old punks web zine
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Movies and Video, Part IV

Sid And Nancy to XTC: Best Hits

Sid And Nancy - (video) (1986): What has eight arms and kills its girlfriend? Squid Vicious! Get it?! That joke kills every time. Zing!! Seriously, punks have a soft spot for dead losers whose only talents were public stupidity and self-destruction. The big three are GG Allin, Darby Crash, and the Elvis of punk idiocy -- Sid Vicious. Writer/Director Alex Cox (Repo Man) filmed this "tragic, brutal love story" about Sid & his American pin-cushion Nancy Spungen, and in many ways this is a great film. I am turned off by any attempt to turn these two pathetic fools into tragic heroes.

Sid Vicious was considered retarded even by his friends. He was a violent alcoholic. He couldn't play bass and was in the Sex Pistols only for shock value. He almost single-handedly gave early UK punk its violent reputation. He loved to throw glasses and utensils at people's heads. He also may have invented pogo dancing. Nancy Spungen as a heroin addict and a groupie. She was so annoying everyone hated her. She did to The Pistols what Yoko Ono did to The Beatles.

On the plus side this is truly a major motion picture. The acting by the two leads is amazing! Gary Oldman as Sid gives the kind of brain-dead performance that usually wins Oscars. Chloe Web is even better, completely over the top without chewing the scenery. It’s method acting at its best. The cinematography and set design are also first rate. The scene where Nancy pleads with her parents for drug money must be rewound and seen again. Her transition from manipulative liar to panicked, screaming junkie is right there. I've ever been a junkie, but it scared the hell out of me to watch it.

On the minus side, supporting actors were poorly cast. I've heard rednecks do a better English accent than the bloke playing Johnny Rotten. He's also too plump. The guy playing Paul Cook looks about fourteen years old. Malcolm McLaren's character is more subdued, which means only 1/2 way to a full Johnny Rotten imitation. Characters and situations have to be established quickly so there's a rush of punk clichés that make punks look dumb as bricks. Maybe it has to be that way to quickly establish a mood, but punks haven't looked this stupid since the punk episode of "Quincy".

Sid And Nancy exists somewhere between 1945's The Lost Weekend and the more recent Leaving Las Vegas. Sid & Nancy are portrayed as doomed lovers spiraling down life's drain, paddling along with the current. I didn't see beauty, just two morons who found each other and helped pull the other down that much faster. Sid is laughingly portrayed as an innocent soul. In reality he was a violent cretin. Nancy is the hurt little girl. If Nancy ever got in touch with her "inner child" she'd sell it into prostitution for drug money. The Malcolm character says of Sid, "Sidney's more than a mere bass player. He's a fabulous disaster. He's a symbol, metaphor. He embodies the dementia of a nihilistic generation. He's a fugging star!" I think McLaren let Sid into the Pistols because he expected the band to have the same shelf life as his trendy line of clothing.

The second half of the film runs out of steam once it veers from the Sex Pistols history it worked so hard to recreate. The portrayal of real punk scenesters isn't great but it's better than watching Sid & Nancy die slowly inside and out. The Circles Jerks and Iggy Pop are listed in the credits but I don't remember seeing them in the film. Joe Strummer of The Clash contributed soundtrack music and sings the movie's theme song (and original title) "Love Kills". Joe and Sid were good friends till the end, and I wonder what he thought of the film. Johnny Rotten hated Sid & Nancy, and if I was him I'd feel the same way. The guy who plays him looks more like Danny Bonaduce than Mr. Green-Teeth himself. Courtney Love is here too, playing a junkie (!) and mumbling her way toward a SAG union card. Do I like this movie? To be honest, I have no idea.

Sin City (DVD review): Sin City is the dumbest movie I've seen in a good long while. It's Sado-Noir. Oooo, I just made that up. Now I'll scat for you: skeep bop boop, a flopity snoop.. Yeah!!!!!

Style is not substance when it's made up entirely of cliché. Comic books are for kids and the harder you try to prove they're not, the more it's proven they are. I own 12,000 of them, that's right, twelve thousand, so craps, boxcars and big bennies!

