Everyone knows rock stars shouldn't make movies, but that goes double for old, drug-addled ones like Neil Young. I respect
the heck out of the guy's music, but his directorial skills are so lacking, it's an insult to the word "lacking." "Greendale" is an 83-minute album of music videos. We hear 11 songs that more or less tell the stories of the people in the titular town, all sung by Neil Young and played by him and his band, Crazy Horse. The characters in the town sometimes lip-sync when a song's lyrics include quotations from them, but that's the closest to "dialogue" that the movie has. The story is vague, and the parts that are clear are pretentious. A guy named Jed shoots the cop who pulled him over; immediately after this, there are images of John Ashcroft, with lyrics warning about the Bush administration's eroding of our civil rights ("leave the doing to us," Young sings).
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