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Andrew Osborne — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:12:00 GMT

Andrew Osborne Reviews T.V. Party: The Documentary

Phil Nugent's "Don't Forget The Flaming Arrows!"

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Scott Von Doviak Reviews Sons Of A Gun

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Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Marx Brothers

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In a provocative piece in the Guardian, Danny Leigh uses the ongoing "Punk 'n Pie" program at BAM to ask, where are the great punk movies? At BAM, as in many a retrospective or critical study, punk movies are movies that deal with punk music as a subject, whether as performance movies or biopics or documentaries or anthropological field trips, or movies that are populated by celebrities and hangers-on from the "scene", such as the now-forgotten Downtown detritus cranked out by '80s filmmakers such as Beth B. and Scott B. and the young Susan Seidelman. Leigh writes that "quite apart from the questionable merits of the films concerned, I've always thought there was something grimly pedestrian about the way such a firecracker cultural moment should be represented by something so drab as a canon at all. And yet wheeled out every so often for an audience of ebbing nostalgiacs are the same old dusty reels, those already mentioned joined by or interchanged with the grim Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, cosy Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, and/or the various filmic portraits of the Clash, principally the near-unwatchable curate's egg Rude Boy and the Joe Strummer tribute The Future Is Unwritten."

Mind you, it was ever thus with rock music, which in its first flush of exploitable excitement was packaged in a shelf's load of movies that collected performances ranging from the leading acts of the time, bound together with the flimsiest of connective tissue. To see what this kind of movie might look like if it were good--which is to say, if it were made by people who lacked contempt for the music and its audience--the world would have to wait for 1978's American Hot Wax, made at a time when its biggest names, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, were, in rock 'n' roll terms, practically senile. (In fact, one of the best ways to tell these movies apart from those made by the greatest punk bands is that the punks, coming along after the official invention of pop culture, tended to get involved with projects that were self-consciously, conceptually screwy. Not content to make a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, the Ramones agreed to make what was supposed to be a cheeky put-on of a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, though independent taste tests found it hard to tell it apart from the real, semi-spoofy thing. The idea behind Rude Boy, featuring the more politically minded the Clash, seems to have been to let the guys the fans wanted to see play second fiddle to uncharismatic roadie Ray Gange, the designated stand-in for all the little people out there to whom the band's music means so much. As the hilarious but seemingly well-intended Wikipedia entry for Gange notes, "In his one and only well-known film appearance, Gange displayed a variety of expressions, although some have pointed out that they all look somewhat similar to the one at the start of the film which shows him waking up and looking out the window.")

There are some great rock performance films, but it's hard not to feel a special affectionate respect for those movies that somehow come across as "rock movies" to their core because they seem to embody something essential to the spirit of the music, even if the music in the movies scarcely captures its essence. Thus Walter Hill's The Warriors is a better "rock movie" than Jailhouse Rock, even if nobody in his right mind thinks that Arnold McCullers's version of "Nowhere to Run" deserves to shine the shoes of Martha and the Vandellas'. And the '50s mutli-performer rock film that holds up best today is Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, not because Tashlin was especially sympathetic to the music but because a man who'd cut his teeth putting Bugs Bunny and Jerry Lewis through their paces had a built-in appreciation of that which was not culturally respectable. (Truth be told, the singing cast member who seems to elicit the highest degree of respect from the director is Julie London, who was more likely to be recruited by NASA than she is to ever be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Leigh argues that "if a film has any aspiration at all to being 'punk' then it cannot be about a band - any more than surrealist cinema can be represented only by biopics of Dalí and Breton...Indeed, it's one of the stranger aspects of British punk films that, if it's debatable whether any ever had anything genuinely punk about them, it's certain that none ever captured the sense of punk. Not punk as a mere footnote in the history of guitar rock, but punk as a democratic shifting underfoot best expressed by the misfits in the audience." As examples of films that do catch hold of that snarling spirit, Leigh nominates the Marx Brothers circa Horse Feathers (featuring Groucho's anarchist anthem "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"), Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue (which takes its title from Neil Young's tribute to Johnny Rotten, and which a not-yet-detoxed Hopper took over directing after being cast as the heroine's daughter), "the anti-corporate self-immolation of the Monkees' Head; the volatile brevity of Punch Drunk Love and the outsider portraiture of John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet." He also drops the name of Eraerhead, and there he will get no argument from me.

Punk shares affinities with the concept of "termite art" championed by the late Manny Farber, and traces of the stuff itself can be found in many of his favorites, from the ratty, volatile action films of such directors as Don Siegel and Sam Fuller to the art-conscious apocalypse of Godard's Weekend, which suggests both the splenetic fury of bands such as the Pistols and the icier, critical-intellectual stance of Gang of Four and Wire. (There are echoes of the latter approach in both Alan Clarke's Elephant and more recent films by Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes.) The Ramones recognized Todd Browning's Freaks as kindred spirits, leading the way to the pre-multiplex films of John Waters and also to Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Re-Animator, and all those midnight flicks that were born with one foot in the art house and one in the gutbucket. And of course the aforementioned Luis Bunuel anticipated punk both with the Surrealist shock effects of his earliest work and his unflinching depiction of those clinging to the bottom of society in such films as Los Olvidados. Although a movie that seems punk to its core still comes along every so often--Matthew Bright's Freeway leaps to mind--it's generally easier to think of movies that anticipate the movement than movies made since 1976 or so that reflect its ideals, probably because nothing kills the spirit quicker than deliberately straining to do it justice.

