Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of SMiLE (DVD)

9.
Well done doc, sometimes sad and hard to watch Brian's private moments, but he is a living legend to me.
One of my favorite moment is when Darian found and played a session of "Child Is Father Of The Man" and Brian: "Woah!". Do you really think he forgot that part of the song? Love it.
Then watching Brian on the piano playing H&V or any other backing track is priceless.

I think this documentary is very entertaining, a good (if flawed) intro to the project, and something which is effective at encouraging newcomers to check out the music for themselves. After I first saw it in '11, I was blown away and immediately decided to hunt down bootlegs. (The rest is history.)

But like kds I also notice some flaws with it:

The "Mike killed SMiLE" scapegoating is the big one. If you're gonna have Brian make a point of unambiguously saying "Reasons I didn't finish SMiLE: One, Mike hated it. He hated it," then you owe it to the accused to speak to his own defense. I don't know if Mike was offered an interview and turned it down, but if so it was on the documentary team to better represent the myriad of problems facing the album. And if he wasn't offered that basic right to present his own case, that's shoddy journalism and pushing a narrative on fans. As I recall, this documentary was very influential in that regard; I've seen the wikipedia change drastically from '11 to now. Luckily, both the online encyclopedia and wider fan community seems to have a more nuanced understanding of what went down today.

Even though I'm largely sympathetic to Brian's arty stoner friends, the so-called Vosse Posse, I think this documentary over-hypes their importance a bit. I think most of them, based on what evidence I've seen personally, were decent people who cared about Brian. I think Brian mistreated them as opposed to the other way around, using them as guinea pigs for his every whim and blowing them off when he canceled the album. However, I don't think they inspired him to be a better artist than he was. SMiLE, the good and the bad, for better or worse, is pretty much all on Brian (and VDP to a lesser extent.)

I think this documentary gives LSD a bad name. I don't like Daro crediting all of Brian's post-65 success to it. If there's one thing I've learned it's that acid doesn't make you a different person so much as empowering you to be yourself. That, and it does have legitimate drawbacks including emphasizing a person's mental illnesses. I would like to see psychedelics embraced as tools for therapy and self-discovery, and I believe they should be legalized for medical research purposes. But painting a rosy picture of its benefits without acknowledging the risks is irresponsible and going to get people hurt.

Besides these big things, there's also little misleading editing tricks that make me wonder "if they lied about something as trivial as this, what else did they lie about?" such as pretending Paul McCartney arrived on opening night.



So, like my review of BWPS, I give it a 7. Flawed, but entertaining and nostalgic.

Not that this is the best thread to discuss this in, but I think another reason Mike wasn’t into PS or Smile was that he had few to no lead vocals, especially on Smile.

Nobody doubts that Mike wasn't the biggest SMiLE fan, just that it was *the* issue which killed the album. If anything it was just the straw that broke the camel's back. That, and if you're gonna levy such a hefty accusation at anyone in any kind of documentary the proper thing to do is give them an interview to defend themselves. That's what good documentaries do. The fact that Mike wasn't given that chance reveals that, as entertaining as this may be, it's more concerned with pushing a narrative than investigating the truth. That's my issue with it.

Not disagreeing, but Brian citing this as the main reason's always seemed odd to me. Brian and Van started working together in what, August? And their collaboration initially continued through to December when the Cabin Essence argument caused VDP to split for the first time. In that time they wrote Heroes and Villains, Wonderful, He Gives Speeches, Cabin Essence, Surf's Up, Wind Chimes (apparently), Holidays (presumably) and Vega-Tables. And the Wordsworth poem that Child is Father of the Man is based on was Van Dyke's suggestion. Van Dyke was back from mid-late January through to March, and from that they wrote the H&V Cantina bridge and a couple of new verses for Vega-Tables.

In all of this seemingly the only song missing lyrics was Child is Father of the Man (maybe I Ran too and possibly whatever Brian had planned for I'm in Great Shape) and somehow over all those months this was never addressed. The missing lyrics can't have been that big of a deal, and the time was definitely there to get them done if Brian wanted to turn his attention to them. To me it comes off more like Brian saw Van Dyke as his right hand guy who could point him in the right direction and reassure him on ideas, while Van just saw himself as the lyricist, and when he left after months of procrastination Brian lost the only guy who could get him back on track. I think that's maybe when Brian started developing his complex about the music being "inappropriate" (when it wasn't even that weird next to other stuff he put out afterwards) and doubting that it'd be a sell to his audience.

Finally watched this last night. Enjoyed it generally, although much preferred the second half of BWPS being put together / rehearsed / performed.