Cheap Trick

Cheap Trick is no has-been. At least not live. So it's disheartening to watch the band act like it's irretrievably stuck in the past. Japan as the focal point is itself a concession to kitschdom. Yeah, the Far East was first to embrace the band, but there's more to Cheap...

By Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

June 10, 2004

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Cheap Trick is no has-been. At least not live. So it's disheartening to watch the band act like it's irretrievably stuck in the past. Japan as the focal point is itself a concession to kitschdom. Yeah, the Far East was first to embrace the band, but there's more to Cheap Trick's history than At Budokan. To make matters worse, most of the "interviews" on this DVD are goof-offs. They're rarely as lame as the embarrassing jokes on the band's 25th-anniversary documentary, but why cheese things up? If you can sit through the inside jokes more than once, you really might need to get a life. The interviews work best when some seriousness shines through, but those moments are fleeting and only highlight what a misstep this DVD is. What true fans need is an earnest career retrospective. But the cardinal sin here is that the interviews play over some of the concert's best moments.

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