YMMV / The Last Waltz

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Neil Diamond tries hard in his performance, but you can tell he knows how out of place he is in this musical setting.^note He was there by invitation of Robbie Robertson, who produced his album Beautiful Noise It didn't help that he looked like he just teleported in from the set of Three's Company, wearing a leisure suit and aviator shades.^note Disturbingly, he also looks a bit like Jim Jones.
    Levon Helm:^note upon being told by Robertson to cut Muddy Waters to make room for Neil Diamond Go tell Neil Diamond we don't even know who the fuck he is!!!
  • The poetry recitals by Michael McClure (reading from The Canterbury Tales) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti seem really odd just in the excerpts shown in the film. You can imagine how they must've felt in person at full-length. And there were several other poets who did recitals at the show but didn't make the film.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The consensus seems to be that Muddy Waters and Van Morrison steal the show.
• Once Original, Now Common: It holds up as a good Concert Film / Rockumentary, but why was this considered such a huge event in 1978? As pointed out on the main page, it marked a major artistic advance for concert films. Instead of being a ragged 16mm cinema verité type film, it was in 35mm, had an actual budget, and a respected director who approached it as a cinematic presentation instead of just a filmed concert. In the words of John Simon, the musical director for the concert, it's "not a film of a concert, but a film about a concert". 6 years later, Talking Heads and Jonathan Demme would release Stop Making Sense, a concert film which was directly inspired by the cinematic and story-driven approach of this movie while also deliberately avoiding and averting aspects of it that Demme and David Byrne considered distracting and unnecessary.^* Specifically, backstage footage, interviews with the musicians and crew, and shots of the audience (until the very end anyway)

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