If you are of a certain age and a certain crowd then you’re supposed to worship Werner Herzog. I am and I don’t. Sorry.
Sundance channel started showing a documentary (hang on) that depicts the making of the music for a Herzog documentary called “Grizzly Man.” The documentary about the music for Grizzly Man is called “In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session” and is directed by the guy that produced the Grizzly Man.
None of which would be very promising except for one thing: Edges rocks.
The star of Edges is Richard Thomson an amazing musician who does his best to basically ignore the random ramblings of Herzog to do what’s right and create a stunning backdrop for Grizzly. The write up for the film says:
A group of musicians, including legendary guitarist Richard Thompson, improvise a musical accompaniment while watching the film and create a lyrical original score.
Which is only mainly bullshit. For the most part when the ensemble is playing they are reading from music stands and following the exact same harmonic structure without any other queues. So, yea, they were given leeway, but that’s not quite what “improvis[ing] a musical accompaniment while watching the film” means to me. There are times when this happens (the most impressive when a cellist and bassist are doing exactly that to a fight scene between two bears) but I’m not convinced that doesn’t happen often on smaller movies that use musicians the caliber of Thompson. (I wonder how much more “composing” went into “The Hot Spot” for instance.)
For all of Herzog’s rambling (remember, I am not a fan) every important word, gesture and sound comes from Thompson. He even gives this documentary its title when he says: “Music is the edges.”
The bottom line: forget what you might think about Herzog, or existential hippies, or country folk guitar, or self-congratulating exploitive “documentaries about the making of documentaries” — In the Edges is a great, honest look into the workings of some awesome musicians plying their trade at the top of the field.