Dig! XX movie review (2025) | Little White Lies

Dig! XX review – the orig­i­nal ver­sion is still the best

21 Mar 2025 / Released: 21 Mar 2025

Two young men with intense expressions, one gesturing forcefully.
Two young men with intense expressions, one gesturing forcefully.
4

Anticipation.

One of the great music docs of the ’00s returns for a 20th birthday tour.

4

Enjoyment.

The base film is still so entertaining that the additional material doesn’t get in the way too much.

3

In Retrospect.

Maybe one for nostalgic fans, but the streamlined original version is still the best.

Ondi Tim­o­n­er revis­its her clas­sic 2004 rock doc with an extend­ed ver­sion that doesn’t add much to the great­ness of the original.

This 20th anniver­sary refit/​remaster of 2004’s cult rock- shock-doc Dig! proves that no amount of inad­vis­able retroac­tive tin­ker­ing can dimin­ish the qual­i­ty of a core prod­uct that’s this good. It tells of the supreme­ly bizarre, large­ly man­u­fac­tured rival­ry between two 90s indie rock dar­lings: The Dandy Warhols and The Bri­an Jon­estown Mas­sacre. Well, from the lat­ter per­spec­tive, it’s more just the band’s loopy, self-destruc­tive and com­i­cal­ly artic­u­late front man, Anton New­combe who, despite his pro­fessed ideals of artis­tic puri­ty, can’t seem to stop tor­pe­do­ing his own career through mis­ad­ven­ture and… well, just being an Olympic- sized ass­hat. The Dandies, it tran­spires, just hap­pen to be an easy tar­get for the blame.

Revis­it­ing the film and you could almost say that New­combe out­does all three of Spinal Tap mem­bers when it comes to fir­ing out lop-sided rock wit­ti­cisms and overblown gloats, and the film ver­i­ta­bly sings when­ev­er he’s in front of the cam­era. This souped-up ver­sion adds around 30 mins of new footage, as well as addi­tion­al nar­ra­tion by avun­cu­lar BJM tam­bourin­ist, Joel Gion. Yet there’s noth­ing real­ly new here, unless you want­ed to see a ver­sion of this film with a pre­fixed Dave Grohl PSA and a new end­ing which shows how the two bands end­ed up being great mates, and all this mad­ness is water under the bridge? No, thought not…

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