Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
On Amazon Prime.
Man, I really wanted to like this one. In my opinion Randy is the best guitar player ever, or at least in the conversation. And even if you don't agree, he definitely holds his own with icons of the era like Eddie Van Halen, Tony Iommi, Brian May, and Clapton.
First 2/3 of the movie is basically a Quiet Riot early years documentary with incredibly garbage footage (or, mostly, narration over photos). I can't fault the film makers too much there just because there probably isn't any. They talk up Randy's talent but there's basically only one incredibly bad video of him playing with Quiet Riot (a solo), with his roadie interjecting every 10 or so seconds about it.
Then they talk about him auditioning for Ozzy and joining the band, but I guess they couldn't get the rights to any of his music so they just...talk about it?
The closing credits we get Crazy Train played by a bunch of random YouTube guitarists. And that's it. That's the movie. For a movie about a musician, you'd really hope they'd actually have something to showcase that. If you're going to make a documentary like this, maybe secure the music rights first.
You can go on YouTube and just search for "Randy Rhoads Solo" and get a much better appreciation for how good he was in a 5 minute clip than this 90 minute documentary gave. Or literally any Ozzy Osbourne live show when Randy was still alive.
It's a damn shame, because he died so young, most people don't even know who he was. Had this been a better showcase of that (had they gotten rights to literally any of his music), it could've introduced a much wider audience to him. I suppose if you're a die-hard fan this might be neat to watch, but otherwise it really missed for me.
Edit: Was talking to my wife about it, and I remembered that I was wrong. They did have a couple solos in it, but they were Van Halen ones. I guess Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen had a bit of a rivalry and he played some of the solos to learn, recording them. So now I'm thinking Ozzy must own the rights to all of Rhoads' music, not just the Ozzy stuff.
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