U2 : 360° AT THE ROSE BOWL |
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Label : Interscope / Mercury Venue : The Rose Bowl, Passadena, California, USA Recording Date : October 25, 2009 Length : 131 minutes NTSC : 16:9 Release Date : June 3, 2010 Review (AllMusic) : This DVD captures U2's 2009 performance at the Rose Bowl, which was simultaneously broadcast over the Internet via YouTube. With more than 97,000 fans present, the show set a U.S. record for the highest-attended concert by a single headlining act. No one is better equipped to handle such a massive audience than U2, and the band runs through 130 minutes of new songs and old standbys during the course of this show, playing beneath a giant, groundbreaking stage nicknamed "The Claw." It's a visually arresting performance - there are moving bridges connecting the main stage to a circular ramp, not to mention a giant video screen that expands and contracts itself - but the band continually draws your focus back to the music, which is the real highlight of this DVD. Although most die-hard fans watched the concert during its free YouTube stream - which, incidentally, was the website's highest stream in history - the group also released a tangible version of 360° at the Rose Bowl in several different formats, including standard DVD, Blue-ray, and a deluxe box-set. Review (Wikipedia) : U2 360° at the Rose Bowl is a 2010 concert film by Irish rock band U2. It was shot on 25 October 2009 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, during the band's U2 360° Tour. The Rose Bowl concert featured a sold-out crowd of 97.014 people, breaking the US record for single concert attendance for one headline act. It was live streamed over the Internet via YouTube, and was later released on DVD and Blu-ray on 3 June 2010 in the United States, 7 June in the United Kingdom, and 8 June in Canada. It received generally positive reviews from critics. The U2 360° Tour was a worldwide concert tour by the Irish rock band U2, launched in support of the group's 2009 album No Line on the Horizon. The tour was designed by Willie Williams, who has worked on every U2 tour since 1982. Mark Fisher was the architect. The tour featured a 360-degree configuration, with the stage being placed closer to the center of the stadium's field than usual. Williams had been toying with ideas for 360-degree stadium staging for U2 for a number of years, and presented sketches of a four-legged design to the group near the end of their Vertigo Tour in 2006. The inspiration for the "spaceship-on-four-legs" design, nicknamed "the Claw", came from the landmark Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. The initial tour dates were formally announced in March 2009. U2 played 44 shows in 2009, with an additional 38 concerts scheduled for 2010. The performance in Pasadena was the group's penultimate concert of 2009. The 25 October 2009 concert in Pasadena, California was streamed live on U2's YouTube channel, the first time a concert was streamed live on YouTube. The feed was initially set to be restricted to 16 countries but was later made available worldwide. Over 10 million viewers streamed the concert, making it the largest streaming event in the website's history. The shoot was directed by Tom Krueger, who had previously worked with the band on the film U2 3D. Following the success of U2 3D, show director Willie Williams asked Krueger to design the photography and video coverage for the U2 360° Tour. Originally 13 cameras were used for filming close-ups during the tour; however, Kruger added additional cameras for the Rose Bowl concert, resulting in a total of 27 cameras for the shoot. The additional cameras were used for crane shots and capturing footage of the audience. The show's attendance reached 97.014 people, breaking the US record for single concert attendance for one headline act, a mark U2 previously held. |