Robert Rodriguez and co-director/comic book dude Frank Miller channel one-scene "special guest director" Quentin Tarantino and his scumbagio aesthetic into a digital world where men are psychotic and women are whores, where what's real is the worst of what's possible, because that's the real reality, man!

Harry Potter is Hannibal Lecter and Freddy Krueger. Bruce Willis is good. It's nice to see Rutger Hauer work, and it was brave of Mickey Rourke to appear sans makeup and prosthetics. I kid, I kid. I kid because I love. He's the best part of the movie.

Do you want bad dialogue? Well, do ya?

It's going to be blood for blood and by the gallon. These are the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days. They're back!

I already have killed you, you jerk! Wise up! But even though it feels like Niagara Falls down there, you'll be a damn long time dying and I can make it quick, or I can make it worse.

My warrior woman. My Valkyrie. You'll always be mine, always and never. Never. The Fire, baby. It'll burn us both. It'll kill us both. there's no place in this world for our kind of fire. Always and never. If I have to die for you tonight, I will.

I wish someone would make a movie using stories from The Spirit comic books. The leadcharacter is secondary to the stories and mood. Now there's violent noir with grace, humor and style. Skeep bop boop, indeed.

SLC Punk (video) (Columbia/TriStar/Sony Picture Classics): Is this really a major motion picture? It has a budget over 47 dollars and name actors including Annabeth Gish and Matthew Lillard as Stevo, the narrator and lead of the story. It's hard to believe this came out of a major studio since it explores punk rock in depths usually reserved for public access TV. It has more than enough flash and gusto to appeal to a wider audience, but the themes and dialogue can be as esoteric as Lyndon LaDouche's theories on economic policy. On the other hand, maybe punk's anarchy and poser shtick are now universal themes. The film works on a few levels and I vacillate on how I really feel about it. I give it three out of four blue mohawks since it does a number of things well, but I can and will gripe about that missed fourth mohawk until you ask unkindly that I stop.

SLC Punk is a Coming Of Age film, where a young person (or persons) makes the painful transition from childhood to adulthood via a series of angst ridden bouts with Reality. SLC Punk, while a comedy, is more nonchalantly nihilistic than you'd expect. It's a bizarro combination of A Clockwork Orange and "Clarissa Explains It All". The film opens with Stevo's narration on how he hates rednecks. Before you know it, he and his pal Heroin Bob are giddily pummeling two unsuspecting rednecks with pipes. A number of scenes present the main characters as sociopaths. If the intent is to show relatively decent, normal, troubled yet likeable and vulnerable kids struggling to cope with their screwy surroundings, SLC Punk fails repeatedly.

It's obvious SLC Punk is director/screenwriter James Merendino's personal views on punk, the evolution of personal philosophy, and growing up in Salt Lake City. His arguments are direct, thought out and complete. Also apparent is how he wrote this movie from an outline of lists made of every major punk issue, every SLC punk issue, every SLC repressive Mormon issue and every personality type he's come across in his days as a punk. I'll bet the house Stevo is Merendino.

SLC Punk has many thorough yet slightly overly scripted scenes that relate to scenarios faced by punks. On the subject of American punks who pretend to be British, Stevo comments directly to the camera, "To me, England was nothing more than a big, fugging, American state, like North Dakota or Canada." Stevo/Merendino also tackles punk fashion, posers, punk's origins, and all 4,000 implications of the word anarchy. He wrestles with anarchy as the peaceful, workable philosophy its followers like to think it is, and the self-destructive and violent ways it's actually applied in real life.

Stevo is an honors student with rich, new age parents who encourage his freedom but are also a little concerned. Will he get over his punk phase of rebellion against his parents and repressive society, go to law school and become part of the evil system? Will he grow up or forever dwell in punk's self-delusional utopia of anarchy? Will he learn valuable lessons from constantly analyzing his own life and watching his peers screw up royally? Well, Duh?!

