R.E.M. – In View – The Best Of R.E.M. 1988-2003 DVD – Rain Phoenix , Mike Mills

A collection of REM’s greatest hits such as ‘Everybody Hurts’ and ‘Man on the Moon’ and ‘Losing My Religion’.

In View is meant as a companion piece to REM’s best-of album, In Time, but it works well as a collection in its own right. A video history of some of the Athens, Georgia band’s biggest songs, its focus is firmly on the latter part their long career, with videos from Automatic for the People (“Everybody Hurts”, “Man on the Moon”, “Nightswimming”, “Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”), Out of Time (“Losing My Religion”), Monster (“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”), New Adventures in Hi-Fi (“E Bow the Letter”, “Electrolite”), Up (“Daysleeper”, “At My Most Beautiful”), and Reveal (“Imitation of Life”, “All the Way to Reno”). There are just two videos from their pre-breakthrough album Green (“Orange Crush” and “Stand”), though admittedly they shied away from making videos early in their career. Still, nobody can fault the presentation of In View. Of course, the promos are spectacular, if occasionally too self-consciously artsy, but there’s even more here. There are three live videos, recorded in Trafalgar Square, and six additional, rarely seen videos (“Tongue”, “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us”, “New Test Leper”, “Bittersweet Me”, “Lotus”, “I’ll Take the Rain”). Best of all, though, is the ability to watch them with or without brief, introductory interviews with the band, which give a window into REM’s ongoing appeal: as talented as they are, they’re still refreshingly human pop stars. –Robert Burrow