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.
