U23D
So I'm in the IMAX theater on a Sunday at 2:30pm and I'm surrounded by families with kids. We all have been handed 3D glasses for the feature presentation which is about to begin - a 3D film done during U2's last tour. I have my M&Ms, my friend has her gummy bears, and we are ready to go.

While I love movies and am learning to love music biography films, I don't think I've ever managed to sit through an entire concert movie - rock or otherwise. It feels like watching televised golf to me; lacking the palpable energy of the crowds, time seems to slow down. I would never have chosen U23D for a Sunday afternoon activity, but I was invited and decided to tag along. Little did I know it would change my life.

Shot in Argentina (?) in a soccer stadium of screaming fans, the film opens to Vertigo and some seriously close-up shots of Bono and his pores. Seemed that right off the bat, the 3D filled in that gap in other concert films I'd seen - this was like being there only I had a better seat than I'd ever had gotten had I attended a live show. I was rockin' along. This was cool.

As it went on, though, the setlist and performance turned increasingly political I can't say this made me uncomfortable exactly, but it made me look around to see if it was making anyone else uncomfortable. Apparently not. I guess this is U2, I guess this is what people have come to expect from U2. And it was from there that my train of thought left the station.

U2 is a pretty amazing band but they have never really been at the top of my list until the last year or two. If I consider what has grabbed my attention of late, a few things come to mind. I can't say their music is getting better per se, but it's not getting worse as often happens with bands who somehow manage to stay together. Only a few bands in history, that I can think of anyway, have managed to produce an entire catalog with both popular and critical merit. Artists often endure but the synergy of a band is far more ephemeral.

There's also the amazing work Bono is doing on behalf of, well, the entire third world. I read about Bono and Bill Gates in a cover article in Time Magazine a few years back. I know Bill Gates as a force to be reckoned with - everyone who lives in our fair city does. But the article made me even more curious about the other endeavors of a celebrity artist who not only could make this kind of transition in the public eye but who actually bothered to.

But the real driving factor which superceeds both of these loftier considerations is that my boyfriend of the last year and a half is a huge fan. As a result, the band has just been more visible for me and I've learned a little more about them. The more I learn the more impressed I am. This film was the first time I'd seen a concert of theirs up close and in scoping out the sweat and the pores it occurred to me that frankly these guys aren't all that attractive and even as raging young rockers... they STILL weren't that attractive. They definately have style and stage presence. They can write and perform music. They have attitude. But none of that really hides the fact that they are just four plain-looking dudes from Ireland.

And on top of that, now they are OLD plain-looking dudes. Yet somehow they have enough market appeal to be popping off the screen at me in my Sunday-afternoon IMAX theater.

You could make a case that the Rolling Stones are in the same category. I guess in their day they might have been lookers but these days the magic of what has been is what people pay big money to see. And what has been for the Rolling Stones was the rock-n-roll dream. Big shows, big fortune and fame, big drugs and sex... and it carries into the music they sing to us. We listen to and love the Stones because they are raucuous, hormone-driven, crazy, rockers who represent everything most of us are not. Even as they rock into their 60s, we are still impressed not just with the music but by the fact that they survived their addictions and the sheer insanity of the lives they created. They rest of us couldn't have survived, but the fact that they did makes them even larger than life.

But now we're back to U2 and what are they selling us as aging rockers? They are married, with visible wedding bands in the film. They are sober, water bottles on stage. And they are devout; the rosary on Bono's mike stand does not hang there in a Steven Tyler sort-of-way.

But as if all of that wasn't enough, they are preachy. Well, as preachy as you can be without being actually preachy, anyway. Singing about peace and tolerance and unity, rather than angst or pain or anger.

All of this flies in the face of everything America wants to see in their pop stars, or so we'd think. Look at Brittany. People are eating up her heartache of too-big, too-early success. Yet U2 tours in the US and sells out venue after venue with tickets at $200 a pop and people not only love it, but they love it so much they'll come out to see the tour in the IMAX theater in 3D on a Sunday afternoon and bring their kids. Kids! To a concert that includes a segment of someone reading the human rights treaty developed by the United Nations.

Perhaps, I thought, it's U2's days-of-yore hipness and their early albums that continue to fill the $200 seats. But the soccer stadium on the screen in front of me is not filled with yuppies like me; it's filled with beautiful, shining young faces and they are singing every word of every song in a language that is not even their native tongue.

So what does that mean to me? Why did it change my life? We all think of ourselves as limited by who we are, where we come from, and what we look like. Over the last few years I've seen the first hint of crows' feet around my eyes, I've made adjustments to my diet for health reasons, and I really can't drink these days. I spend ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and money trying to reduce the impact of my presence on the planet. I listen to NPR. I read the materials and make educated voter decisions. I have a corporate job and my last real adventure was two years ago. Perhaps scariest of all is that I have grown my hair out because it's easier and I have given up on high-heeled shoes. They hurt.

This has all led to a lot of woe-is-me. It's official - I'm middle aged. I've seen my best days; I'll never be a model, or a TV star or anything that involves a lens, really. And by the Debbie Gibson Standard, I'm nearly 15 years behind (she was 16 when her first hit was in the Top 40).

But as I sat there eating my M&Ms, I realized if those guys, U2, can go from bad-ass rockers to middle-aged family-men and still sell out stadiums in Argentina while singing songs about the assignation of a civil rights leader and a beauty queen of a war-torn country... surely there's something out there for courdroy-clad, diet-conscious me.

Thanks, gentlemen. Awesome set.