Summer Phoenix puts Stevo in his place by pointing out "You want to be an individual, right? You look like you're wearing a uniform. I mean, you look like a ‘punk’. That's not rebellion, that's fashion". This sounds like every fifth letter to punk zines. I'm not giving anything away by saying Stevo decides to drop the anarchy pose and go to law school. It's up to the viewer to decide if it's a rationalization or a higher truth when he concludes "There's no future in anarchy" and "You can do a hell of a lot more damage inside the system than outside of it." Is Stevo a poser? I believe if you want to squat, that's fine, just don't bitch you have neither money nor prospects. Nobody owes you diddly if you insist on constantly pooping your own pants. Punk's not a political party or religion; it's a form of music. If you think punk demands you to drop out of society, that's your problem. The conclusions of SLC Punk are substantiated by the fact that your average punk fan for at least the last two decades is fifteen years old.

The production values of SLC Punk are high and the soundtrack is the best I've seen. Songs by The Specials, The English Beat, Fear, D.I., The Ramones, Minor Threat, The Dead Kennedys, Blondie, Generation X, Iggy Pop, The Velvet Underground, Adam Ant, and more! The jokes are funny, the acting effective, it never gets dull, it switches styles and perspectives seamlessly, and the insights are profound. Not that I agree with everything the film says. The dialogue reads well but it may be a tad too clever (at least it's not The Velvet Goldmine). The film takes place in 1985, a fairly dull year for punk. Stevo bitches about his small, boring scene, but many big city scenes suck royally while a lot of small scenes are great no matter how much people feel it has to be better elsewhere. SLC Punk proves that punk is Everything or Nothing, depending on your perspective. 

The Slog Movie!: L.A. Hardcore Archives '81 (video) (WGP):

3/16/2007 Update: I wrote this review maybe eight years ago, and David Markey finally got around to finding it and writing me an e-mail. As you can see he wasn’t pleased with me. His e-mail follows. I wrote back without anger and now we’ve agreed to disagree on what I think of his old films. Reviewing is fun but it isn’t pleasant when the subject of your negative review writes to lower your self-esteem. Dave has a cool website and the man sure does keep busy. No matter what I think of his early films I wish him no ill will and hope he makes a decent living in the punk and music film biz. Here’s his e-mail to me:

What gives you the inkling you are a film critic?  Because you are "Old"? Because you are a "Punk"?   So you don't like my work.  Fine, have a great day.  I appreciate criticism.  If you actually had something to say it would be one thing,  other than posting all out slags which seem based in a bitter "Old Punk" (YAWN) personal vendetta.    I was doing 'zines almost 30 years ago, but guess what?  I moved on.  The only thing your poorly written and horrible looking webzine proves is any asshole can post a website.     I make a living off my work, you

can't say the same.

-David J. Markey

www.wegotpowerfilms.com

David Markey is the same man who directed the Teenage Lovedoll movies and 1991: The Year Punk Broke, featuring Sonic Youth. Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and its $2.47 sequel are two of the worst films ever made, bar none. Markey couldn't direct himself out of a parking lot. Just because a movie is bad doesn't automatically make it a cult classic. It has to have some camp, comic or interesting qualities. David Markey is a hack with a cheap camera and friends in the punk business. Not to take away from what he's done in the areas of zines and music, but as a director the man both sucks and blows. His last credited film work is listed as a 1997 documentary of Shonen Knife. I'd have to see it to be sure, but I can say with almost complete confidence that Helen Keller would have made a better film director.

So, fine, David had a cheap camera and no access to good sound equipment. His glossy 1991: The Year Punk Broke shows a lack of editing, directorial and comedic skills. If you're going to simply turn on the camera and let your subjects improvise, you have to then edit out anything that serves no purpose whatsoever. Thurston Moore and the rest of Sonic Youth are given enough celluloid rope to hang themselves, and hang themselves they do, but that wasn't the intention of the film. With the camera constantly staring at him, demanding he do something worthy, Moore screams, flails and desperately tries to be funny. Sadly, he's not, and it's embarrassing to watch. Here's a rule of comedy: there’s no correlation between being funny with your friends and being funny on stage or film. When Penelope Spheeris films her documentaries you can be sure for every five minutes of usable interview footage there's an hour of worthless crap. David Markey either only has crap to work with or doesn't know what crap is. I doubt he could direct an episode of the Emergency Broadcast Signal.

