Walking out of the Ryerson, I got right back into the line for the next screening: It Might Get Loud (tiff). I went from a crowd of teenage girls shrieking over Zac Efron to a crowd of middle-aged men bowing and scraping to Jimmy Page. Actually, that’s not fair. There were people of all age excited to see Jimmy Page, not to mention The Edge and Jack White.

The documentary was made by Davis Guggenheim, the same man who made An Inconvenient Truth and who, we found out last night, is married to Elisabeth Shue. Anyway, when the three guitarists entered the theatre there was a long standing ovation (the first of three on the night) with the exultations mainly centered on Jimmy, or Led Zeppelin in general*. It was a documentary about the electric guitar, and a very well-made one at that, centered around the three of them gathering on a sound stage to jam, but if you weren’t a rock and roll fan, there probably wasn’t much there for you. If you care about the history of these men and their careers it was very interesting, and if you like rock music it was an asskicking moment to see the three of them play nearly all of Zeppelin’s “In My Time Of Dying”, or to see Jack White make a guitar out of wood scraps and baling wire, or to see White and The Edge look on like little kids as Page played the intro to “Whole Lotta Love”, but make no mistake it was 97 minutes of hero-worship. If you like these guys and their music, and especially the guitar, you’ll like this documentary. If you don’t then you’ll likely find it, as Now Magazine put it, “just three guys sitting around stroking their precious phallic objects.”

B, but I’m a big Zeppelin and White Stripes fan

* Actually, I think that the first mention of John Bonham got a bigger cheer than The Edge did.

[tags]tiff, tiff08, it might get loud, jimmy page, jack white, the edge[/tags]