| Bullet In A Bible (CD/DVD, Jewel Case) | 
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| Artist: Green Day
Label: Reprise / Wea
Category: Music
List Price: $24.98
Buy Used: $5.00
You Save: $19.98 (80%)
New (45) Used (45) Collectible (2) from $5.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  158 reviews
Sales Rank: 4273
Format: Explicit Lyrics, Live
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.6
MPN: 49466
UPC: 093624946625
EAN: 0093624946625
ASIN: B000B8QF14
Release Date: November 15, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Tracks:
| • | American Idiot | | • | Jesus of Suburbia | | • | Holiday | | • | Are We The Waiting | | • | St. Jimmy | | • | Longview | | • | Hitchin' A Ride | | • | Brain Stew | | • | Basket Case | | • | King for a Day/Shout | | • | Wake Me Up When September Ends | | • | Minority | | • | Boulevard of Broken Dreams | | • | Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) |
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| Editorial Reviews:
From Amazon.co.uk
If you're wondering how Green Day managed to become the biggest punk band in the world, take a look at Bullet in a Bible. Recorded at their June 2005 two-night run at Milton Keynes National Bowl in England, this combined CD/DVD sees these former bong-hitting Californian dropouts embracing political activism, pantomime hilarity, and all the fripperies of a rock opera--and excelling at all three.The first half is essentially a run-through of the group's 2004 album American Idiot, complete with anti-American rabble-rousing and a set of barbed insults tossed back at the "rednecks" across the pond. That out of the way, the band careen into a sort of greatest-hits set, with the likes of "Longview" and "Hitchin' a Ride" sharing space with a brass-laden "King for a Day" that sees Billie Joe Armstrong prancing around the stage in crown and ermine cape, singing snatches of Lulu's "Shout" and Eric Idle's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." Tremendously silly, but Green Day have managed to figure out how to play it like showmen without resorting to juvenile puerility or morphing into corporate yes-men, and that's a way harder trick than it looks. --Louis Pattison
Album Description
Featuring Green Day's first live DVD, the CD + DVD Bullet in a Bible captures the explosive band on the biggest tour in its career, in support of the Grammy-winning, quadruple-platinum, #1 charting American Idiot punk-rock epic. From two performances filmed in June 2005 before 65,000 fans, both in Milton Keynes in England, to the DVD's documentary segments following the band members around that city as they visit a war museum and various pubs, and share in-depth insights on the making and meaning of American Idiot, Green Day is #1 with a Bullet in a Bible. DVD: Video of the performance with documentary behind-the-scenes footage
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| Customer Reviews: Read 153 more reviews...
Not bad but could've been better, in particular the DVD November 16, 2005
65 out of 79 found this review helpful
CD: 4.5 stars; DVD: 3.5 stars
At the conclusion of the ennormously successful "American Idiot" tour, Green Day now releases it's first full-length live album. To entice fans even more, this comes as a CD/DVD combo package.
First the CD: "Bullit in a Bible" (14 tracks, 65 min.) is evenly divided between 7 A.I. tracks and 7 selections from the past. The band sounds really tight and arena-sized, and the sound quality of the CD is outstanding. Favorite tracks for me include "Holiday", "Longview", "Brain Stew", "Basket Case", and "Wake Me Up When September Ends". At 65 min., why didn't they squeeze in two or three more songs, but in the end this is a very enjoyable performance. The DVD is another story altogether (the tracklist of the DVD is listed above in the Amazon listing). Two major complaints: rather than having the show in one section and the interviews with the band in another section, they are all intermixed, severely testing the continuity of the show. Even worse is the incessant editing of the show: the picture shifts to another angle just about every few seconds. I know this is the MTV age of short attention spans, but come on! After a while, it becomes quite annoying. Too bad, as Green Day is clearly at the top if its game musically.
In all, this is certainly not a "bad" CD/DVD combo, but it could've been even better and I know that I will not be playing the DVD all that much. But I'm glad to have the CD in my carousel!
 Is There A Better Live Band Still Touring Today?! November 29, 2005
45 out of 50 found this review helpful
You had to figure that Green Day couldn't let their biggest year, 2005, pass by without some sort of celebration. Their great come-back album, 2004's "American Idiot" was not only massively successful and dominant over the radio, but was easily the most interesting and inspiring piece of music to come out of that year as well. So, in comes "Bullet In A Bible," a DVD/CD set that covers Green Day's biggest show to date, a two-day concert at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes where they played to over 130,000 English fans.
