Metallica: Some Kind of Monster

Just watched the Metallica: Some Kind of Monster DVD at Justin's place tonight. This isn't going to be just another long-ish movie review because a Google search will get you enough of those. But there were a few things on the DVD extras that I found pretty funny.

First, they had an extended cut of the Dave Mustaine-Lars Ulrich scene in which Dave cries. (!!) Basically we see that Mustaine never got over the time Lars and James fired him from Metallica, and despite the fact that he went on to become the second biggest name in metal with Megadeth, he always felt like a failure and a reject. This was funny enough in the film (a proper examination of just how fucked Dave and the other early members of Megadeth were is rather less funny, but this out of context is pretty hilarious.) But the extended but has Dave talking about Cliff Burton a bit and wishing that everything could have worked out back then.

Now, Justin (being a rock-star worshipper and maybe a little image-conscious) absolutely hates Dave Mustaine. But he always really loved Cliff (obsession with dead rock stars, and all that), so to hear Dave remembering Cliff Burton fondly was rather an uncomfortable moment.

Another funny delete scene from the DVD was of Lars getting pissed off and going off by himself, and wondering whether the last 20 years of success was all based on anger and bad feelings, and if the therapy that they were in would take away whatever inspires them to create good music. Mostly it's funny to see Lars pissed off and having a fit, though. In the movie they show Lars' father, who is incredibly calm and cool and the total polar opposite of Lars' drama queen style. Makes you wonder what it was like to grow up in that house.

Now, their last album, St. Anger, still sucks. But hearing them lay down the riffs for it and really work them out made me appreciate the riffs a lot more. But I still can't listen to the album, because the lyrics are quite stupid and there aren't any guitar solos. So it's an hour of repeated riffs with trash-can drum sound and lyrics that make me laugh out loud.

The band members' relationships with each other were all pretty much in line with what I had figured before from just reading random articles and listening to interviews. It's pretty much a creative contest between James and Lars, where they feel compelled to finish and perfect some part of a song before the other one suggests an improvement. And Kirk is often left out in the cold and just told what and how to play. There's a scene where James is worried that he is losing some control of the creative process, and Kirk says "Well, welcome to how I've been feeling for the past 16 years." Most of the film was made while they didn't have a bassist, after Jason Newstead left the band to play with Voivod and pursue his own side project that lead to him being kicked out of Metallica because Lars was worried that he might enjoy doing that more than being in Metallica. (These kinds of confessions come along with the group-therapy sessions that the band go through in the film.)

I think this film is a good example of the idea that if someone's ego is too high, what needs to happen is to have it knocked completely to the ground and built up again, only more honestly and carefully. Metallica had become a parody of themselves, and the cracks had begun to run together and no one was really taking them seriously until this documentary came out and people actually saw what went on behind the recording studio walls and all the internal struggles and conflicts and saw the actual 3-4 human beings that play music together rather than this packaged thing called 'Metallica'. If Metallica hadn't gone through that period of extreme self-doubt I'm sure they never would have been able to have the guts to let something as revealing as this be made and put out.
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