The case of Alex Cox, who probably worked as hard to create a punk cinema as any director working in the last twenty-five years or so, may be instructive. In his first feature, the 1984 Repo Man, he delivered the ultimate sick joke of Los Angeles punk, complete with a self-parodying appearance by the Circle Jerks and a tossed-off homage to Kiss Me Deadly. In Straight to Hell and Walker, he exposed the connections between punk filmmaking and the dusty fever dreams of Sergio Leone and the Sam Peckinpah of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a director who never saw a scene of blood-soaked carnage that he didn't figure could be improved with just a few more buzzing flies. But when Cox set out to deliberately recreate the hallelujah days of British punk in Sid and Nancy, he made a soft, nostalgic, dishonestly self-pitying film with speeches about the music's importance and Gary Oldman's sweetly sleepy, harmless Sid Vicious. His closest American counterpart may be Penelope Spheeris, whose Decline of Western Civilization documentaries had a sharp, smart edge entirely missing from her attempts to take punk mainstream in such films as Suburbia (1984), a standard-issue misunderstood youth film with a Mohawk, and the highly regrettable Dudes (1987), which set some kind of record for toxic obnoxiousness just by sticking Jon Cryer and Flea in the same film frame. Part of the thrill of punk is that it tends to pop its head out when and where you least expect it. Well, not literally where you absolutely least expect it, because there's not a lot of it in Spheeris's 1994 version of The Little Rascals.

Ladies and Gentlemen, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains", Rediscovered Again

Phil Nugent — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Aaron Hillis in Spin documents the story behind Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, the '80s cult item that he terms, with some justice, "the missing link between punk and riot grrl." Stains was the brainchild of Nancy Dowd, who made her bones as a screenwriter in the late 1970s with Slap Shot and Coming Home. Punk was still a going concern when Dowd completed her script (originally called "All Washed Up") about some rebellious teenage girls whose bad attitudes and worse music briefly turn them into stars and role models for disaffected youth. The script fell into the hands of director Lou Adler, who had helped produce the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, brought The Rocky Horror Show to America, and then turned filmmaker with the first Cheech and Chong picture, Up in Smoke. Adler may have been looking for a new subculture to milk, but Dowd managed to bring in music journalist Caroline Coon to serve as the film's technical adviser, and the on-screen cast didn't lack for authenticity: Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Paul Simonon of the Clash were brought in to make a raucous noise behind an aspiring punk vocalist played by an unrecognizable, skinny young Ray Winstone, and Fee Waybill of the Tubes contributed a surprisingly moving performance as a has-been metal singer, whose features hang down as if to protest all the make-up he's slathered on them over the years. (According to Waybill, authenticity in many forms kept breaking out all over on the set, and he was usually on the wrong side of it. At one point the rough young Winstone, who was supposed to hit Waybill in a scene, failed to pull his punches and gave his co-star a black eye. On another occasion, an overly helpful prop man substituted the pretend cocaine that the characters were supposed to be snorting with the real thing--"And I hated coke. They cut, and Lou goes, 'Man, that looked so real!' Then we do the same thing from five or six different camera angles. The one and only time I ever snorted coke is on film, and I'm just whacked.") At the center of the movie, though, are Diane Lane, as the leader of the Stains, and Diane Ladd, as one of her bandmates. They were both barely in their mid-teens at the time. (The third Stain, Marin Kanter, disappeared from the movies after appearances in such out-of-the-way pictures as Alan Rudolph's Endangered Species and The Loveless, a fetishistic biker film co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow.)

The movie wrapped shooting in 1980, but a couple of years slipped by while Adler tinkered with it in the editing room. By that time, Dowd had decided to remove her name from the project, in part out of pique over sexist behavior on the set, and the movie's topical moment passed. By the time it started getting previewed in 1982, it looked, as Steve Jones put it, "corny." Without ever getting a proper theatrical release or being released to home video, it spent another three years slipping in and out of a few art theaters, but it really built up its cult reputation through appearances on late night cable TV. By the early 1990s, Courtney Love and such bands as Bikini Kill had taken it to their heart and proclaimed it a valuable training film for women who wanted to know what they could expect to deal with in the music business. Now that music clearances have been worked out, Stains fans have an imminent DVD release to look forward to, and Diane Lane, whose Oscar-nominated performance in 2002's Unfaithful helped cement her current role as a leading thinking person's sex symbol among respected American actresses shading forty, has a lost trinket from her raging youth to use to confuse her kids. "I was freaking out!" she recalls now. "The most poignant irony is that my daughter is going to be exactly the age I was when the DVD comes out. It's not shocking, just a little bit embarrassing that it happens to be your mom." The Spin article is worth checking out, not least because it includes another lost trinket, a "mini-documentary" about the movie that, unless my bleary eyes and bloodshot memory deceive me, is actually a 1999 segment from Split Screen, John Pierson's classic and much-missed indie-film-scene TV newsmagazine show for the IFC Channel. So when's that coming to DVD?