Roger Waters - The Wall - Live In Berlin

115 minutes

Genre : Concert

MPAA Rating : n.a. (documentary)

My Rating : A-

. This was a benefit concert, given on 21 July 1990, just 8 months after the Berlin Wall was demolished. Ex-Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters assembles a star-studded list of guest musicians and stages a live version of The Wall, overcoming tremendous technical difficulties to do so. The audience is estimated to be between 200,000 and 300,000. . Some of the stars... The Scorpions were an impressive opening act, even if they did milli-vanilli it. Bryan Adams was still young enough to come off as a stud. Van Morrison and The Band were cool to see, although they didn't have big enough parts in the show. James Galway played a b*thchin' flute. Waters' in-house lead guitarist, Rick Difonzo, was awesome. Cyndi Lauper and Sinead O'Connor were still relevant back then. And Mick Jagger's ex, Jerry Hall, got to prance-&-pout. . What's To Like... It's Floydian music, so naturally it's great. But it's the technical aspect of the stage show itself that really makes this a worthwhile concert/DVD. Waters puts his soul into the work, and the result is a more like a musical than a concert. The building of the wall, and its subsequent crumbling down - all done while the musicians are doing their thing - is fabulous. So if there was some miming going on, and if some of the DVD scenes are re-takes and pre-takes, that's okay. . The quibbles are few. Joni Mitchell seems to be stuck in the 60's - no visual effort on her part - just stand-&-sing. Cyndi Lauper seems overly-happy, and Sinead O'Connor seems underly-so. As always, the list of musicians who declined to play is mind-numbing : Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel, Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker, and of course, the rest of Pink Floyd. . Tear Down The Wall! In the end, this is as much a historical happening as a well-staged musical. Germany was in the process of reunifying, and 45 years of French, Russian, British, and American occupation was coming to an end. The German people, especially the young, needed a focal event to remember the long, gradual reunification by. Roger Waters supplied it. . It is said the original concert audio was rather wretched. This 2003 version had the sound tracks re-mastered, and they certainly sounded good to me. We'll give it an "A-", and recommend it to fans of both Pink Floyd and History.