Festival Express

This rock doc about a 1970 train trek across Canada is a time capsule for the era (which coincidentally is “my” era.) Swallow it and you are swept back to the Sixties. Obviously a lot of critics got high on this (witness cumulative scores below), but I just caught a mellow buzz, nothing like the wild times the musicians had in the capsule of the train -- drinking, drugging, playing and singing -- jamming the groove to the rhythm of the tracks. Oh yes, they’d occasionally get off the train and give concerts, and the performance footage is excellent. I’d just seen Janis Joplin’s same all-out performances of “Cry Baby” and “Tell Mama” in another doc about her, and it was good to see alternate takes from The Band performing “The Weight” and “I Shall Be Released” (though Scorsese’s Last Waltz will remain forever definitive), but the revelation was the Grateful Dead in “Workingman’s Dead” mode, which was the only period in which I really followed them. Fact is, Jerry Garcia was quite a musician. There’s a scary-funny-thrilling sequence in which he, Janis, and Rick Danko are in the bar car wailing away at an old work song. She would be dead of a heroin overdose in two months; the guys would follow in their own due time. But what a time it was while it lasted. (2004, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-85, RT-96.)