Sundance. Anvil! The True Story of Anvil.

"Anvil! The Story of Anvil is not just better than you'd think that a documentary about a 30-year-old Canadian metal band led by two lifelong friends in their 50s to be," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "It's better than most music documentaries. It's better than most documentaries, period. I am about as metal as your aunt, and I was spellbound by Anvil! The Story of Anvil - laughing, yes, but also inspired to think feel and literally moved to the edge of tears by the complicated-simple, stupid-smart, goofy-serious story that it tells thanks to Sascha Gervasi's inspired and impressive direction. Anvil! The Story of Anvil is a documentary about a metal band, sure. And The Catcher in the Rye's about baseball."

This "is an alternatively moving and hilarious love story - a tale of two people hopelessly devoted to playing heavy metal music," writes John Horn in the Los Angeles Times. "The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a gold rush of hard-core rockers: Scorpions, Iron Maiden, Whitesnake, Metallica, Anthrax and Motorhead among them. With its outrageous stage antics and pulsing rhythms, Anvil was right in the mix too, its album Metal on Metal envied by the band's head-banging brethren. As a teen living in London, screenwriter Sacha Gervasi saw one of Anvil's first British gigs. 'I was blown away,' he recalls. 'It was heavy music with really funny entertainment.'"

"For the first half of this documentary one admires the tenacity of the rock and roll dream but in the latter half, an increasingly humiliating sense that the dream has been over for decades and they just haven’t woken up begins to take over," writes Nathaniel Rogers at Zoom In. "After a particularly difficult therapy session of sorts with their record producer on their 13th record This is Thirteen they visit Stonehenge. Yes, Stonehenge! This is Spinal Tap roars back into mind."

"The effusive, downright giddy crowd response had director Gervasi and Anvil's bald guitarist wiping away tears as they thanked everyone and answered questions," notes the Austin American-Statesman's Chris Garcia.

IndieWIRE interviews Gervasi.

Update, 1/22: "Who would've guessed that the second movie to move me to tears at Sundance - following Stranded, way back on day two - would be a documentary about an obscure Canadian heavy metal band, still grinding it out after 30 years?" asks the AV Club's Noel Murray. "[W]ithin the portrait of Anvil's endurance, we may see why they never became big stars: They're too nice."

Updates, 1/25: James Rocchi talks with Gervasi and producer Rebecca Yeldham for Cinematical.

"Anvil is this year's American Movie, albeit less wildly funny and more poignant," writes David Poland.

Update, 1/26: "A must-see for dreamers everywhere," declares Tom Hall.

Update, 1/30: "Right off the bat, this story plays right to my personal preferences," writes AJ Schnack. "Gigantic, after all, is also a story of two boyhood friends who are two decades into a career that has been filled with ups and downs, yet who are still looking for ways to make music.... Already we've seen writers bending over backwards to explain that they loved Anvil: The Story of Anvil even though they aren't metal fans. I'm not sure that anything can be done to break that vicious cycle, but a committed distributor would do right to gamble on Anvil."

Posted by dwhudson at January 19, 2008 4:05 PM