The concert/documentary runs at about two-hours long, and spliced in between each song are interviews and behind the scenes footage that document Green Day's rise back to the top and the nervousness that comes with playing to such a large crowd. As far as the performance, the boys are on top of their game. I saw them back in April, and let me tell you: it was the best concert I have ever been to, and I have a hard time imagining any concert I go to in the future being that good. They play roughly the same set that they did for the U.S. "American Idiot" tour, with a few differences. One noticeable omission is their popular cover of Queen's "We Are The Champions." "She," "Maria" and "Knowledge," the song where they bring fans onstage to play, are also missing as well. But what is here is superb. The band blows through nearly the first half of the "American Idiot" album, saving "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams" for the encore, and then gets into some choice older material such as "Longview" and "Minority." "King For A Day" is fused with a cover of "Shout," which is just brilliant (although Billie skips the floor-humping here that he did for us). The final song, "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" has Billie Joe going solo with an electric guitar and freshening up a song that got played to death in it's day. It was worth buying this set just to have that version on the audio-CD that is included.
My only gripe with this performance/documentary is Samuel Bayer's direction. I love his videos, especially all he's done for Green Day, but he overdoes it with his direction for the concert. The cameras dart around way to fast, and he inserts so many unneccessary and distracting effects. He complicates something that should have been fairly simple and straight-forward: letting the viewer watch one of the best acts of our generation. But the fact remains, this is Green Day at their best. This concert is a monster, and they pack so much energy into each song, it's hard not to be moved. I was a little disappointed that more "American Idiot" stuff (i.e. Music videos, making-of) wasn't included, but I'm sure that stuff'll surface one day.
 A Great Set, Could Have Been Better November 15, 2005
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
I thought this was an excellent DVD/CD set. I just think it could have been A LOT better.
Packaging: 4/5
I would have preferred the set to come in a typical DVD sized case as opposed to a double CD album case. Personal preference, but I think it would look better on my DVD shelf like that. The packaging is nice though. I really like the clear sleeve encasing the cardboard album packaging. The interior packaging? We'll just say it fits with the title.
CD: 5/5
The live album is exactly what one would expect from a live recording. I really don't have much to say except that of everything in this set, it was the only thing I didn't have a complaint about.
DVD: 3/5
I'll start off with the bonus features - a photo gallery. Had some very lovely photos set to the instrumentals for Boulevard of Broken Dreams. All in all, rather boring. You couldn't navigate and it spent what felt like ages on each image.
The DVD itself. The editing was excellent. There were some real creative touches with camera angles that looked like they were lifted from an old television, overhead shots, every angle you could imagine in a widescreen format. Probably the smallest of my problems with the DVD was that the documentary was interlaced between each track so you'd get a song then some behind the scenes and interview footage. The documentary was excellent. It just should have been a bonus feature and not part of the concert. The way it is was rather jarring.
The show was excellent. Just not the best one to showcase the tour, to immortalise on DVD. At least not as the only release. There's many reasons for this, and I will go into all of them. First off, it was filmed at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes. For those unfamiliar with the locale, it is in England. I think it is a great locale for filming - plenty of space for the cameras, thus giving the ability to film a large crowd and have wide, sweeping shots of the stage and audience. The National Bowl has a capacity of around 100,000 spectators. The crowd Green Day performed for the day this was filmed? 65,000. Leaving a lot of open space that was visible and stood out in the wide, sweeping shots of the stage and audience.
Continuing with filming location, by choosing somewhere outside America, you're creating a COMPLETELY different emotional atmosphere for the show. American Idiot is a very highly charged album which reflects the post 9/11 political environment here in the United States. Not that Brits don't understand, because the US is obviously not the only place to have been affected by 9/11 or other terrorist attacks, it just isn't the same. Choosing to put out this UK performance rather than a US performance made the DVD more reminiscent of seeing them in 2002 on the Pop Disaster Tour rather than in 2005 on the American Idiot Tour.
I've listened to the live recording from Leeds from 2004. Excellent recording. Excellent show. I enjoyed it. I saw the AOL Live Webcast of ther show back in September or October. Excellent show, and I could feel the political tension in it. I couldn't quite feel it in this DVD. I saw them live this tour on September 11th. Four years after the attacks. I think of all the shows to be filmed for DVD, to really capture the essence of the American Idiot Tour, it should have been that show. Not because I was there, but because of how charged the atmosphere was. I don't think I need to explain any further on that reasoning.
I also believe that an indoor arena show woul have been better than an outdoor show. A lot of the lighting effects early on in the show were lot to the fact that it was still light outside. The audience wasn't as tightly packed. While I love that there was a crowd of 65,000 - it wasn't a sold out show. While an arena show might only have fit 18,000-22,000 it would have been a tightly packed 18,000-22,000. The show's lighting and pyrotechnics would not have been lost to the daylight.