The Slog Movie! is a jumble of interview, concert and "comedy" snippets filmed on Markey's cheap camera as he went about his life as a pioneer in the early ‘80s L.A. scene. He was the original drummer for Sin 34, whose road trip to S.F. is included here. The good news about this film is the bands: Red Cross, The Circle Jerks, Circle One, Wasted Youth, The Chiefs, Sin 34, TSOL, Fear and Black Flag. The bad news is that the interviews suck, the soundtrack aspires to be mono, the film is murky and dark, the editing stinks and sometimes only parts of live songs are shown. The constant camera movements are annoying because it blurs and goes out of focus. It's like turning your head with your eyes frozen straight ahead. What's wrong with Slog! has nothing to do with a lack of adequate equipment. There's no talent of any kind on display, even at the conception stage.

Now a word on the California punk scene: the state I now live in has its own brand of punk mentality that defies one simple description. It's a lack of conscience wrapped in a goofy smile. It's politics and social statement as quasi-sincere pose. It's looking for trouble and always finding it - and then being surprised you're not as mellow about it as they are. It's surfer as inconsiderate asshole, hippie as anarchist, and jock as fascist thug. Watch Slog! and come up with your own pathologies that can help differentiate the L.A. punk scene from the rest of reality.

Smithereens (video) (First Run): Two Arts terms can be applied to this movie: 1) Slice Of Life -- the real lives of real people are examined through real dialogue, real situations and real human interactions in real settings, all of which are real depressing and not real interesting except in a dysfunctional, voyeuristic sense; and 2) Character Study -- by becoming so convincingly real as characters through real dialogue and real situations, you won't notice there's no real plot or real dramatic tension. Slice Of Life and Character Studies are a method actor's dream because they don’t follow standard rules of drama which dictate openings, middles, endings, antagonist, protagonist, etc., allowing the actor to literally "become" the character they're portraying. Real life isn't like the movies. Real life is mostly dull. The trap these works often fall into is that, by keeping it "real", the work is about exciting as watching your neighbors eating dinner through a window. These genres work better as short scenes because the goal is to show immersion into character, place and situation. Smithereens is a real labor to watch and not worth the time.

I've read a few quick reviews of Smithereens and it's as if nobody bothered watching it. The All Movie Guide describes the film as "A young woman from the poor part of town claws, shoves and hustles her way into becoming a major figure on the New York punk rock club circuit." The video box synopsis fertilizes the same garden while assigning it an engrossing plot (that defies you to stay awake). The front of the box trumpets this blurb from The Boston Globe, "A Rock 'N' Roll Movie!" What the McNuggets does that mean? It’s like a bag of pretzels labeled "It's A Snack Food!!"

Smithereens co-stars Richard Hell but he doesn't sing, it contains a grand total of four minutes shot in New York's Peppermint Lounge, and Wren, the female lead, bulls--ts everyone that she wants to put a band together and be famous. The film is an endless series of scenes where people express their miserable lives, loves and hates in dialogue that does nothing but add noise to the celluloid as it progresses frame by frame. The independent film movement is a good thing but a higher standard needs to be applied than just saying it's the opposite of a Hollywood movie.

Wren is a petty thief, a user of people, a pathological liar, lazy, unpleasant, not too bright, none too nice and a loser who not only burns her bridges - she nukes them. Her story is not a descent into madness or oblivion, but the day-to-day failures of a low-level asshole who hates the world for her shortcomings and does nothing to earn anyone's sympathy or understanding. She's not independent or a survivor or a plucky non-conformist. She’s just an asshole.

Richard Hell basically plays himself, and I give him credit for not chomping on the scenery. He has the look of the NYC rock junkie putz down pat, and as a matter of fact he probably invented it. He speaks his lines, doesn't embarrass himself, and that's all you can ask. Cookie Mueller of John Waters fame has a small part, and X-Sessive, lead singer of the Nitecaps, not only sings a tune but also gets to mumble some dialogue. Music is provided by The Feelies but it's only snippets from their first album used to no real effect. You can also hear some of Richard Hell's "The Kid With The Replaceable Head". The sound editing is generally poor.

