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"The band in Heaven, they play my favorite song / Play it one more time, play it all night long." David Byrne enters with guitar and cassette player, looking like a spooked stork as he launches into a rendition of "Psycho Killer" in an ascetic stage. His angularity contrasts with the soccer-mom roundedness of bassist Tina Weymouth, she and Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison join one by one as technicians piece the proscenium together. The Talking Heads and more: Bernie Worrell on keyboard, Steve Scales on percussion, Alex Weir on guitar and Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt singing backup, a jubilant sonic collective. By the time the incendiary liberation of "Burning Down the House" rolls in, the groove is set. "Does anybody have any questions?" The simple pleasure of watching your favorite band in concert, Jonathan Demme is like a good friend with the best seats and the most translucent mise en scène. "Life During Wartime" surveys a buoyant apocalypse, "What a Day That Was" engulfs the community in pulsing expressionistic shadow, "This Must Be the Place" pairs the gangling frontman with a lamp for an ineffable pas de deux. "Snap into position, bounce till you ache," Byrne's modalities include Fred Astaire and Jerry Lewis as ecstasy seems to seize the anxious doofus by the spinal cord. Scrims and spotlights, a camera intimate enough to point a microphone at, the Hollywood Pantages Theatre turned into electric cinematic space. The funk dreamscapes culminate with "Once in a Lifetime," where the veil of materialistic illusion is lifted like a sermon by a short-circuiting automaton. "Into the blue again, after the money's gone..." The beaming face of postmodernism, the vast corporate suit that grows loose and floppy, the art installation that swells into a rapturous bash. The hitherto unseen audience spills over at last during "Crosseyed and Painless," Demme resumes the square's perilous awakening in Something Wild. Cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth.
--- Fernando F. Croce |