Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense [VHS]

Great Picture and Sound
Great movie, however I thought the studio track played better than the live track over my 5.1 speakers. Awesome picture quality for 1983.

Excellent Sound!
If you care about sound quality you will love this DVD - it sounds wonderful. It is well mixed and does not suffer from the loudness war disease that afflicts so many other DVD's / CD's.

funky
great fun. shot on 35mm and has the look of film, not cleaned up for blu-ray but has much more saturated color. excellent bonus features of byrne interviewing himself and also a complete press conference with the band. has a live song from TomTom Club that is superb and the heads tunes could not be better. crank it up and dance around the room !!!

Blu-ray version no better than regular DVD
This review is primarily a comparison of the standard DVD to the blu-ray. See other reviews for more discussion of the performance itself. First, to be clear, I love the Talking Heads of this era (and earlier) and this concert. As many have said before, Stop Making Sense is one of the best concert performances ever captured on film. Poorly captured, unfortunately. I've owned the standard DVD for years, and have viewed it on my Oppo 970 upscaling player at least 50 times. I know (and love) the content very well, warts and all. I eagerly awaited the release on blu-ray to improve the blurry, soft, artifact-laden DVD. Sadly, on my 106" screen (fed by a Pioneer BPD-51FD blu-ray player though an Epson 1080UB), the video on blu-ray is so similar (poor) to the DVD that I consider it a wasted purchase. What makes it even WORSE than the DVD, is that all the grain, scratches, and film defects are greatly enhanced by the sharpness of blu-ray. When a scratch comes along, it's presented in high definition, making it leap out even more than it does on DVD. The sharp detail of the defects screams out how bad the source really is. Monty Python's Life of Brian was similarly horrific on DVD, but the restoration processing used for the blu-ray transformed it astonishingly to near perfect. I had hoped for SOME similar improvements on Stop Making Sense, but this blu-ray is a dud in my opinion. I see only moments of improved detail, but so little as to be of no consequence. Some reviewers feel that this is part of the films' charm and artistic intent. I respectfully disagree - strongly. The bad video quality just looks like sloppy, inept film making. The concept, direction and performances are wonderful, but the images look like a 4th generation VHS tape. Sadly, apparently all the existing copies of the original film used to master the DVDs and blu-rays are apparently equally awful. Audio IS improved on the blu-ray, however. Notably, audio lip-sync problems are much better than the standard DVD (particularly on 'What a Day That Was') . Yet this also helps to emphasize how bad the image quality is. Great audio combined with high-def film grain/defects make the soft, crappy images seem worse than ever by comparison. I wish I'd never bothered to upgrade to this blu-ray, my old DVD is essentially equivalent on a good upscaling player. Ultimately, Stop Making Sense is an essential, desert-island DVD, although poorly-filmed (picture quality-wise). I adore the content, but wish that there would be an attempt at restoration, even if some purists might object. Until then, the added resolution of blu-ray is a waste, at best. If you own this on DVD, don't bother with the blu-ray version. [...]

Best Concert Film Ever
Having had the Beta-Hifi tape version, then the DVD release, and now the BluRay version, I still feel this is the most entertaining captured music concert I have ever seen. This is more than a band just playing their songs. It is a visual treat. David Byrne is an artist in multiple mediums. Main disappointment is that the BluRay doesn't bring much more to the table, although the audio is lossless DTS-HD MA. The DVD release left great perfomances (Cities, Big Business, and I Zimbra) as bonus tracks, and unfortunately with the BluRay release, this did not change. And those selections are not presented in wide-screen and have a very non-HDTV look. Why they did not make it right? But overall, a great captured performance makes up for the faults.