So I finally managed to sit down and watch “We are X” properly and to my surprise, felt compelled to watch it a second time a couple of days later.
I thought I’d share my thoughts and would very much like to hear what you guys thought of it.
Some quick background, I’m a 35 years old guy, live in Canada east coast (have always), have been listening and passionate about X for over 20 years now (enough to get that tattoo 10 years ago, whatever that means).
As many here, I’ve been growing excessively tired of the stagnation since the band reunion tour in 2008 and although I’ve attend the MSG show and loved it, I don’t hold much hope for X-Japan’s future as a band at this point.
So it’s with that cynical attitude that I sat down and clicked play.
Opening with Yoshiki’s soft spoken English you could already tell that this was indeed going to be a documentary about YOSHIKI’s X-Japan – not much of a surprise but I was still bummed out to witness the overwhelming emphasis on drama from his personal perspective. Through the movie Yoshiki often speaks in poetically broken English, the result of it not being is first language and most likely also an influence of his song writing – it feels like he’s more used to think in English in terms of lyrics than a conversational vehicle. For the most part, it gives a very personal tone to his observations and I doubt serious individuals watching the documentary would be bothered by it but there were definitely a few occasions where it almost felt forced and telegraphed (the whole piece about the swan which sings only one time before it dies was just odd). Nitpicking but after 1h30, it gets a little heavy.
The good news however is that this pseudo philosophical monologue is much more present in the first 30 minutes and gradually seems to fade away leaving room for actual content, after all this is a documentary! Ironically, I was expecting to be much more interested by the “early years” portion of the documentary as I don’t care much for their more recent stuff but to my surprise I found the second half (starting at the breakup) much more interesting and involving. Even though there was a whole lot of drama it somewhat felt much more real, interesting and to some extent sincerely moving. There actually was some real drama happening with the band through these years that are certainly worth discussing and a great opportunity to get up close and personal with Yoshiki. They support and explain his dramatic behavior that came out as overwhelming in the first portion of the movie.
The pacing and editing is mostly great all through the documentary and I found they did a great job at balancing songs in background, short snippets of live acts from different era and facts in a reasonable play time. Someone who knew nothing of X-Japan would certainly walk out of the movie theater knowing a whole lot more and possibly intrigued. What I found surprising was that they did not clearly highlight their albums release, titles, biggest hits, tours etc… from informative perspective this was severely lacking – a proper timeline, even a very quick one, would been appreciated. Trade some of that Yoshiki monologue for actual information.
Although I understand the other band members don’t speak English very well, I would have appreciated a little bit more time spent on one on one interviews, subtitles are just fine and generally well accepted in small doses by the average population.
In the end, I couldn’t help but feel ‘We are X’ was more of a massive and well-orchestrated infomercial (see multiple reviews coming out of nowhere that feel more like paid advertisement than actual reviews) as opposed to a more technical and informative documentary. The radio interview clips when Yoshiki’s X-japan is presented as an internationally famous band somewhat irked me a bit and I couldn’t help but watch movie and see such a stark contrast between the whole ambitious world domination plan Yoshiki seems to constantly bring up and the actual total lack of any progress since the band got back together save a few shows and singles.
All in all, a quality documentary, light on information, heavy on drama that should still be viewed by any X-japan fan out there.