By Catherine Bray, Variety | Some documentaries are searing exposés of the unpalatable truth and some are unashamed celebrations of a beloved subject – and if you think “The Ballad of Judas Priest,” from co-directors and Priest fans Tom Morello and Sam Dunn, is going to be anything other than an ode to everything that’s great about the British headbangers, you’ve got another thing coming.
In a film compiled from interviews with the band, archive footage (some of which is previously unpublished), and interviews with luminaries including The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, actor Jack Black and the late Ozzy Osbourne, the name of the game is not formal innovation. And that’s just fine: Sometimes, it’s not desirable for the documentary to get in the way of the stories.
A pioneer of the heavy metal genre, Judas Priest formed in 1969 and have been going strong ever since, with a good claim to having invented or defined many of the tropes of the genre. They’ve gone through more drummers than Spinal Tap (don’t worry, the film makes that joke, along with a “to 11” reference from frontman Rob Halford) in an up-and-down, half-century-spanning career that’s seen them survive multiple line-up changes, controversy, fallings-out, alcohol problems, health issues and a misbegotten court case in Nevada.
It’s fascinating seeing the latter culture war replayed nearly 40 years later in all its stupidity: A legal travesty saw the hapless rockers having to defend themselves in court from the absurd proposition that vague subliminal messages in their music caused the deaths of two teenagers. As bassist Ian Hill points out, since the alleged (and in fact non-existent) messages were subliminal, they were being asked to prove that something which couldn’t be detected wasn’t there.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/reviews/the-ballad-of-judas-priest-review-delightful-metal-doc-is-a-rock-solid-directorial-debut-for-rage-against-the-machine-guitarist-tom-morello/