I can’t wait for Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen’s anthropological look at Heavy Metal to be released on DVD later this month. Yahoo! had a writeup about the film earlier in the week.

Check out “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey”‘s trailer.

From a Chicago Tribune review:

Unlike the current youth movement Emo, metal was never “a way to understand your loneliness,” says music writer and pop-culture sensei Chuck Klosterman, “but it’s a way to feel a part of something larger than yourself.” So Dunn travels to Germany’s Wacken Open Air festival to mosh with 40,000 other metalheads and experience that larger-than-life adrenaline rush that makes otherwise intelligent kids thrash their heads toward permanent brain damage.

Touching on sex, religion and violence, Dunn zooms through the history of metal (the genre is rooted in blues and, more obviously, classical), rattling off a mind-blowing list of musical subgenres, from heavy to punk to British to black to speed to death to hair –to name a few.

From Ruthless Reviews:

…this wonderfully entertaining movie doesn’t pit bands against each other, or foolishly attempt to argue in favor of Megadeth’s importance while picking on “lesser” bands like Motley Crue and Poison. From glam to progressive, black metal to thrash, it’s all the same silly, loveable music. It made us laugh, helped us accept a solitary prom night, and allowed us to feel superior to those burdened by the bad taste of associating with Duran Duran or Wham. Metal is a dying giant to be sure, and is rarely discussed without some sort of VH1 “Where are They Now?” detachment, but fans remain; scattered and low key, perhaps, but still in love with a style of music that always managed to piss somebody off. It was about rebellion, arrogance, and hate, yes, but also the true spirit of the form — being an individual. Sure, we always exaggerated the impact, and more often than not the lyrics were nothing more than the umpteenth derivation of fucking a slut in the back of the tour bus, but we could read between the lines, even then. All we knew was that our parents hated it, Congress sought to act against it, and for the time it took to finish a cassette or LP, we felt like gods. Zit-ridden, painfully shy, and inept on all fronts, but gods nonetheless.

My kinda movie.