Events

[SCREENING] Gene Simmons could have taken lessons in arrogance from Oasis in their prime. The biggest British band of the 1990s by a considerable margin, their rise to fame was mercurial: only a few years into their career, they sold a quarter of a million tickets for two shows at Knebworth, England. What’s even more impressive is that another 2.25 million people applied for tickets.

The new documentary Oasis: Supersonic concentrates on those glory days, culminating with the Knebworth shows. With plenty of live footage, it resembles current Beatles documentary Eight Days a Week. But the depth of early material uncovered will remind you of another film from the same producers, Amy.

Oasis was never as big in the US, which spent the mid-90s in thrall to rap and hip hop, as it was in the rest of the world, so if you’ve ever wondered what all the fuss was about, Supersonic is a good way to find out. And even if you don’t care that much for the music, there’s the spectacle of the battling Gallagher brothers, Noel and Liam, whose love/hate—well, mostly hate—relationship eventually sundered the band. Providing separate audio commentaries to the filmmakers, they drop more F bombs than three viewings of GoodFellas, in thick Mancunian accents in which the profanities are often the only identifiable syllables. The producers claim that they had enough material to make a film nine hours long, so the two hours they whittled it down to is the band at it’s best—and of course worst.