A few weeks back, I claimed the period from New Year's to Oscar Night was the most wonderful time of the year for movie geeks, what with all the Best-Of Lists and awards season festivities...but for movie AND music geeks (not to mention the small but powerful barbecue geek lobby), there is no better place or time than mid-March in sunny Austin, when the South-By-Southwest Festival unleashes 1,800 bands from around the world on the capital of Texas, along with several zillion filmmakers, wannabes, hucksters, tourists, web designers, Industry sleazeballs and bloggers (including yours truly, my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce and, heck, maybe half the Nerve.com staff for all I know...see you at the Yard Dog, guys)!

Thus, in celebration of SXSW’s yearly combo of films & fretboards, your pals here at the Screengrab are launching a two-week tribute to OUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC!

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There's one great problem with making a concert film:  if the audience doesn't respond positively to the music, no amount of great filmmaking is going to save it.  Documentaries about bands are one thing; if there's a good story to tell, an audience might just forgive the band in the spotlight for making music they dont' particularly care for.  But in a concert film, with very little to contemplate but the action on stage, if the moviegoers aren't compelled by the music that's being made, that's pretty much all she wrote.  With some concert films, such as Woodstock, there's enough historical portent to the whole affair that it gets carried along; that film also had the benefit of multiple bands to take the pressure off.  With other films, such as the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, there's the power of a compelling story to alleviate the fact that you might not especially dig the Rolling Stones at their stage in their career:  what was going on all around them was more than enough to compensate for any distaste you might have for the music coming out of the speakers.  With Jonathan Demme's beautiful, moving, nearly perfect 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, though, Demme was taking a huge risk:  he presented no story, no history, no audience, no variance, no nothing:  just the pure experience of watching the Talking Heads play.

It could have been a disaster.  Although they were one of the most successful of the bands to come out of the New York punk scene (they even raised the money to shoot the film themselves), Talking Heads were, then as now, not to everyone's taste.  Their nervy, edgy blend of no wave, funk, and ice-cold electronic pop turned off a lot of people, as did lead singer David Byrne's otherworldly geekiness, which made him come across as even more alien than David Bowie, but with none of Bowie's cool.  And although the band, touring behind their then-new album Speaking in Tongues, went on to have a number of high-profile hits, at the time it was a big risk, both for them and for their record label, to sink so much money and time into a full-length concert documentary with no guaranteed audience.  But it wasn't a disaster:  Stop Making Sense was, and is, quite simply the greatest concert film ever made, the purest and simplest evocation imaginable of the sheer joy of watching a band at the top of their game play an amazing show in a live setting.  It's that rare exception to the rule:  even those who weren't particular fans of the Talking Heads found themselves instantly swept away by the sheer charisma and intensity of the performers.  The movie that Jonathan Demme made at such risk became the gold standard to which all concert films are held.

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Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week.  Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years.  Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another.  For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both.  If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive.   Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway.  While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball. 

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one.  Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles).  The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition:  that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience.  Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

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