It Might Get Loud (Blu-ray) (2009)

"Musically and visually sumptuous.  John Anderson, Variety
"A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time.  Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Editor's Note IT MIGHT GET LOUD is a slick documentary about three seminal guitarists from successive generations of rock royalty: Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's the Edge, and the White Stripes/Raconteurs/Dead Weather's Jack White. The film follows the guitarists individually, in evocative settings like Headley Grange, the studio where "Stairway to Heaven" was written, and the Dublin high school where U2 first played together as teenagers. The three subjects sidestep music-biz gossip and open up about their influences, their approach to songcraft, and their aesthetic goals. Music lovers--guitar fanatics in particular--will thrill to some behind-the-scenes tech-talk as the artists explain how they get their respective sounds. These fascinating individual interviews are intercut with impressionistic bits, animation, cool titles, mesmerizing vintage footage of the guitarists and their blues-singer heroes, and a round-robin jam featuring all three guitarists learning and playing each other's tunes. The live-music segments are at times awkward, as the men eye each other warily and shyly, seemingly unsure of how to interact. But when the music works--as it does on the trio's impromptu "Whole Lotta Love"--sparks fly and genuine smiles break out all over. Fortunately, these inspired moments outshine the clumsy onstage socializing, and viewers are left with the impression that these three very different masters have more in common than previously suspected.

	Peter Afterman - Producer
	Jimmy Page - Featured
	Jack White - Featured
	The Edge - Featured
	Lesley Chilcott - Producer
	Thomas Tull - Producer
	Davis Guggenheim - Producer
	Erich Roland - Director of Photography
	Guillermo Navarro - Director of Photography
	Margaret Yen - Music Supervisor
	Davis Guggenheim - Director

Hollywood Reporter
"IT MIGHT GET LOUD offers a thrilling personal tour of three exceptional electric guitarists' careers that equally appealing to musicians and rock enthusiasts alike." 06/30/2009

Rolling Stone
3.5 stars out of 4 -- "Does this sound like rock heaven? It is." 08/20/2009

A.V. Club
"A fan's love letter to the art of the six-string, Davis Guggenheim's documentary IT MIGHT GET LOUD convenes a summit of guitar gods from three generations..." -- Grade: B- 08/13/2009

Entertainment Weekly
"A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time....Pure candy for the guitar hero in all of us." -- Grade: A 08/21/2009

USA Today
3 stars out of 4 -- ?You don?t have to be a musician to appreciate IT MIGHT GET LOUD....Though their individual stories are compelling, the best moments are when they interact, either verbally or musically.? 08/14/2009

Los Angeles Times
"The film culminates as the three finally come together on an empty soundstage in Hollywood for a conversation and a raucous jam session that is remarkable for its intimacy and its passion." 08/14/2009

New York Times
"It's a group portrait of three musicians and also, more intriguingly, a free-form historical and philosophical essay on the instrument that unites them." 08/19/2009

Washington Post
?Guggenheim makes all this guitar/guitarist worship engagingly cinematic. One needn?t have a Stratocaster moldering in the closet at home to get a kick out of IT MIGHT GET LOUD...? 09/04/2009

Uncut
4 stars out of 5 -- "[I]t's an engaging study of guitar heroism as a shared passion." 01/26/2010

Empire
4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]eaming three of the world's most renowned axe-wielders: Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White. In separate strands, each tells his own story....There are great pleasures..." 01/01/2010

Sight and Sound
"There are compelling moments dotted through the film..." 03/01/2010

Los Angeles Times 9 of 10
When it's nearing midnight and some amazing maniac is shredding through a guitar solo on stage, eyes closed, sweat flying, vibrations rumbling through the house like a northbound freight train, it's easy to forget just how much art and craft and science is involved in creating that sound...Director Davis Guggenheim, who brought us Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, reminds us of this in his very fine documentary about the electric guitar and the men who play it best, It Might Get Loud...Following three generations of rock virtuosos -- Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White -- on a journey through time, the film takes us behind the scenes as these artists talk about their relationship with and philosophies about that curve of electrified sound they have each mastered in distinctive ways...The film culminates as the three finally come together on an empty soundstage in Hollywood for a conversation and a raucous jam session that is remarkable for its intimacy and its passion...But the story begins more simply in a pasture as White, the creative force behind the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather and youngest of the three, builds a guitar out of fence wood, a Coke bottle, a few nails and some twine. You can make a guitar out of anything, he tells us, as he turns this crude but playable instrument over in his hands...Like with the others, there is a love affair going on here. They've been seduced by the powers of the instrument to reach something inside that emerges in a sound that flows through an amp and grabs the rest of us. The emotion coursing through the tangle of wires, and increasingly versatile amps, is sometimes raw, sometimes soft, but always alive...We get a look at the transformation of a simple chord progression as U2's the Edge seems to split and then, with the twist of a knob, amplify, creating the delay-echo effect that is his signature. When, in another frame, we're put in the middle of the band's performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday," as the echo of his guitar rises and falls, distinct from the whole, you process it differently...Guggenheim does a good job of capturing their craft rather than the rock star side, trailing them on their home turf, away from the crowds. Page -- who formed Led Zeppelin, with Robert Plant as its vocal powerhouse, after the Yardbirds fell apart -- rummages through his massive vinyl collection, talking about the sounds that influenced him...For nearly a year, the filmmaker followed the three, going back to Page's estate near London, to the Dublin classroom with the Edge where U2 practiced when they were still just ordinary schoolboys, to Austin and Nashville with White...Among the pleasures of the film are the old snapshots, particularly of Page and the Edge, capturing them before fame came in waves of screaming fans. Or hearing rare performances by those who influenced them, such as White explaining his immediate connection to the old blues man Son House, as House's "Grinnin' in Y - Betsy Sharkey