There’s very little to say about the 40th anniversary 4K restoration of the late Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense that hasn’t already been said except that if you plan to see it you really ought to see it in an IMAX theater. I don’t have any particular fondness for IMAX since I tend to think it only works with movies that are made with the IMAX technology in mind, and most of those movies usually incorporate special effects that don’t need any more emphasis. Talking Heads, the band whose uniquely personal concert experience is the whole purpose of Stop Making Sense, offer up an extremely visceral live show that Demme captures with rare empathy and intelligence. By now everyone knows how David Byrne conceptualized and choreographed the concert down to the way the crew added and subtracted elements to a bare stage throughout the show, but less credit is given to the way Demme highlights these elements while focusing on each member (the 4 Heads augmented by five African-American musicians) in ways that reveal not only the synergy of the music, but its individual components as well. In that regard the movie might even be better as a concert experience than the actual concert itself, audience immersion or no audience immersion.

I saw the original stage production in 1983 in Berkeley but I never saw the movie in a theater. The first time I watched it was on video, and by then I had already listened to the soundtrack album hundreds of times, so the IMAX experience was not only a potent blast from the past, it was a startlingly new experience because the concert, for all the care Byrne and Demme put into its presentation as a portrait of a band’s aesthetic in historical context, is itself predicated on joy and love, which come through so directly in the IMAX rendering that you have no capacity to think of anything else except what is up there on the screen.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX, 050-6868-5068), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX, 050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060).

Stop Making Sense home page in Japanese

photo (c) 1984 Talking Heads Films