The Eddy (2020)
9/10
Human Is Better Than Perfect
30 May 2020
This is a series I have been waiting for all my life. I live for live, mostly acoustic music.sound. I attend over 100 concerts a year and recorded a library of over 800 sets. I designed and built two very different mobile recording studios because I could not relate to smoothed over studio recordings; and the rough edges are definitely in this drama.

The sound of the band playing live on camera was instantly recognizable as REAL, none of the gear is props and every audio detail is congruent with the specific fictional setting. This drew me in in a way that no post-production studio can.

Further, the music was acted. When the plot called for the band to be hot, they where; when personal and business problems spilled over, they were not, and in a realistic way - because they are all real musicians, good enough to have a dual career with no schism. How they thought about the music, felt about the music, it was all there in the sound as well as faces and body language - while they were (mostly) hitting the notes. In that sense, the flaws in the movie are perfect - the stumbles, the focus, the non-steady cam, the flattened color of a dark club, the intonation, the off-rhythm, losing the protagonists in crowd scenes was all evocative of the live Jazz environment.

So, too, the off-stage action although over-dramatic fit the rhythms of musicians' life and the range of other denizens in this world. The daily tensions came from the clashes between introversion (Elliott, Jude, Cristina, Sim and surprisingly Maja) and extroversion of Julie, Farid, Amira, Sami, and the rest of the band. Then there was the clash of business - well I promised no spoilers.

Checking the other movie people's reviews I understand this is not everybodies' glass of wine or bottle of beer. No tidy Hollywood plot lines, but bumps and knocks. If you know and LOVE live music, you will love this outing as I do, right down to a musically satisfying ended.
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