Smithereens was an entry for best film at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. I imagine the bar for indie films back then was so low you couldn't even trip over it. Director Susan Seidelman later directed Desperately Seeking Susan and the Roseanne Barr clunker She-Devil. Richard Hell's next film role was in Geek Maggot Bingo.

Sore Losers (video): This 1997 underground film won first place at a film festival. It's actually good considering the tiny budget and a plot as weird as it is convoluted. Sore Losers stars lo-fi greaser punks Jack Oblivion (the poor man's John Doe), Mike Maker (the dead broke man's Nick Cave) and all three of Guitar Wolf (God-zee-la!), along with performance artist Kerine Elkins and old-time exploitation film director David F. Friedman. It's John Waters meets Russ Meyer meets Kenneth Anger in Memphis, TN.

Director/writer/producer John Michael McCarthy, comic book artist and director of other movies that never made it far past Memphis' remaining drive-in theaters, describes the film-making process this way, "I am an auteur-savant. I have an abstract vision of what I have an abstract vision of what I want my film to be. Then as that big-budget dream crumbles, a new one based in lo-fi takes shape. This becomes the final memory as the old script is filed away. It's the same with every movie. I'm only as good as the crew I get or the talent who are told to check their art at the door. Actors are going to change their lines to suit their natural style or not even bother reading the script as I found out on The Sore Losers. I retain as much as our time and budget will allow. A script is a lonely little item once the footage rolls in. But hey, film is a visual medium. The most incredible life experience comes from taking a crash course in putting your trust in strangers who become your best friends in a very short, intense time. Suddenly all my compromised figments are there on screen."

Jack Oblivion doesn't trip over his lines, Mike Maker thinks he's some kind of style legend, Guitar Wolf are just really cool, like the Ramones of Japan, and Kerine Elkins chews every piece of scenery as the script and her own nuttiness demand. The many secondary actors are well cast, and that's a real plus. The effects are great, especially the zombie mother. The plot of Sore Losers is a jumble of stuff involving juvenile delinquent aliens, an old alien who might be God, dead beatniks, and hippies,, men in black, a naked angel, a zombie, crazed naked Betty Page stripper chicks who don't work the night Rev. Horton Heat plays, EC comics, 50’s cars, and The Apocalypse. I'd try to explain it but I'm sober and you're not stoned. Needless to say there's enough surreal hep-cat madness to keep it interesting even when you're scratching your ass wondering what's going on. My favorite line is this definition of a hippie: "Imagine someone who doesn't believe in war, the death penalty, or taking a bath". There's also this hippie joke: "What's the difference between an onion and a hippie? You don't cry as much when you cut an onion."

Here's a list of some teen exploitation movies from the golden era of 1954-1969. Imagine what each is like and that's what Sore Losers is about. It's a lot of fun and much better than the budget and swiss-cheese plot might lead you to believe: Riot In Juvenile Hall, Speed Crazy, Teenage Wolfpack, The Rebel Set, Teenage Bad Girl, Young and Wild, Live Fast Die Young, I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, Juvenile Jungle, Hot Rod Rumble, The Cool and the Crazy, Girls In Prison, Daddy-O, and Teenage Crime Wave. 

Anton LaVey - Speak Of The Devil (video review): Speak Of the Devil came out in 1993 but uses so much old and beat up footage it looks like something from 1967. The title cards and effects are cheap enough to evoke grindhouse films of yore. This 89 minute self-promotion reel from Church Of Satan founder Anton LaVey is interesting mostly as a study of what his daughter Zeena describes as "a notorious figure of the 1960s' subculture of social experiment". It's a cult of personality where the leader is goofy beyond belief, and you can't watch this and not think Anton himself knows he's a light-hearted scam artist of middling success.

