BEFORE: Winding down to the last four rock music documentaries, and there were a few that popped up DURING the chain, and I'm just not going to get to them. One cable channel is now running a doc about Lynyrd Skynyrd, and there's just no way I can work that in at this point. PBS is also running some doc called "Downhill From Here" about a famous Grateful Dead concert, but the time to work that one in was about 6 weeks ago, and that time came and went.
I'm not going to get to the one about Jeff Lynne and ELO playing at Wembley, either - I could have linked to it from "Concert for George", but I had no way to link OUT of it. Same goes for that documentary "Sound City", directed by Dave Grohl, about that recording studio in California, which has another of those all-star casts. I probably could have worked that one in during the 11th hour, because the cast is so large, but I've shuffled things around three times already, and I sort of just want to finish and get back to narrative movies again.
Ozzy Osbourne carries over from "Black Sabbath The End of the End", and I think this makes five appearances in a row for Ozzy.
THE PLOT: Ozzy Osbourne's four-decade track record as a culturally relevant artist is well-known, but his personal struggles have been shrouded in secrecy, until now.
AFTER: Well, if anyone is living in their overtime, it's just got to be Ozzy, right? He was basically the poster child for excess drug and alcohol use during the 1980's, and somehow came out the other end. He was heavily self-medicating during the entire run of the reality show "The Osbournes", which is when middle America stopped treating him like a Satan-worshipping rock star and started regarding him as a lovable-yet-hard-to-understand family man, but the truth of the matter is that he was smashed out of his mind at the time. So suddenly watching Ozzy staring blankly at the TV set, trying to figure out why the satellite dish isn't picking up any signal isn't so funny any more.
(Meanwhile, mom Sharon's on cancer medications, daughter Kelly is taking drugs to deal with her mother's diagnosis, and son Jack is drinking heavily and suicidal. Yep, nothing but a nice, normal, famous SoCal family...)
Somehow this all gets traced back to Ozzy's dad, who was your typical 1940's/1950's dad, in that he didn't see the need to develop a close personal bond with his children. Who had time for that, anyway, what with working three factory jobs while struggling in post-war Britain where nobody had any decent food to eat, or even any time to clean up all the bombed-out buildings from the war? That was just the way things were, men weren't supposed to show any emotion, it was considered a sign of weakness, and anyway, that was women's work. Men just had to work themselves to death to keep feeding all six kids, because somehow birth control was not in the cards either - I don't know, maybe don't have a sixth kid if you can't feed five, I'm just spitballing here...
And so Ozzy grew up with low self-esteem, plus a distant father figure and oh, yeah he had dyslexia or ADD or something that made him not able to perform in school. Plus, he was bullied, so this only drove him further into himself. Great, now I don't know whether to admire Ozzy or pity him - but a lot of this sounds like a bunch of excuses that somehow justify his rampant alcoholism and drug use during the entire decade of the 1980's. This is what alcoholics do, as Ozzy himself tells us - they lie. They even lie about how much they're lying, so saying that the drinking is from a bad childhood, or this, or that, or dealing with fame, or some childhood trauma, I just don't know if I'm buying it.
To compound things, we hear stories from the likes of Tommy Lee, Motley Crue's drummer (I want to say drummer, was he the drummer?) about Ozzy and Crue members doing "gross-out" contests while on tour, freaking out the tourists in a nice Hilton hotel while they piss out on the patio and dare each other to lick it up, then drunk Ozzy went up to his room and took a dump on the floor, then started smearing that all over the walls. I mean, there's drunk behavior and then there's stuff for which there's just no excuse.
Again, this guy should have died several times over, only he didn't. And I know it sucks to see your best friend and guitarist die in a plane crash, but that's no excuse either - those hotel rooms were not responsible for your pain, Ozzy, so it's not going to accomplish anything when you trash them.
Anyway, regarding the music, I probably know more Ozzy songs than Sabbath songs, like "Bark at the Moon" or "Mr. Crowley" in addition to "Crazy Train", of course. For the sake of this documentary, Ozzy is forced to watch all of his silly music videos from the 1980's and comment on them, but when he tires of them after three or four videos, he's allowed to leave the room. That just isn't fair, if his fans had to watch them during the 1980's, he should be forced to watch them too.
Somehow Ozzy also gets a pass for beating up his wife, knocking our her two front teeth in one altercation, and nearly choking her in another. Sure, he was drunk - yes, he got arrested for it. But why, for God's sake, did she forgive him? How are they still together? Is it because of the money, or the fact that he's clean and sober now, and acting like the semblance of a good parent? I think the average guy, who's not a rock star, with a self-respecting woman, would never be cut this much slack. Yes, he's a senior citizen now and just sits around mostly drawing when he's not on stage, but come on, there's got to be some kind of long-term accountability for all of his bad behavior, no?
Also starring Tony Iommi (also carrying over from "Black Sabbath The End of the End"), Geezer Butler (ditto), Adam Wakeman (ditto), Bill Ward, Sharon Osbourne, Paul McCartney (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Rudy Sarzo (ditto), Henry Rollins (last seen in "Lemmy"), Robert Trujillo (ditto), Tommy Lee, John Frusciante, Serj Terkanian, Zakk Wylde, Aimee Osbourne, Jack Osbourne, Kelly Osbourne, Louis Osbourne, Paul Osbourne, Jessica Hobbs, Tony Dennis, Ross Halfin, Billy Morrison, Mark Weiss, with archive footage of Randy Rhoads (also last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Vince Neil (ditto), Nikki Sixx (also last seen in "Lemmy"), Alan Hunter, Queen Elizabeth II (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World").
RATING: 5 out of 10 manginas
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