WhatÂ’s Going On: The Life & Death of Marvin Gaye & Greatest Hits: Live In Â’76 (CollectorÂ’s Edition) New Mexico

What's Going On: The Life & Death of Marvin Gaye & Greatest Hits: Live In '76 (Collector's Edition)

Marvin Gaye

Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2008

REVIEW BY: Kenny McGuane

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 05/27/2008

Popumentaries have really gained momentum in the last ten years. It seems like there’s a new documentary about pop and/or rock icons released every week, though most of them skip the theater and come straight to DVD.

That’s because the overwhelming majority of them aren’t very good.

We’re still waiting for a great Marvin Gaye documentary. Even a decent one would be nice. I mean, he’s just as deserving of a high-budget Hollywood treatment as Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, perhaps more; after all, Charles and Cash don’t have albums that regularly show up in the Top 10 of “greatest albums of all time” listings.

Eagle Vision Entertainment has bundled two of their Marvin Gaye releases into one collector’s edition DVD. The marketing phrase “collector’s edition” implies that there is something unique about this package, but there isn’t. They’ve just combined two previously released DVDs into one box. This set includes their 2005 – mediocre at best – documentary What’s Going On: The Life & Death of Marvin Gaye and a 1976 concert filmed at the Edenhalle Concert Hall in Amsterdam on Gaye’s first European tour called Greatest Hits: Live In ’76.