‘Squaring the Circle’ Film Review: Music Meets Image in Stylish Rock Documentary

thewrap.com:

second band, doesn’t have a terribly interesting cover, but it does make for a pointed example of how ridiculous rock excess extended even to album cover shoots in the ’70s and ’80s.While you might expect an image-savvy director like Corbijn to play up the visual over the verbal, he also knows that an agency as offbeat as Hipgnosis deserves a lot of storytelling.

The company grew out of a London party that ended in a drug bust that doubled as a (non-romantic) meet-cute between a pair of eccentric and artistic young men, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell.Po, as everyone called Powell, was an aspiring photographer, Storm some kind of mad genius with an eye for design and a huge stubborn streak. (One of the most amusing sequences in “Squaring the Circle” finds wide variety of friends and acquaintances talking about how difficult and unpleasant Storm could be; when a legendary jerk like Roger Waters talks about what a jerk you are, you’re probably not winning any Mr.

Congeniality awards.)But Po, who is still alive and at the center of the film, and Storm, who died in 2013, were in it to make art, not friends (though the two of them, particularly Po, managed to do both).