Luna Tell Me Do You Miss Me (DVD)

I read some great reviews of the DVD release of the Luna documentary Tell Me Do You Miss Me and one night, I was just wandering around through a music and DVD section of a store looking for something new. Something I could take home that I didn't even think about buying when I walked into the place. I have my favorite artists, but every now and then, I want to find something new to get interested in. So I found this in the racks and remembered the good buzz I heard on it. I had missed on Luna through the 90's, being more enamored with pop/punk and discovering the Replacements at the time. I had the summer before actually picked up their swansong album, Rendezvous and liked it quite a bit, but did not really look back into their catalog to check more of it out.

I sat in a dark room and popped the disc in. After the first song, "Fuzzy Wuzzy", all i could think to myself is: how did I completely miss the boat on this band? The film begins with the end, with a performance from their last set of shows in New York city in February 2005, and then backs it up to the time of the release of Rendezvous, with three of the members discussing their break-up press release. From there, the global criss-crossing to promote the album leads you back to the place where the movie starts.

The music serves as both a soundtrack to the fantastic images and a best of covering the band's career. The filmmaker, Matthew Buzzell does an excellent job with letting his images, which in many cases are some of the best photography I have ever seen in a documentary, and the music tell most of the story. There are a few interviews conducted with a band member looking into a camera, but mostly, events are just observed and the band themselves just tell the story of the band, past and present. You're watching the farewell tour, but hear many many stories over the history of the band, combining with the music to present a bigger picture of what this band actually was.

And for that matter, continues to be. The day after I watched this for the first time, I spent the entire next afternoon driving all over my city, going to every place that sells music, trying to find as much of their catalog as I could. I could only turn up a best of from Rhino, which is a great place to start. Between ordering on-line and being able to hit good record stores in another town, I had their entire catalog in a month.

Now, the songs contained in this film have, over the last three years, become favorites. This film marked the first time I ever got to hear the hypnotic intro to "23 Minutes in Brussels". The first time I ever heard the riff from "Sideshow by the Seashore", which I heard thousands of times since. As soon as I could piece it together with my collection, I put together a soundtrack CD of most of the songs featured in the film and began listening to it as I walked to work or drove around the city and that disc is still in the CD player as I type this. As good as all of the recorded versions are, the versions in the film are even better in most cases.

It makes little sense to me how this movie meant to show a farewell became such a good introduction, but that's exactly what it was for me. I may have missed out on seeing them live myself, but at least I still eventually heard this. This is not the first time that's happened to me with a band either. As much as I listen to things, there are still a lot of bands either I never get to chance to hear or no one ever suggests them to me, thinking I wouldn't be into it (and probably, to be honest, at the time, I probably wouldn't have listened to it the same way I do now) and I eventually figure it out. I was able to see Luna members Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips play the music they make now in Atlanta, shortly after the release of their Back Numbers record, which I will write about on here very soon. It was the first time in a long time that I got really excited about going to a show. But more on their current stuff later.

Check out a couple of things here:

First, you can check out the trailer for Tell Me Do You Miss Me here, because my internet non-skills can't seem to get the image to imbed into my blog, like I just did with that Faces thing in the last entry.


Second, here's a miwxit tape of some Luna tracks that are a good mix of their originals and some great covers.