Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

I love Leonard Cohen. So when my friends said they'd netflix'd this film, I thought it would be worth watching. However, I definitely had some feelings of trepidation when I found out that it was comprised mostly of other bands doing covers of Leonard Cohen songs. While I am actually a big fan of the Jeff Buckley version of "Hallelujah," that's pretty much where the love ends.

Hearing Cohen talk about life, poetry, and his personal experiences (wait, that falls under life, doesn't it?) was heart-felt and charming, if not badly edited, but the poignancy was somewhat lost in the distracting, weird flashing red dots that kept floating across the screen at every single transition. Stylistically, it was cheesy and overdone.

To make matters worse, Bono and "The Edge," of U2 take up entirely too much screen time for my taste, and are as pretentious as ever.

A few good performances, but over all, pretty lackluster. The only good thing about it was seeing Leonard talk, though I don't feel like it was edited well. If you like the bands/singers that are featured (Rufus Wainwright, for example) then you might enjoy it. But if you are a not inclined towards song covers then you might want to skip this one and hold out for a documentary where Cohen sings.