Christopher Hagen When you think of rock-stars you usually think of hard hitting guitar riffs, beer and all round fun. Wrong. SKOM shows you the true cost of being a metal legend, and holds back nothing when delivering serious emotion. The film shows Metallica at probably the worst time in their career. James is struggling with alcoholism, Jason has left the band, and the remaining members are fighting Napster over copyrighted music. Out of all their struggles, they decide to record a new album, with a new sound. Producer Bob Rock takes the bass duties for 'St Anger', and influences a lot of the musical direction. Due to their struggles, the band hire the services of renowned Psychotherapist Phil Towle. Throughout the film, we see Metallica in an entirely different light, we see their emotions. We see how much they can simultaneously love and hate each other dependent on their mood in that day. The film is hard to watch, and it will certainly sadden any Metallica fan because of the conflict between themselves and everyone around them. A must see for fans of not only heavy music, but music in general.

Sandcooler Of all words to describe this movie, sadness is probably the most accurate. We see Metallica as we've never seen them before, nothing would make you believe they used to be an awesome band. We see them slave for months and months on new material, going through depressions and fights and getting psychological help for their fear of failure. The sad thing is, listening to "St.Anger" just makes you realise it just really wasn't worth it. It's just a very bad, uninspired record. You can hear them forcing themselves, and that's never good. This is an interesting document, but it's also painful to watch, with Dave Mustaine's appearance as it's "highlight". The way it captures a band in desperation is truly brilliant.

bob the moo Despite bass player Jason Newsted leaving the band, Metallica hire empty army barracks in San Francisco to record their first studio album in years. At the same time they go into group therapy to try and resolve lingering issues between the band members and try and deal with any building issues before they get any bigger. This film follows them as they make that album, complete with disappearing members, infighting, bonding, rocking, suing Napster and other events.I'm not a Metallica fan although I used to listen to their stuff when I was in my teens and perhaps was angry enough to do something with it; now that I'm older and my anger has turned from the passionate kind to the "empty bitter husk" kind, metal doesn't really do it for me. However for some reason I thought this film seemed interesting enough to be worth a look. The on screen captions helps set the scene for those of us not au fait with the band and this approach continues across the film, which also helps keep the vast spread of time in context and keeps it together. Although this is useful and although I know there was about 1600 hours of material, this still could have been a little shorter – not because it was too long but mostly because it was a little baggy. That said it is still mostly very interesting although it will help if you care a jot about these people – if you don't then there is likely to be little for you here.For myself I thought it was interesting to get behind a group of multi-millionaires and see their issues and conflicts. This isn't to say that it is all about the fighting because it isn't, it is just a fairly interesting look at the personalities and the events of the past few years. The events provide a good frame although none of them are really gone into in detail and instead everything is given a general sweep. What forms the majority of the film is how the people are within these events. As such it is engaging without being fascinating and the guys vary between normal people, idiots, ego-heavy stars and star sprouting pretentious psycho-babble.Whether this is worth you watching I suppose depends on your view. For fans it will possibly be too short as they want as much of their band as they can get. For me these elements were interesting enough to be worth watching but perhaps not enough for the long running time. Regardless, this is interesting and worth a viewing just to see behind one of the biggest metal bands in the world.

jpelleg1 Some Kind of Monster is a brutal and honest documentary, which exposes the 2003 version of Metallica as 3 guys who have COMPLETELY lost touch with the scene they helped create. Jason Newstead perfectly sums up the current state of Metallica with a quote from an interview in 2003, "On all previous albums, Metallica sounded like leaders. On this one, they sound like followers."The film follows Metallica during the creation of what was billed to be the return-to-form, classic Metallica album, St. Anger. Instead, the world was delivered a misguided and un-administered(thanks Bob Rock) attempt at sounding like modern mainstream metal bands. Note the scene in which Lars tells Kirk that there should be no guitar solos on the album because he feels they've been "outdated." Lars requested this because it was the trend at the time amongst modern "metal" bands. Kirk even calls him out on this.During the mid to late 90's, the general public seemed to have a rather low opinion of Metallica due to the Napster lawsuit, high ticket prices, and poor album output. This film provides some explanation as to what (and more importantly, WHO) were the internal causes of Metallica's fan backlash. The answers of which should come as no surprise to most Metallica fans, but the degree of ignorance amongst the decision makers in Metallica's "Inner Circle", still comes off as a shock with every viewing.As a further testament to the film, you almost feel like you are not watching a documentary at all. Rather, you feel like you are watching a tragic drama, full of anti-heros who are so pre-occupied battling their own demons that they cannot come together as normal human beings to solve the simplest of problems. It is hard to feel sorry for any of these "characters", considering the massive levels of both professional and personal success the have all had. Instead, I found myself being mad at them for almost forgetting their roots. Their communication internally is so forced and fake... yet at the same time, THIS IS REAL. These interactions REALLY happened. There was no script. This really was a documentary.Some Kind of Monster gives all of us all a behind the scenes look at the internal decision process of a struggling multi-platinum metal band. It is a privileged sight that most people never get to see regarding their favorite band... but for most Metallica fans, this intense look is sure to be upsetting.