Iggy Pop-La Rage de Vivre (Jesus?.. This is Iggy) (1998)

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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Main Menu Audio Gallery Discography Trailer-Sunbury Rock Festival; Rainbow Bridge
Rating
Year Of Production	1998
Running Time	50:34
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Gilles Nadeau
Studio Distributor	La Sept ARTE Umbrella Entertainment	Starring	Iggy Pop David Bowie John Lydon
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$29.95	Music	Iggy Pop David Bowie

    James Newell Osterberg, or Iggy Pop as he prefers to be called (with good reason) is one of those wild men of rock music that the likes of Kurt Cobain or Courtney Love so desperately wish they were. This guy has a literal monopoly on great acts of offensiveness in music, so much so that the wild antics of Ewan McGregor in The Velvet Goldmine were actually understating it by quite a long way. Indeed, the mock parental warning on this DVD and the American Caesar album sum it up perfectly when they say "Parental Warning - This is an Iggy Pop video/album".

    Iggy started out as the frontman for a Detroit punk band called The Stooges, who broke up shortly after Iggy sold their gear in order to buy more heroin. Indeed, his heroin addiction would lead to one of the most infamous on-stage incidents when the heroin-related constipation wore off and he crapped his pants in front of a few thousand people on stage. However, as an owner of albums like The Idiot and David Bowie's "Heroes", I am of the opinion that Iggy and David both reached their creative peak when they decided to get off heroin, or had a nervous breakdown in the latter case, and disappeared off to Berlin together. The David Bowie albums from this period are "Heroes", Low, and Lodger, while Iggy used this period to bring us The Idiot and Lust For Life, from which many of the videos on this DVD are taken.

    Indeed, Iggy Pop's original version of China Girl so craps on Bowie's pathetically poppy and repetitive emotionally bereft version that you can honestly tell people they don't know a thing about music if they haven't heard the version on this DVD (or The Idiot). This is not to say that Bowie is a bad performer, as he has had some major, major masterworks of his own, but Iggy's ability to combine the dark with the humorous was far ahead by the time the vapid eighties rolled around, and even more so by the time the horrible period of human history called the nineties began.

    You could be forgiven for thinking that Iggy Pop is just another punk rock star who has had his day, but this is far from the case. Indeed, Iggy's appeal to the disenfranchised or the people that mainstream society want to forget is best exemplified by the fact that around twenty years after most of his songs were released, they are still finding their way into films about the dregs of modern society. Trainspotting, for example, made excellent use of Lust For Life and Nightclubbing. For those who are interested, the track listing of this disc is as follows:

Video

    The video transfer is presented in an approximate 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and it is not 16x9 Enhanced. There is also an interview with David Bowie at 23:04 which is presented at about 1.44:1, also not 16x9 Enhanced.

    The interview segments with Iggy Pop are pretty sharp - enough so to appear as if they were shot on thirty-five millimetre film or similar quality material. The archival materials, consisting of music videos and live performances, look terrible, which is not surprising considering that they were shot on what was generally the cheapest possible materials at the time. The quality of the archival material improves as it gets more recent, however. The worst of the archival material would probably be the broadcast video for Funtime, which looks like it was shot using methods that the Doctor Who crew would turn their nose up at.

    The shadow detail is also quite variable, but generally acceptable. Low-level noise is a small problem in the archival material.

    The colours also vary with the age of the material. The older materials, especially the early concert material in the first four Chapters, are prone to colour bleed and generally look rather washed out, but again, this improves as the source material gets more recent.

    MPEG artefacts were not noticed in this transfer, which is just as well considering its short length. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some very minor aliasing in stage equipment, but the low resolution of the source material did a great job for the most part of hiding this artefact. Film artefacts consisted of some black and white marks on the picture that were generally quite acceptable. Video artefacts included the occasional analogue tape dropout or tracking error, but these were also kept to a minimum that, while not anything to brag about, was acceptable.

    No subtitles are encoded as video substreams on this disc, so Hearing Impaired viewers are out of luck. Some subtitles are burned into the video to translate conversations with foreign television hosts, usually French ones.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is one soundtrack on this DVD: the original English dialogue and lyrics, encoded in Dolby Digital 2.0 at 224 kilobits per second.

    The dialogue is generally clear and easy to understand, barring the limitations of the recording devices used with the archival materials. Iggy Pop's vocals leave something to desire in terms of clarity during live performances, but that's not unusual. No discernable problems with audio sync were detected.

    The music on this disc consists of compositions by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, The Stooges, and whatever collaborators were on hand during the various periods in Iggy's career when these songs were composed. A cover of Louie Louie is included for good measure. I've already covered the quality of the music in the plot synopsis, so we'll leave it at that.

    The surround channels are unused by this soundtrack.

    The subwoofer also had nothing to do.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu is static, not 16x9 Enhanced, and accompanied by a Dolby Digital 2.0 version of Search And Destroy.

DVD Credits

    A standard listing of everyone who whacked this DVD together.

Photo Gallery

    A large collection of unannotated stills.

Discography

    A selected discography, which seems to list every Iggy Pop album necessary to have heard his best (and possibly worst) work.

Umbrella Propaganda

    Trailers for the following DVDs are included here:

• Billy Thorpe - Sunbury Rock Festival: 30th Anniversary Special Collector's Edition
• Jimi Hendrix - Rainbow Bridge

    Given that the content of this DVD appears to have been produced in France, a more relevant comparison would be with the Region 2 version. That version appears identical to ours, except it retails for just under eleven UK pounds on Amazon. Given what the Australian dollar is worth, I cannot see this material being worth the bother of importing from anywhere, especially given that the correct audio pitch is retained with this PAL transfer. We'll call this even.

    Iggy Pop has given us some of the best music of the post-punk era, and he still continues to influence creative artists in every field from music to film. This documentary won't give the viewer much of an idea why, however. To get that, one would be better off waiting for DVD-Audios of The Idiot or Lust For Life to arrive. Still, completist fans will find something to justify purchasing this disc here.

    The video transfer is acceptable given the source materials.

    The audio transfer is actually pretty good.

    The extras are minimal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall