The Last Play at Shea
Reviews by Paul Preston
Welcome to Today I Watched…, a series of posts documenting my new challenge – watch a movie a day for the rest of my life. Keep coming back to TheMovieGuys.net to find out what I watch each day…and get my take on it.
When I see a movie that’s a new release in theaters or on demand, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews” or “Home Viewing”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.
June 12, 2017 – The Last Play at Shea
How have I not seen this Billy Joel documentary until now? Billy is my all-time favorite musician. It sounds cornball to say “his music tells the story of my life”, but it’s totally true here. I should clarify that Billy’s music mostly tells his story. The songs have a chronological arc, often ending up on the album in the order that they were written, but I don’t share his stories of cocaine use and divorce. It’s just that every one of his songs bring back a place and time in my life when I heard it and it impacted me, from my hometown to college and beyond.
This doc is exciting because there’s a dearth of full-on Billy Joel docs in this world. There’s the occasional VH-1 profile or something, but feature films about Billy are lacking, so this had me excited, and I smite myself for taking so long to get to it. As I mentioned, Billy’s songs tell his life story, that’s why something like Broadway’s Movin’ Out made me nuts. They built a story around his songs – NO, the story’s already there! He’s telling it, just listen. Didn’t matter, as Movin’ Out was just a big dance recital, and the band was the best thing about it. Billy fans need this doc.
The title refers to Shea Stadium, the longtime home of the New York Mets, and numerous other events, most notably the legendary Beatles concert in 1966. As it’s about to be torn down and replaced with Citi Field, New York hometown hero Billy Joel performs a series of concerts to send the place out with a bang. The film chronicles those shows with high-end coverage (the photography and sound capturing the concert is stellar), but goes beyond that to explore a lot more – The history of the stadium, Billy Joel’s career (the film treats Billy at Shea as the coming together of two icons) and also the ups and downs of The Mets, the long journey of one of the stadium’s groundskeepers, and an in-depth look at the city of New York itself as it’s toughed through financial crises, 9/11 and more.
That’s a lot to deal with in ninety minutes, but editor Mike J. Nichols and director Paul Crowder keep the pace brisk. The Mets sequences are essentially mini sports movies and if there’s one thing I’m a huge sucker for, it’s sports movies! I forgot that about myself until I was in the middle of the legendary game six of the 1986 World Series and the movie blends the music with the sports drama perfectly, then WHAM!…lump in my throat. And there are two moments like that where The Mets stopped crapping the bed long enough to make an impact as a team.
The concert footage is one of the highlights of the film, shot and recorded with massive multi-camera coverage. Also, the concerts (two, actually) featured great guest stars who show up in the movie, including Tony Bennett and a dramatic entrance by Paul McCartney, which only seems right seeing as how his show with The Beatles inaugurated live shows at the venue. Alec Baldwin narrates but one of the other big treats of this doc is Billy himself guiding you through big moments of his career and there’s something infectious about this New Yorker being the one to go on about the history of New York.
The movie’s choice to expand its reach beyond the Shea concerts is ambitious, but you can’t cover everything else in the forty-plus year of a music icon, so I think the essential Billy Joel doc is still out there waiting to be made (or maybe a biopic?), but till then, this is a solid snapshot of a great rock and roll moment.
Directed by: Paul Crowder & Jon Small (concert)
Release Date: 2010
Run Time: 90 Minutes
Country: USA
Distributor: Newmarket Films