On the other hand, Zeena and her husband with the obvious fake name of Nikolas Schreck run their own Satan-based group, which claims her father's take on it was insincere and carny. There are also accusations of animal cruelty, domestic violence and sexual perversion that for all I know may have touched Zeena in more ways than one. It's obvious she thinks her father was evil, and not the good kind of evil either.

If Hollywood made a film on the life of Anton LaVey it might have the same vibe as Ed Wood. Here's a shlub fascinated with cheap novelty gags and carnivals who created a persona for himself that's too campy and cheap to be taken seriously. He chose "Satan" as a hook but what he was really about seems to be Paganism, Ayn Rand's Objectivism, 60's free love and a geek love of noir campiness.

If Zeena's stories are true I have no sympathy for Anton, but in Speak Of The Devil he comes across sincerely as a lovable, lonely, introverted, animal loving nerd who builds his own mannequins to sit in the bar area of his home, which he calls his "Den Of Iniquity", and loves nothing more than sitting at the pipe organ playing midway tunes. A surprisingly halting and boring speaker, he waxes semi-poetic on his love of the sea and of jobs he may or may not have actually held. The Johnson Smith gag catalogs of his youth may have been the turning point in his life that led him to create Satanism.

What to make of his invocation to Satan for "civility, understanding, tranquility, compassion, vengeance, sensuality, love and triumph", or when he says "Death is not a flattering thing." He comes across as the last guy you'd consider evil. He looks like he needs a hug. The film contains interviews with two young priests in the Church Of Satan, and they come across as angry and hateful. Anton, on the other hand, is more like an adult child.

Anton Szandor LaVey was born Harold Stanton Levey in 1930. He died in 1997. He named his children Karla Maritza, Zeena Galatea and Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey.

Starstruck (video) (Fox Lorber): How's this for odd. There are two movies titled Starstruck, one from ‘81 and the other, which I just rented, from ‘82. They’re both from Australia and both feature Jo Kennedy and Ross O'Donovan. The earlier film, starring Trini Alvarado, was an hour long ABC television "After School Special" that might have been up for an Emmy. I assume the feature film was either an extension of the TV production or what the makers had in mind in the first place.

The feature bumps actress/singer Kennedy from a supporting role to what I guess was Alvarado's part. O'Donovan reprises his geeky kid character with P.T. Barnum's flair for showmanship. Directed by Gillian Armstrong, who bookended this with My Brilliant Career and Mrs. Soffel, Starstruck is a whimsical musical filled with sweet eccentric characters and situations found mostly in old Andy Hardy movies. There's no bad guys and never a moment of doubt our heroine will win the song contest and save the family business. Kooky music numbers and even kookier adventures fill up 102 minutes of light entertainment.

Set in a faded yet still quaint seaside resort town, Jackie is a twenty-ish cross between Bernadette Peters and Cyndi Lauper. She yearns to be a star. Her fourteen year old cousin Angus acts as her manager, and the kid is unstoppable in his ideas and determination. To get the attention of the media he calls the press to announce a naked lady will be walking a tightrope high above the business district. Jackie's actually wearing a shirt with huge boobs sewn on but from below it looks like she's topless. Jackie loses her balance and is rescued by the fire department, but the stunt works and Jackie appears on a local TV music show. There's some ups and downs and blah blah blah, but by the end of the movie the family doesn't have to move, she's a national sensation, Angus is rolling around on the concrete with a hot babe and the corpse of Stalin rises from the earth and dances the Hully Gully. That last part I made up but it might as well have happened. Reality leaves the building the second the opening credits roll, but there's a lot to like about this movie and it doesn't make a difference what happens by way of plot.

The bar owned by Jackie's mom is filled with rich local characters, from the cat lady to the old guy with the tropical bird on his shoulder. The grandmother, who looks like one of the Fat Ladies from the British TV cooking show, is incredibly funny without being cute or hip. The group Jackie hooks up with is the real band The Swingers, featuring ex-Split Enz member Phil Judd. Tim Finn has a small role and helped write some of the music. Geoffrey Rush makes his second film appearance as the blink-or-you'll-miss-him "Floor Manager". The musical numbers sound like they came from the Split Enz members who wrote them. It’s slightly more commercial and a bit more tailored for film use. The music scenes are choreographed, some more than others, and some dancers are more talented than others. Starstruck is a pure new wave movie, contrary to some punk references I've read in the past.

