Starring
Written By:
Directed By:
Studio: Frizzle Fry, Inc.
Buy on Amazon.com link

The DVD’s tagline is “An Abstract Look at the 2003 Primus Tour De Fromage,” and it’s exactly that: abstract. Rather than your typical concert footage, the music is accompanied by, interjected with, and jaggedly spliced with stage footage, backstage footage, music video-type footage, interviews, snippets of banter, and lots and lots of weird shots and video effects.

The result succeeds at giving you two things: 1) a frenetic, feverish tour of life on the road, and 2) a really bad headache.

On the one hand, the film provides a few good insights into the band, and it’s a weird take on a concert film, which one should expect from Primus. On the other, it’s like watching a bad student film from the 70s. The time lapses, inverted colors, slo-mo’s, image overlays, and lingering closeups of artsy things like bare trees and ugly insects, etc, all reeks of pretentious hackery. Combined with a hallucinogenic pallette, shaky handhelds, and mindless editing, it looks like 200 Motels meets the last 15 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This tour reunited the band, and you want to see and hear them perform, especially since their set list seemed fantastic. But the editing doesn’t allow any satisfaction whatsoever, not even one song in its entirety, as the music is assaulted by jumping shots and nonstop interjections and distractions. A single minute of live footage (if there is a full continuous minute) could include 10 different performances with varying sound quality, while various images and colors overlay the closeups of the musicians (mostly Les). It’s like the evil, hellish version of The Song Remains the Same.

I don’t mind the concept of splicing concert footage with backstage antics, interviews, etc., but the editing is so bad the DVD is unwatchable.

Features:
Fish On (more painful deleted scenes)
Primus 2065
Trailer

Audio:
Dolby Digital 2.0

Video:
4×3 Letterbox

Subtitles:

Favorite Scenes: Not much worth watching, but the snippets of music made me hungry to pop on some albums.
Rating: –Select–
Running Time: 162 minutes
Extras Rating:
Overall Rating: