Dog-Day Distemper

Thanks to various inventions, pain has pretty much been taken out of dentistry. All but psychic pain, that is; when the drill whines, keens, and shrills inside my mouth, I still experience soulsuffering of the kind rock music inflicts on me. So I do not constitute the ideal audience for a movie like The Last Waltz, by Martin Scorsese, which is about the last concert, given in San Francisco, by a group called The Band. In this swan song (contrary to legend, swans have abysmal voices), The Band was joined by numerous rock celebrities, ranging from Joni Mitchell to Bob Dylan, from Neil Young to Neil Diamond.

Seven cinematographers (three of them very famous) and scads of assistant cameramen worked on The Last Waltz—“the first 35-mm rock film ever made [and] the first to use a 24-track recording system, which, after the longest mix in history, has produced the final 4-track Dolby stereo print,” we are informed by the press kit. And all this technology to reproduce more accurately the sound of a high-powered drill inside your mouth—accompanied, worse yet, by banal words of a type that no respectable dentist’s drill would be caught uttering. Let it be said that Robbie Robertson, the leader of The Band, has a good and interesting face, and comes across as an at least intermittently sensible fellow, which may account for the disbanding of The Band.

JS

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John Simon

Thanks to various inventions, pain has pretty much been taken out of dentistry. All but psychic pain, that is; when the drill whines, keens, and shrills inside my mouth, I still experience soulsuffering of the kind rock music inflicts on me. So I do not constitute the ideal audience for a movie like The Last Waltz, by Martin Scorsese, which is about the last concert, given in San Francisco, by a group called The Band. In this swan song (contrary to legend, swans have abysmal voices), The Band was joined by numerous rock celebrities, ranging from Joni Mitchell to Bob Dylan, from Neil Young to Neil Diamond.

Seven cinematographers (three of them very famous) and scads of assistant cameramen worked on The Last Waltz—“the first 35-mm rock film ever made [and] the first to use a 24-track recording system, which, after the longest mix in history, has produced the final 4-track Dolby stereo print,” we are informed by the press kit. And all this technology to reproduce more accurately the sound of a high-powered drill inside your mouth—accompanied, worse yet, by banal words of a type that no respectable dentist’s drill would be caught uttering. Let it be said that Robbie Robertson, the leader of The Band, has a good and interesting face, and comes across as an at least intermittently sensible fellow, which may account for the disbanding of The Band.