In March of 2023, movie distributor A24 posted a teaser of musician David Byrne picking up a certain big suit from the dry cleaners. This was an announcement for the Talking Heads concert film, “Stop Making Sense”, which would be coming back to theaters, restored both audibly and visually, for its 40th anniversary. As a fan of the group, I was ecstatic. Sure, I had seen the movie on my phone before, but to see it in a movie theater on a big screen with booming music to match was something I eagerly anticipated for half a year to see.
I attended the film on the Friday the re-release premiered, Sept. 29, with several friends, all of whom had never seen the movie and knew little to nothing about Talking Heads. I gave them all only the vaguest idea of what it would be like and met up with them at Cinemark in Moosic. An hour and a half later, not only had the experience been everything I had hoped it would be, but the world had just received four new Talking Heads fans. Well, at least four new people who would willingly listen to their music. That speaks volumes about how mesmerizing this movie is, even if it’s been 40 years since the band went on the tour captured in this movie.
Filmed in December 1983 and released the following August, “Stop Making Sense” is a time capsule of the last tour Talking Heads ever did, undertaken to promote their “Speaking in Tongues” album. Not content with just being the full, mostly uninterrupted performance of an already great band, Byrne and company have a few tricks up their sleeve to keep you interested. The band comes out one by one with the first four songs, first Byrne performing solo, then bassist Tina Weymouth, followed by drummer Chris Frantz and finally guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison. Then the auxiliary musicians appear in two separate groups. The show gets bigger and bigger, music-wise and performance-wise. Before you know it, you’re treated to such sights as Byrne dancing with a lamp during “This Must be the Place” and doing five laps around the stage during “Life During Wartime.”
Musically, the concert features selections from throughout the band’s catalog up to 1983, all arranged in the style of “Tongues,” from well-known singles like “Psycho Killer” to deeper cuts like “Slippery People.” Visually, it’s clear that everyone involved is giving it 110%, but special mention goes to both Steve Scales on percussion, who hypes up the crowd every chance he gets, and Byrne himself, whose unusual dances and routines throughout the concert have transcended the film and entered pop culture at large. Chief among these routines is the big suit, worn during what can be said to be the film’s climax, the song “Girlfriend is Better.” The suit is no doubt the movie’s icon, being featured on the poster and CD, as well as the 2023 teaser and a handful of Talking Heads spoofs like this one by the Muppets.
But despite all of this spectacle, the film is still 40 years old. Pre-restoration versions of the movie had scratches on them, and although the movie was the first to use digital audio recorders, certain things could’ve been done with the original film to bring other instruments and backup singers further forward in the mixes. Not only that, the mainstream popularity of Talking Heads has unfortunately diminished over the years. So, with all that said, did the 2023 restoration do anything to remedy these things?
Aside from the gleam of the light on an 80s camera lens, the picture looks absolutely stunning and shows all of Byrne’s antics in 4K glory. The mixes sound distinctly different in many places from their original counterparts, and pieces of certain songs seem to have been recreated from scratch in order to sound cleaner. As for the popularity of the band, perhaps a movie will not do anything on its own to fix that, but if the reactions of my friends were any indication, getting non-Talking Heads fans to go into the movie completely blind and watch it is a good way to get them interested in their music. In fact, I highly recommend doing just that.
“Stop Making Sense” is a genuine gem in a sea of rhinestones, a glittering movie about making music live on stage that just shows the performance instead of going on and on about everything that went into a show or tour we barely get to see (like The Band’s “The Last Waltz”). “Stop Making Sense” solves the problem of these sorts of movies containing too much talking by just showing what the audience would see, minus some dynamic camera angles and a cut and cross-fade every now and then. There are also no fully-lit shots of the audience until the very end, giving the illusion you’re watching an actual performance; indeed, videos from the recent IMAX showings have surfaced showing people dancing in the aisles as if they were at a real concert.
“Stop Making Sense” is everything a concert film should be and more: Toe-tapping, artistic, with no pointless filler and just a little ridiculousness. It’s all of that, 40 years on.
And nothing is better than that.
(“Stop Making Sense”’s 40th anniversary restoration is currently playing at Cinemark in Moosic, about 15 minutes from campus.)
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