Starstruck didn't always keep my interest but the characters are endearing and fully developed. Whimsical and quaint are two qualities that often lead to film disaster. Here it works like a charm. It’s light fare but still probably the best new wave movie of the bunch. 

Stop Making Sense (video) (Columbia): Did this really come out in 1984, fifteen years ago? (audible sobbing) Where did the years go? Where did my hair go?! Oh, God..... (two hours later) Oh God!!...

This is the second best concert film of all time, close behind 1978's "The Last Waltz", directed by Martin Scorsese. Stop Making Sense, from Jonathan Demme, is a staged multi-media performance filmed in front of an audience, conceived by chief Head David Byrne, who helped usher in the age of pretentious video in the early days of MTV. I wouldn’t call Byrne or his ideas pretentious, since Byrne is sincerely the weirdest alien to ever land on this planet.

I recently rented and reviewed R.E.M.'s Tourfilm, which attempts to recreate this film's magic but fails on every count. It’s a music video pretending to be a concert film. Stop Making Sense is a live concert filmed by a great director. A major difference is that R.E.M. is a creation of the MTV age, with their stage shows filled with rapid-fire backdrop videos and a detached self-awareness that defines shoe-gazing. The Talking Heads come out of the 70’s CBGBs punk scene, and they were often billed with the Ramones. Even though Byrne looked beyond the music itself to other media, concerts were still rooted in the joys of live performance as a thrill for both the audience and the band. In Stop Making Sense there's a large camera planted in front of the stage for part of the concert, so the audience isn't relating to the performers like they normally would, but once it is removed they get to experience a great stage show and music performance.

The film opens with Byrne's sneakered feet walking onto a bare stage. He places a boom box next to him and sings "Psycho Killer". The Talking Heads was his band, and he proves this by bringing out one band member at a time with each new song. Tina Weymouth and Co. get to perform as The Tom Tom Club during the film, but this is a small payback while Byrne is backstage getting into his big suit costume. The concert itself is in two parts - the first the building of both the band and set by a large crew of stagehands as each song progresses, and the second an exploration of indirect lighting and static backdrop images. Byrne, while never appearing to be the same room as the rest of us, puts on quite a performance and works up a real sweat. To fill time even runs a few laps around the massive stage. Byrne likes to: A) stick his neck out like a chicken, B) run in place, and C) pretend he's just been hit in the face. His clumsy-act with a six foot floor lamp is right out of great silent film.

Some of the songs are: "Once In A Lifetime", "Take Me To The River", "Burning Down The House", "Life During Wartime" and my favorite, "Heaven". The backup singers and musicians earn their pay, adding texture and cheerleading excitement to what is in essence a minimalist white funk band. I admit I forwarded through some of the more African flavored numbers, but David Byrne is a genius. This film is great. Case closed. 

Straight To Hell (video) (Island): The first draft of this review went straight to hell too. It disappeared from my computer. The Corel Web Designer would have been worth every penny - if it was free. One random keystroke and you lose who knows what. Here's the basics on what you need to know about one of the worst movies you'll hopefully never see. Just because a film stinks doesn't make it a cult classic. A good midnight movie has to be campy or express the clear, coherent vision of a lunatic. This just stinks

This follow-up to Sid & Nancy gives the impression the last one only succeeded due to the excellent acting of the two lead actors. It’s as if Cox rounded up the barflys at the Where Are They Now Saloon, yelled "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!", and then gave each the assignment of creating their own wacky character and dialogue. Characters range from moron to cretin. There's no connection between anybody in this film as they take turns chewing scenery. Cast notables include Grace Jones, Dennis Hopper, Elvis Costello, The Pogues, Edward Tenpole-Tudor, Jim Jarmusch (whose style Cox fails to copy well), Joe "Woody" Strummer and Courtney Love, who does a straight Nancy Spungen imitation that's as annoying as you’d imagine.

