes four or five or six percussionists all simultaneously playing parts of a drum kit that they can carry with them. So Byrne and his 11 musicians, all dressed in gray suits and pale blue shirts, and all barefoot (or in some cases, wearing sheer or flesh-colored socks), have the stage to themselves. The idea of the show, Byrne says at one point, is to eliminate everything from the stage except what we want to look at most, which is people. Like all of Byrne’s work, it is sly performance art masquerading as rock ‘n’ roll, or maybe it’s sly rock ‘n’ roll masquerading as performance art definitions are elusive but the impact is both cerebral and visceral, just the way Byrne likes it.Īlso Read: 'David Byrne's American Utopia' Broadway Review: Stop Making Sense, Start Making Music “Stop Making Sense” sets a very high standard for “American Utopia,” but the new film is after something very different – a performance that illustrates David Byrne’s concept of home, perhaps, which with the eager collaboration of his director turns into a portrait of America at a time when the very idea of home seems hard to hang onto. In the strictest sense, “American Utopia” is just a filmed performance, but so was “Hamilton” and “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Stop Making Sense,” the 1984 Talking Heads film by Jonathan Demme that is widely considered one of the great concert films, and the great rock ‘n’ roll films, of all time. Then again, the word just really has no part in any discussion of the work of Byrne or of director Spike Lee, who turned the former Talking Heads front man’s Broadway show into a film that premiered at the slimmed-down TIFF on Thursday, and will come to HBO in October. But it’s the first that you could say is just a concert movie. (Fincher, who had been originally attached to direct and executive produce, brought on Flynn to write the series having just worked with her on the feature Gone Girl, which he helmed from a script she had penned based on her book.) The series was in pre-production, and Fincher and Flynn had been rehearsing with the cast that included Rooney Mara, Colm Feore, Eric McCormack, Dallas Roberts and Jason Ritter, when it unraveled after Fincher and HBO could not agree on a budget.“David Byrne’s American Utopia” is the third music-oriented film in the last 10 years to serve as the opening-night attraction at the Toronto International Film Festival, after “Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band” last year and U2’s “From the Sky Down” in 2011. version of the 2013-14 British series Utopia, created by Dennis Kelly and produced by Endemol Shine Group’s UK production studio Kudos, was previously in the works at HBO in 2015 with David Fincher and Flynn. Executive producing alongside Flynn were Jessica Rhoades, Sharon Hall, Karen Wilson and Dennis Kelly.Ī U.S. The Amazon adaptation was a co-production between Endemol Shine North America/Kudos and Amazon Studios. Within the comic’s pages, they discover the conspiracy theories that may actually be real and are forced into the dangerous, unique and ironic position of saving the world. Utopia follows a group of young adults who meet online that are mercilessly hunted by a shadowy deep state organization after they come into possession of a near-mythical cult underground graphic novel.
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