It wasn’t on our Most Anticipated of 2009 list, but that’s because we’ve already seen it and hell, we put it on our Best Films of 2008 list, but finally after months of waiting the first official trailer for Sacha Gervasi’s superb documentary, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” has arrived.
And as we reported in November, the film is coming out in April of this year and now we’re happy to report that it has a concrete release date of April 10th. Update: we spoke to the director. He said the film will hit NY and L.A. in limited release on the 10th and then will start rolling out to twelve major cities afterwards. He said to expect more details next week.
The doc chronicles the seemingly washed-up Canadian 1980s heavy-metal rockers, Anvil (they had one hit in the eighties called, “Metal On Metal“), and the film is comical, tragic and emotionally awe-inspiring (Michael Moore called it, “The best documentary I’ve seen in years!”).
We wrote, ” The story of these lovable buffoons will make you pump devils horns in the sky, cringe with embarrassment, laugh and weep in celebration,” it is seriously so good, even if you know squat about this band or don’t care for heavy metal (that would be like saying you have to love professional wrestling to enjoy “The Wrestler”). Here’s our full-blown review of the film that we saw in the spring, but it first premiered at Sundance 2008 and made a big splash with audiences. Everyone’s calling the film a real-life “Spinal Tap,” and that’s good shorthand for viewers, but the film is so much more than that and is really a moving tale about brotherhood and perseverance; it’s a beautiful thing at the end of the day, no joke.
The trailer (and movie) features glowing testimonials from fellow metal head like Guns N’ Roses’ Slash, Motorhead’s Lemmy plus members of Metallica, Anthrax and Slayer. As we wrote about the music in the film (which is more than just metal).”Noted texturalist David Torn composed the moving Mogwai-like score (he also wrote the score to “The Wackness,” among many other great scores like the recent “Lars And The Real Girl” one) and apart from featuring a shit-ton of Anvil songs, the film also features tracks from Explosions In The Sky, Air and Alice Cooper to name a few (but yes, it’s all about Anvil at the end of the day). Thanks to the DailySwarm guys for the head’s up, here’s the brand new trailer, it fucking rules.
You’ve probably noticed that music docs have turned us off of late, cause they’re so rote and by-the-numbers, but this flick is something to be especially proud of. If only all music documentaries could be this good. We can’t wait to see the movie again. Before we forget, there’s also a book-tie in that’s coming out through Random House to coincide with the film’s release in April. Someone please put us down for a copy too, it sounds like a must-read.