Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Anvil! The Story of a Friendship ( Original Title: Anvil The Story of Anvil ) is an American documentary by Sacha Gervasi. The 2006-2007 rotated and published in 2008 film deals with the Canadian metal band Anvil.

Action

In Super Rock Festival in Japan in 1984, the metal and hard rock bands Scorpions, Whitesnake and Bon Jovi occur. The entire line-up would later sell millions of records, with one exception: Anvil. Musicians such as Scott Ian, Slash, Lemmy Kilmister and Lars Ulrich enter the following from its assessment of the group and regret that there have never managed the Canadian musician.

Steve " Lips" Kudlow drives now from food supplies for schools and other institutions. Robb Reiner, drummer of the band, working on construction. The group, however, there still is. An appearance at the 50th birthday of Kudlow is shown. Tiziana Arrigoni, a friend of the band, has organized a European tour for the group. Kudlow and Reiner sense the chance for a comeback. The start of the tour leads to the Sweden Rock Festival, where they meet their old idols like Ted Nugent, Carmine Appice and Michael Schenker. The appearance and look very promising, but then it goes down. You miss trains and flights. In Prague, they come two hours late, and then the club owner retains the fee. Kudlow is palpable, but a lawyer intervened. In an appearance in Transylvania Anvil plays in a stadium designed for 10,000 spectators - before 174 visitors. At a gig in Germany the poster explicitly requested is hand painted with a felt pen. After they returned to Canada, marries guitarist Ivan Hurd Tiziana Arrigoni, but leaves shortly after the band.

With the help of star producer Chris Tsangarides the group trying to record a new album. Tsangarides knows Anvil since the 1980s and had their most famous album Metal on Metal produces. He encouraged the group to Dover to get the UK. However, the shots cost 13,000 pounds. However, the financial situation is precarious, no one in the group has enough money. Kudlow had to strain his house with another mortgage and Glenn Gyorffy is homeless and lives in a garage. Kudlow tries unsuccessfully in a call center for sunglasses. After him his older sister Rhonda lends the money.

During the recording of This Is Thirteen Reiner and Kudlow falling out, but reconciled after a debate. Back in Canada remains from the hoped-for record deal. The group decides to sell the album in self-distribution. Out of the blue calls to a Japanese promoter, the Anvil would like to book for a festival in Japan. In fact, open Anvil a three-day festival and fear of playing in front of an empty hall. However, when the performance hall is full and the group sets off an ecstatically acclaimed by the audience gig.

Background

Director Sacha Gervasi is a fan of the group since he had seen them live Marquee Club in London on 21 September 1982. In fact, he traveled by the group on tour and worked in 1982, 1984 and 1985 as a roadie. Of the band members he got the nickname " Teabag " ( tea bags, alluding to the consumption of tea from the British) missed. Gervasi finally found the movie business and tried after the great success of the terminal, where he had worked as a screenwriter to make a personal film and stepped back in touch with Steve Kudlow.

Publication and reception

The premiere of the film financed by VH1 was held at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008. Anvil! has been awarded more than a dozen American film and festival prizes, including the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award and Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary (both 2010) as well as the spectators prices of the Sydney Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival and Galway International Film festivals. Director Sacha Gervasi was nominated for the documentary award of the Directors Guild of America.

The documentation was sometimes very enthusiastically taken up by the American press. The magazine Entertainment Weekly -reviewed Gervasi's film as funny and unexpectedly moving documentary about "the greatest metal band of which you have probably never heard ." Anthony Lane (The New Yorker) praised Anvil! as " mitreißendste release of the year ". The film live "somewhere in this entertaining unrestricted gray area between self-parody and the triumph of the human spirit ," says the San Francisco Chronicle. Anvil! would not invite them to change his mind about heavy metal, but the film will give a new impetus to think about a cruel cultural logic and to blur the balance between success and failure, increasingly, as AO Scott (The New York Times).

The critics in Germany fell out just as overwhelmingly positive. The German music magazine Rock Hard honored the U.S. DVD version in the booklet 269 (08/2009) as "DVD of the Month". Götz Kühnemund performs:

" It has never someone so well, so well capture the soul, the splendor, the comedy and the tragedy of the Heavy Metal in half super- entertaining hours [ ... ]. You suffer with Anvil, one lives and laughs with them, they laugh sometimes about them - to determine stirred at the end to tears, that one can hardly imagine more sympathetic types [ ... ]. One discovers the little Lips in itself It is proud to be a metalhead. "

The mirror ruled:

" The Story of Anvil ' told like no second musical film of unconditional, infinite naive love for rock' n 'roll, from the manic longing for the big stages, from art to fail with dignity, again and again. And another from the affection of two men who have vowed as a teenager to rock together until they are old and gray -. , And where this promise often means more than it does good to them and their families "

The film has been compared frequently to the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap and highly praised by such well-known film artists such as Dustin Hoffman, Keanu Reeves and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. January Kedves ( the daily paper) compared the film at its theatrical release in early March 2010 will also see the documentation Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and the feature film The Wrestler and described Anvil! as " rehabilitation story " and " heavy metal tour comedy" that also play with the motif of " aging mercenary body " and elements of the psychotherapy drama. The Welt am Sonntag -reviewed the film as " Ode to the belief of a common vision and to the music as in life. A paean to loyalty and cohesion that are in any other style of music so strongly present as in Metal. " Expressed a similar view Thomas Winkler ( Frankfurter Rundschau), the effort attempts by Kudlow and Reiner as" sometimes very funny, sometimes tantalizing, always tragic and above all very moving, " described.

Aftermath

Anvil benefited from the history of its failure: 2009 joined the band on the Download Festival and played tours with Saxon and AC / DC. In addition, the group appeared on the The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. The self - produced CD This is Thirteen sold very well due to the film success, so that Anvil were able to cover the cost of production. The CD was then offered about individual distributors regularly in the trade.

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