Text size:

'U23D'

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

January 24, 2008

The more rock concerts change, the more they remain the same. Guys with guitars and attitude snarl out songs about peace and love. Pretty girls bounce and sway atop the weary shoulders of their boyfriends. Cigarette lighters flicker like fireflies in the night.

If you look closely into the congealed mass of Argentinians that has gathered for a shot of U2 euphoria, you may notice that most of those propane lighters have morphed into cell phone cameras. And thanks to the miracle of 3-D projection systems, Bono can now reach out his arm and give a personal benediction to each and every one of us.

"Everyone" has always been the agenda of U2, a band that has doggedly surfed the crest of communications technology to embrace the largest audience imaginable. And "everyone" is the inclusive mantra of "U23D," a filmed concert that bats an appeal for universal human rights across a packed stadium and into our laps.

You couldn't find an audience more open to such a message than rock fans in Buenos Aires, whose parents (those who are still alive) have passed down raw memories of Argentina's thuggish military junta. The emotive faces of these young women and men, mouthing the lyrics to such impassioned U2 anthems as "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Where the Streets Have No Name," are the most moving aspects of this unstoppable rock document by Catherine Owens and Mark Pennington.

For those of us not preprogrammed to the U2 groove, the spectacle can be simultaneously unnerving. If anything, the ability of 3-D to foist twirling T-shirts and pointing fingers in our noses only heightens a muted undercurrent of stadium concerts: that quasi-fascistic connection between performer and crowd that German photographer Andreas Gursky has captured so chillingly in his work.

U2 would rather heal the planet than conquer it. Their romping-stomping rhythms are laced with admonitions about man's inhumanity to man and set to seductive melodic hooks that speak to the non-English speakers in the crowd. Add to that a hipper-than-thou deployment of large electronic graphics, and you have the ultimate we-are-the-world stadium band.

Any backhanded flattery is purely intentional. To this viewer, any single minute of David Byrne in two dimensions is more engaging than 85 of Bono in 3-D. Bono's a powerful singer, and he knows how to work a crowd, as witnessed by the theatrical manner in which he shifts a headband reading "Coexista" down to cover his eyes, prisoner-of-war style.

But the bands' platitudinizing lyrics seem more suited to cafe poetry slam than a sports stadium, and the in-your-face 3-D treatment has the effect of accentuating the weirdly passive experience of watching a concert film. We want to be in the thick of the flailing mobs, but the best we can do is hang loose in our theater seat and watch with our noses pressed against the window.

The upside, of course, is that we have a view that beats that of the premium-seat kids down front. Owens and Pellington use the 3-D effect to achieve heady layering effects, piling close-up shots atop long shots and vice versa, or flooding the eye with a cascade of alphabet letters that spill over from the electronic graphics on stage. "U23D" only just begins to tap the potential of performance film in three dimensions, but the possibilities are thrilling to contemplate.

U23D (G). A heady, holographic rock concert: Put on your 3-D glasses, and the camera zooms within you, without you, over the drums and below Bono's armpits. 1:25. At IMAX at AMC Lincoln Square, Manhattan. Expands Feb. 15 to theaters in digital 3-D.