Ingenious 'Sense' recalls '80s rockers

During the 1980s, the new wave band the Talking Heads leapt from anonymity to sell-out arena crowds under the leadership of geek posterboy David Byrne and his merry band of musicmakers. Their shows weren't so much staged pageants as well-crafted jam sessions, with Byrne acting the jester for the crowds.

In 1984, the Talking Heads teamed with pre-Oscar director Jonathan Demme ("The Silence of the Lambs") and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth ("Blade Runner") to make a concert film that, unlike so many concert films, actually gives the viewer the sense that they're at the concert rather than just watching a showy, MTV-style movie. That's quite an achievement, as movie such as, say, Madonna's "Truth or Dare" often are resounding failures. It might not sound too interesting to our cut-cut-cut-addled brains, but rest assured that "Stop Making Sense" lives up to its pedigree and then some.

In fact, the camerawork of "Stop Making Sense," the Talking Heads' collaboration with Demme, is what recommends it even above and beyond the aural pleasures contained within. It's like being 10 feet tall at a concert when you're stuck in the pit - a perfect vantage point from every angle. And in a lot of ways, the audience around you in the theater is more like the crowd at the concert than the film's concert crowd itself, who rarely intrude on the performance until the end thanks to Demme's direction.

The format of the show is ingenious as well. The members of the band arrive on stage one by one, not reaching full strength until mid-set when all nine players are under the lights pumping out a rollicking, get-up-out-of-your-chair-and-dance version of "Burning Down the House." Byrne comes out first, pulls out his guitar and sets down a boombox. He looks almost timid when he breaks into "Psycho Killer." By the show's end, as the band reaches ecstatic heights during "Take Me to the River," all of that caution and strangeness is gone. Okay, maybe not the strangeness; Byrne finishes out the show lost at sea within a giant suit, his already strange, lanky body made even more fantastically extreme, bobbing like a bird for feed.

That suit and Cronenweth's lighting effects make "Stop Making Sense" a thoroughly entertaining and successful marriage of film and music. The elements of the Talking Heads' performance and of Byrne's antics in particular are fully realized by the different perspectives provided by the eight cameras used in production. The results are spellbinding to both eyes and ears.

The Talking Heads broke up long ago, but this week you have the opportunity to experience them (almost) first-hand, and at a greatly reduced price compared to today's insanely inflated concert prices (and let's not forget the missing Ticketbastard surcharge). "Stop Making Sense" is 90 minutes of pure sensory bliss; now it's been digitally remastered and, I assume, sounds better than ever. I assume because I was still watching "He-Man" and wearing Underoos when the movie first came out. But I assure you it's just as fresh as it must have been 15 years ago. If a girl with the latest from Nine Inch Nails and the Chemical Brothers playing in her stereo as she writes this can love a trip down music memory lane, so can you.

10-20-99