Black Sabbath: Up Close and Personal (2007) Review

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People think I’m insane because I am frowning all the time

Black Sabbath: Up Close and Personal (2007) 6 out of 10: Is a collection of interviews and clips in a brisk 57 minutes about, to no one’s surprise, Black Sabbath.

The Good

The Good: I think I am at exactly the right level of fandom for Black Sabbath: Up Close and Personal. I genuinely like Black Sabbath’s music, particularly thier first two albums. And I know very little about the band outside of the fact that Ozzy Osbourne was the lead singer and then was fired and rehired over the last fifty years.

So reveals such as Tony Iommi wrote the majority of Black Sabbath’s music, while Osbourne would write vocal melodies, and bassist Geezer Butler would write the lyrics were interesting to myself whereas to a more seasoned Black Sabbath fan I can imagine this type of talk being relatively rote.

The good news about Black Sabbath’s documentary is the sound clips are clear, and it is fairly well organized. This is not always the case with this kind of documentary cough “Dead Kennedys: The Early Years Live” cough.

The Bad

The Bad: There is nothing seemingly new in Black Sabbath: Up Close and Personal. It is a collection of fairly rote interviews. I really have a hard time believing that Black Sabbath was this boring of a band. You can gain a lot more insight from thier Wikipedia page than the video offers.

The Ugly

The Ugly: While I praise the quality of the audio considering the age of some of the concert clips, the video, on the other hand… In fairness, Black Sabbath was founded over fifty years ago and Ozzy Osbourne was never a pretty boy. A visual treat this documentary is not.

In Conclusion

In Conclusion: If you fall in that sweet spot of liking Black Sabbath and knowing next to nothing about them, this is a pretty good and informative sixty minutes. Others may want to take a pass.

Neil Murray of Black Sabbath and later a Whitesnake bassist is not the late Tony Hendra from This Is Spinal Tap. But I had to do such a double take that I wonder if Rob Reiner had him in mind when he did the casting.
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