Bananaz

It's day six of SXSW, and my busiest day left. My first feature this afternoon is Bananaz, a documentary on the band Gorillaz. Admittedly, I've only heard their two big hits, one of which I bought on iTunes. But the concept of a real fake band interested me, and I thought I could see more, learn more, and perhaps grow to appreciate more of their story.

Alas, this documentary won't help me do so. It should have been subtitled due to poor audio, which greatly detracted from the experience. Scenes of them being the band chatting / bullshitting I guess help establish their personality, but it slows the pace way down, especially when they mumble everything except the curses. As Damon, one of the founding members, put it in a brief moment of clarity: "Americans like you to be nice. They want you to explain things clearly." Yes, yes we do.

I did enjoy where they showed the process of laying down tracks for a new song, something I hadn't seen in such detail in a documentary before. But I felt that they skimped on the animation aspects, something I couldn't get anywhere else. Whatever I thought of the band before, it's basically unchanged.

Bananaz
2008, 92 minutes, directed by Ceri Levy