Movie
Everyone who has grown up in the last 20 or so years knows of Metallica. At one point, they were quite possibly my least favorite band around. While there still is a period of Metallica music that I don't overly love (mostly post-Black album), I've really taken a liking to their early music. A lot of their old music is fast, angry music which is absolutely great for running. Anyways, over the past twenty plus years, a lot has happened to Metallica. This documentary is kind of a behind the scenes look at the making of their last cd, St. Anger, which took nearly two full years to complete. Due to some animosity in the band (read: Lars and Hetfield hate each other), they hired a psychologist to be with them during the making of their album. Watching this documentary is amazing because Metallica has literally turned into Spinal Tap. Kirk Hammett seems to just want to make music, but Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield are constantly going at each other.
At one point, James leaves the band, enters rehab, and all but loses contact with the entire band for six months. Upon his returns, he implements rules that he will only work from noon to 4:00 PM because he wants to spend more time with his kids. He also implements a rule that nobody can work when he's not working. He feels like if other people are sitting around listening to what they've worked on while he's not around, decisions will be made without him. It's as absolutely absurd on screen as it sounds as I write it down.
The scenes with the psychologist remind me of watching Tony go to Dr. Melfi on the Sopranos. They spent most of the time talking about issues that shouldn't matter. Hearing James Hetfield using terminology you've ever heard from a psych book is just classic, though.
There are some great scenes discussing Cliff Burton, Dave Mustaine, and Jason Newstead all leaving the band. As you probably know, Cliff Burton was killed in a bus accident back in the mid-80's. Nearly 20 years later, he is still missed and talked about by the members of the band. Dave Mustaine was kicked out of the band and, again, 20 years later he's still not over it. He went on to play in Megadeath and sell millions upon millions of albums, but he's still disappointed that he was let go by the band. Jason Newstead left the band after being discouraged from working on side projects. It's really interesting because much of the pain felt from these departures from the band has yet to heal.
Everything about the record - which by the way was horrid - is pretty much dissected and discussed except for the decision to make the record sound almost unproduced. For the life of me, I can't figure out why they would make the record sound the way it did. Part of me thinks that in the past 10 years, Metallica as a whole has been looking for "something" to make their music sound fresh. It would explain the reason that they did the S&M record with the orchestra (which, by the way, was really cool) and it would also explain why they recorded their newest record in an untraditional way.
As a whole, this is a very interesting look. Metallica is arguably the hugest band still in existence today. Musically and financially, they could walk away today and be just fine. They've accomplished more than 99.99 percent of bands ever could even imagine. To see them still alive and trying to make music that they love is pretty cool and most certainly interesting. As bad as their last album was, I'll still probably wind up buying any new music they ever put out. After seeing this movie, if Metallica broke up tomorrow, I wouldn't find myself as being surprised.

Video & Sound
Unfortunately, this movie was shot mostly on DV cameras, so the quality seems to suffer a bit. It's in 4:3 full screen, which is also unfortunate, but the look adds to the almost home video feel. It's watchable, but not reference material. The sound is mostly front track, but the music is presented in a nice 5.1 surround mix. It sounds good except for the lack of production problem that I think plagues the cd. It's nothing that I'd hold against the dvd, though, because it is the true to the source material.

Extras
This two disc edition is just stacked. My favorite extra was the one extra I usually loathe - the deleted scenes. I don't know what the total is, but I'd be willing to bet it adds up to around an extra two and a half hours of scenes that were cut from the film. Some of them are awesome, even if they don't fit the flow of the film. Some of the highlights include Kirk going to traffic school, Kirk not being able to get the riff for "Some Kind of Monster," Bob Rock struggling with the bassline for "My World," James talking about growing up as a child, Metallica working with Swizz Beats & Ja Rule, and Lars & Kirk not being able to login to a webchat on their own webpage because they don't know the password. Also included on the disc are scenes from the premiere of the movie at various festivals. A Q & A and press conference from the Sundance Film Festival is very much worth watching. There are two commentaries included on this disc. The first, featuring members of the band, is actually very disappointing. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. If speaking about what is happening was a strength of the band, this movie wouldn’t exist in the first place. The better commentary is the one featuring the filmmakers who fill in some of the blanks and talk about scenes that were originally in the film.  

Closing thoughts…
I don’t think you’d necessarily have to be a fan of this movie to enjoy the film. It’s definitely not what you would expect from one of the biggest bands of all-time. To put themselves out there like this was very risky and, in my eyes, very cool.