But for everything that I thought could have been better, I still found the DVD an excellent purchase and enjoyable diversion.
The little band that could just did it . . . November 16, 2005
12 out of 17 found this review helpful
Yeah sure, so the setlist sucks. We all wanted "We are the Champions". Most of us wanted "Whatsername". I especially wanted "Letterbomb". But there again if I was picking the setlist, we'd have "Panic Song", "Densensitized", "C#(tion)", "Bab's Uvala Who?", "Road to Acceptance", "Android" and a bunch of other songs the majority of Green Day fans have probably never even heard of. Then there are other more, shall we say, obnoxious things. Pyrotechnics went out with spandex, didn't they? The choreography and Mike Dirnt's exaggerated moves sometimes look like they'd be better placed in a Bollywood musical. And then, of course, there's the mood-shattering inter-song featurettes and the dizzying array of ever-changing camera angles. I'm sure I'll have more gripes later too. In totality, though, "Bullet in a Bible" (bless that title, hands down one of rock's best ever) is an unmitigated triumph for Green Day fans everywhere. Just a couple of years earlier, this is a band even those of us diehards were telling ourselves to forget about. A lukewarm album, a meandering trajectory, nothing we could really get our hopes up about. Yet Green Day, that archetypal little band that could, rose to become the undisputed biggest band in the world. As I write this, they indeed are the champions. Bigger than U2. And "Bullet in a Bible" captures that very sweet moment when Billie Joe, Mike, and Tré are at the very cusp of realizing just what a monster they've given birth to, how important they all now are. It's clearly an ecstatic moment for them, and for those of us too who have followed this band throughout its journey over the undulating, unpredictable seascape of stardom. What is especially sweet about it is Green Day conquered the world only by embracing all that had built them up. "American Idiot" is, at its core, a quintessential punk album anchored in themes familiar enough to everyone who know enough about what punk is to not ever dare to define it. Those themes, borne out well in staples of the genre like Screeching Weasel's "Anthem for a New Tommorow", NOFX' "The Decline", and the gorgeous writings of Aaron Cometbus (see "The Cometbus Omnibus"), are illuminated brilliantly, put to amazing music reflecting the very best of punk rock, and woven together with a commitment to coherency that comes only with the true care you almost never see anymore. "American Idiot" was punk taking over the mainstream and transforming it, and not - as not has so rampantly been the case over recent years - the mainstream taking over punk and destroying it. That's a brilliant, beautiful thing. For there are kids everywhere who need punk. Not the music per se, but the self-reliance and the empowerment that it provides. With "American Idiot", Green Day brought not hope, but satisfaction with reality to millions of kids across the mindless sprawl of suburbia. "Bullet in a Bible" celebrates that in all of the glory it deserves. So the setlist is tepid, the choreography painfully contrived, and everything from the band uniforms to the fireworks is strikingly anachronistic. This ain't U2's "Zoo TV" either - for innovation in your entertainment, look elsewhere. For the revolution is not on the jumbotron, it's in the hearts and minds of the 130,000 people seeing this show and, particularly, in the 3 band members on stage. For me at least, that's a joy to watch.
 The biggest fake band the wrolds ever seen. December 2, 2005
12 out of 46 found this review helpful
Green Days "American Idiot" album (released 2004) is less of an artistic statement by a long mile than any of their previous records which seemed to be more about music than leaping around screaming "England!!" (meaning?) on stage and featuring a thousand explosions and ridiculously, an overdoing of their commercially successful album "American Idiot" songs, which we've heard a thousand times of Music Television and radio, which has been marketed directly to the safe and mainstream unadventurous audiences.
The Green Day of, hey 2002? They released a B Sides compilation called "Shenanigans", no one took any notice? Yet why in 2004 and 2005 everyone thinks "American Idiot" is the dogs bollix and they are suddenly so great, when for years before, no one gave a crap? And neither did Green Day.
Marketing - is your answer, this is'nt music! The fact that quotes such as "reclaims punks ambition" are laughable and so wide of the mark its a joke. Critics know absolutely nothing about music, well most of them oviously.
Green Day were'nt neccesarilly punk in the first place anyway, if you want punk go listen to "Sex Pistols" or "The Offspring", Green Day wrote melodic tunes "When I come around" "Warning" "She" "Redundant".
To some who don't even really enjoy music, these guys at the moment are the best thing since sliced bread, but it looks like they've gained a new audience that does'nt really count for anything.
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