2 out of 5

Directed by: Craig Kureck

‘Sunshine for Shady People’s back cover blurb mentions ‘interviews, live shows, and personal footage,’ and that’s all here, in this collection of footage from 1997 to 2003, covering show bits and some casual interviews (at shows, so the sound quality is what it is), and band-hanging-out footage, but the information offered is truly scant – a few printed lines of text setting up whatever tour the group was on, and perhaps 5 minutes total of chatting during a 30 minute runtime. And as a road document, it’s not uninteresting, showing the difference between the normal-ish group members and their raucous live shows, and capturing blips of the dredges of touring life – vans, hotels, club bathrooms – but it’s also, er, pretty unnecessary, with apologies to band member Craig Kureck’s piecing together of it all, which I’m sure was a chore. It’s really just that the thing could be boiled down to even less than those 5 minutes of dialogue, given that some of that is just wandering chatting, and one clip of a wild show isn’t so drastically different from others across that period. Plus, I gotta say: this is a shit way to experience the band live, which goes for the bevy of live footage extras that’s included. This is a group that I’m sure many would say got burned into our brains because of their live show, and you’re getting handheld footage by people in the pits, with completely garbled sound quality. Yes – you see the chaos, but how much of an example of that do you need?

Sunshine for Shady People is nice for sort of placing AoR in context of the Fort Thunder music scene, and getting a sense for how relatively normal things were – that, y’know, they were just a band, doing their thing. But given that they were just a band, doing their thing, there’s not all that much to see in these 30 minutes, and beyond seeing the intensity of their performances, the sound quality doesn’t really make this a fun listen. I appreciate this being put together, but it’s probably not required viewing, even for fans.