Something to watch tonight: Thursday 12 September

In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon (Gibney, 2024)

Regular read­ers will know that I love a good music doc­u­ment­ary and one of the bet­ter recent ones arrives on home video today (DVD and Blu-ray as well as digital).

In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon is made by the pro­lif­ic dir­ect­or Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief) and was ori­gin­ally a two-part series rather than the three and a half hour movie we have now.

I wrote about it in my pre­view of this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival for RNZ:

Fans won’t find much that’s new in the bio­graph­ic mater­i­al, but the present­a­tion is flaw­less, and the extra length means that the music gets exten­ded chances to shine.

Where the film really goes to new ter­rit­ory are the sec­tions where we watch Simon pro­du­cing his most recent album, Seven Psalms, the first time a set of songs has come to him – he says – in dreams and not wrestled out of his pro­fes­sion­al song­writ­ing craft.

Simon is push­ing 80 and his body is also fail­ing him. To his great dis­tress, his hear­ing is going, among oth­er pain­ful ail­ments, and that adds a sense of urgency to the mak­ing of the record – urgency that belies its under­stated beauty.

Also land­ing on home video today – I’ve recom­men­ded it twice in this news­let­ter so won’t fea­ture it again for a while – is the newly restored Talking Heads con­cert Stop Making Sense. We don’t get the 4K UHD ver­sion in Aotearoa but the Blu-ray does fea­ture the scin­til­lat­ing new Atmos sound mix so that should def­in­itely do the job.

Where to watch In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on DocPlay or digit­al rent­al (or you can buy it on DVD/Blu-ray)

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland and UK: Not available

USA: Streaming on MGM+

Further listening

On Tuesday night I joined Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights to talk about the career and impact of the late James Earl Jones, who passed away earli­er this week at the age of 93. We had time to fea­ture a few clips of the great man at work, too.