Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
PG | 17 February 2006 (USA)
Neil Young: Heart of Gold Trailers

In March 2005, Neil Young was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. Four days before he was scheduled for a lifesaving operation, he headed to Nashville, where he wrote and recorded the country folk album Prairie Wind with old friends and family members. After the successful operation and recovery period, he returned to Nashville that August to play at the famed Ryman Auditorium, once again gathering together friends and family for this special performance.

Reviews
MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant
Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.
Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
sfjpowell the first snow flakes, the last days of summer, so pure and so clear,all this love in song, for all of us to hear, i just wanted to write the first two lines, but anal IMDb have rules for submision,so i will ramble on for a wee bit, did you know that Neil Young sometimes takes his train set on tour,and i mean train set, one that fits in a semi trailer, and of coarse Neil's bus along with willies and bob's are just about the last word in "on the road again" style, and why not? these wandering minstral's deserve it, cheers for now and good luck ya'll. sorry two more lines required, old man take a look at my life ime a lot like you,i need someone to love me the the whole day through
wvmcl I've never been much of a Neil Young fan. This may be because it seems to be some of his worst material that has become best known, such as the patronizing "Southern Man" and the sappy "Heart of Gold" (the lyrics of which have always made me gag).This movie may not quite have made me a fan, but it has raised my opinion of Neil by a few notches, and of Demme by several. This is everything a concert film should be - focused on the music and the performance, with a minimum of distraction. There are no audience shots, thankfully, and interviews are limited to a few minutes at the beginning, just enough to let us meet the performers we'll be spending the next 90 minutes with. The DVD comes with the lyrics on subtitles, which should be standard on all concert films and videos, but unfortunately is still rare. This movie could be a template for all concert films and videos to come. I just wish they'd called it something other than "Heart of Gold."
mjjusa-1 Of course I have disappeared into the movies. The Neil Young concert film 'Heart of Gold.' There have been many great concert films through the years. The best being Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Waltz' which filmed the Band's last concert at Filmore West. A phenomenal concert and a phenomenal film, that is if you love rock and roll and felt as if you had been born into it and were part of the music, and could be in the band if you had a better guitar and someone would show you the chords and that with a few chords and a lyric or two you could change the world...as you can guess I felt all five to the bottom of my twenty four year old soul. Neil Young was in 'The Last Waltz.' They had to digitally, before digital actually, they had to manually scrape a big hanging cocaine rock that extruded from his nose so in the film there's a bright light that is not the star of Bethlehem dangling above his lip and below his nostril...it's a famous bit of rock and roll history. But 'The Last Waltz' was made when the Band and Neil and everyone else was in their thirties and 'Heart of Gold' was filmed last year when Neil is in his sixties and his band looks as if they are in their late nineties and the entire movie could visually be used by the Christian Right and the DEA in the same way that those Ohio State Patrol films of the perils of drunk driving were used when I was in high school showing dead teenagers hanging through front windows or dangling from trees or bloody in a ditch. Close your eyes and it is a terrific concert, open them and view Dorian Grey's hidden portrait. Case in point, the once ethereally beautiful Emmylou Harris literally coming out of the darkness to sing with Neil and from dark to light appearing to be a ring wraith leapt full borne out of the river in front of Rivendale. Ghastly, ghostlike, a nose that doesn't appear in nature and is not an advertisement for plastic surgery, eyes that make buttons on dolls look lifelike, and the ability to express any emotion, human or not, constrained by unrestrained over indulgence in Botox. My mind reeled...porcupine...Peru...Jack Daniels...living hard for decades...my god...sweet Emmylou Harris who I saw sing for free at Fred's in Boulder, a face a 2000 year dead Pharoah would not accept. But the voice, as pure as a thick lipped bottle of Boulder beer brewed from the waters of Boulder Creek and I closed my eyes and smelled ammmmmbbbererrrrrrrrrgerrrrrrrssss (an homage...one must use homage at least once in any film review...to Fred's hamburgers on Boulder Mall and the Steve Martin Pink Panther movie). It would have been a terrific concert sitting in the dark in Ryman Auditorium, maybe twenty rows back. But, close up, in close ups, it was a medieval morality play depicting the horrors of indulgence and the consequences of a sinful life. The concert theme, emblazoned on the scenery, A Prairie Wind...the last song, massed guitars (I counted eight) and I wondered if irony was at play. I don't think so. A Native American bass player, a lead guitarist who looked and dressed like Buffalo Bill, a piano player whose face looked like the screamer's face in Munch's The Scream, the chick singers (actually matronly singers, mostly reminding one of the lost youth of senior United flight attendants still plying the friendly skies) dressed in matching full length distressed denim dresses...no it was played straight. None of them had seen, I would bet, A Mighty Wind. It will be a great CD, and would be glad to tell tales of hippy dippy Boulder when Neil was a long haired Canadian crooner whose indecipherable lyrics seemed to mirror heartache and loss, feelings as universal then as now. But, only in a dark bar.
freekwellerdieck As the first genre listed on IMDb for this "movie" was Documentary i watched it expecting a documentary. As it turns out that genre is probably only referring to the first 5 or so minutes of the movie. The rest of the runtime is just a concert registration, which was a shame for me. I'm not a fan of Neil Young or his music, i just watched the movie to watch a legend talk, the same way i watched Walk The Line to broaden my horizon, even though I'm no fan of Johnny Cash.The concert is well played and well recorded, but if you're not into Neil Young it's not very entertaining. There is hardly any show element, it only proves that he can play live just as well as in a studio.