Watch Stop Making Sense For Free

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Since Jonathan Demme's death last year, I've tried to see how many of his movies I can watch. "Stop Making Sense" is one of them.I first learned about the Talking Heads when my parents rented Wim Wenders's "Until the End of the World" (which included one of the Talking Heads' songs and featured a music video showing disembodied heads speaking). My parents and I later saw David Byrne in concert. It wasn't until a few years later that I started listening to the Talking Heads' songs, namely "Burning Down the House" (thanks to "Weird Al" Yankovic's usage of it in a polka medley). Now I've finally seen their famous concert movie. What an experience. This is one of the best concert movies ever made. The cool cinematography and clever editing make this something that you have to see.

Stop Making Sense does what a concert film is supposed to do: focus on the music. No in depth interviews with the performers, no extended shots of the audience, and no massive set pieces to distract from the music. The lesson: keep it simple, stupid.This minimalism is reflected in the set design. What we get is a largely bare stage with some creative use of lighting and projections to liven things up. This puts the onus entirely on the artists, and it works wonderfully. The performance is energetic, with the film building up from just Byrne on stage to the whole band. Even when the stage is occupied by a lone performer, it keeps your attention.Even the costumes reflect this minimalist aesthetic. All the primary band members where bland, gray costumes, with the only wardrobe being the famous "big suit" which is still pretty drab.

I had to sit through this video- of a concert by the title group recently. I can't see what all the fuss about this group was. The vocals are lame, their playing is amateurish and they have no stage persona at all. How can a good director like Demme squander his talents on an extended MTV style video like this? As you probably have guessed by now, I do not like this group. As a matter of fact, I HATE them. Yet for some reason, the music critics just loved them. I remember them fawning over them in the 1980s. I just didn't get it then just as I can't get it now. Music is highly unoriginal and seemed to rehash almost everything pop music threw at us then. The front man David Byrne has just about as much charisma as a faceless musician on a "Muzak" recording session, that is if real artists actually did these recordings at all. Not worth your time. In plain English, this film sucks.I really do not like to use vulgar langusage on my reviews, but I could not think of a better word to describe this garbage. Zero stars.

I have many music documentaries and recorded concerts, and stop making sense is by far the best. I don't know if this was truly intentional or not, but it seems like the entire concert was geared toward making an awesome video. of course the music is awesome, as always, but the combination of an incredible performance and terrific cinematography creates one hell of a DVD. there are actually only 3 or 4 shots in the entire film where you see a substantial amount of the audience, and, unlike many concert recordings, the camera work is not constantly switching and showing everything at once, but focuses on what is most significant to that portion of the song and waits, appreciating whatever is happening rather than flipping back and forth to every different angle they have. you must buy this DVD, and, if not, at least buy the album so you realize how great the DVD must be.