Supposedly a satire of spaghetti westerns, the plot has something to do with three inept thieves/contract killers who hide out in a tiny Meh-Hee-Kin town run by a bunch of loco gringo banditos who, get this, love gourmet coffee! Isn’t that nutty? Besides the line "Let's make that wiener kid sing his song" being used as the title of a music compilation, Straight To Hell might have been an influence on Quentin Tarantino, who takes the Sy Richardson character and splits it between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. He also probably borrowed some of this for From Dusk Till Dawn.

The only redeeming quality of this film is that it eventually ends. It's also something to have on while ironing shirts or cleaning the house. The end of the movie claims there was going to be a sequel, "Back From Hell". I haven't felt this threatened since the follow-up to Desperate Teenage Lovedolls was announced. Those guys had the extra $7 to make that one. Thankfully Alex Cox didn't.

Street Trash (video) (Lightning): Straddling the line between horror-comedy and exploitation, Street Trash is a hard to find trash classic that’s not only the best of its kind, it’s probably the only film of its kind. [2007 update: it’s been on DVD for a few years and a special 2-disc set came out that is worth its weight in gelatinous goo.]

Street Trash depicts rape, murder, alcoholism, homelessness, random violence and a general sense of depravity regurgitated through both the hyper-realism of exploitation and cartoonishness of horror-comedy. On the surface it’s a scattershot affair involving bums and a cheap wine called “Viper” that turns people into lumps of jelly in funny yet horrifying ways. A strong undercurrent of practical nihilism permeates the air, making this more disturbing than anything from Troma (The Toxic Avenger, Tromeo & Juliet), which releases movies of similar quality. Street Trash is for all intents and purposes a Troma film, but it was released by Lightning Video, who in 1987 released a handfull of b-movies before folding. The Troma guys hate Street Trash director Jim Munro for some reason.

The simple answer as to what the film is about can be summed up as (spoilers all!): bums and scums operating out of an automobile graveyard in Queens, NY live out their low rent lives while the local skid row liquor store sells old bottles of Viper for a buck. Anyone who drinks it dies by having their insides turned into a gelatinous acid. A shell-shocked Vietnam vet terrorizes the neighborhood and his small crew of dirty hobos, while a violent cop is determined to wipe out any troublemakers on his turf. The girlfriend of a mob boss is raped and murdered by derelicts, and when he’s not sending out a hit-man to off the homeless guy last seen with her, he’s threatening the life of his goofy doorman who has a smart mouth and no common sense. Events (and Viper) take their toll and while there is no total resolution, the worst of the bad guys gets his in spectacular fashion. The only likeable male character walks off with his girl to a future I can’t say will be happy, but at least she has a job.

The humor is as dark as you’ll ever see, as when the obese junkyard owner finds a dead woman on his lot, and in a comic fashion not unlike Oliver Hardy, sizes up his opportunity to have his way with it. There are seven deaths by Viper, each overwhelming yet funny like in Evil Dead II and Dead Alive. The horror effects are by Jennifer Aspinall, who later worked on the Toxic Avenger. Considering the budget, her skill and creativity are amazing. She creates spectacular, surrealistic moving landscapes of human liquefaction, and her use of bright melting colors is inspired and grotesquely beautiful.

What separates Street Trash from your standard Troma fare, and what makes it a truly disturbing film, is its exploitation aspects. Exploitation films date back before Reefer Madness and hit their peak in the ‘50s and ‘60s with shockers on juvenile delinquency and that damn rock and roll music. The ‘70s saw a proliferation of black Mac Daddy/Pimp/Private Dick/Gangster films like Superfly and Shaft. Since then, pure exploitation has taken a back seat to dramas with a “message”. For all the overt silliness in the genre, the best exploitation films involved real personalities and issues of the day, be it the pimp daddy hero of the urban jungle or the homeless bums in Street Trash. For every exaggerated performance there’s also enough truth in others to make the film as much a series of character studies as it is a cheap horror film. If you’ve led a sheltered life you may not think characters like this exist, but even my own limited experiences have shown me they do.

Frst time director Jim Muro does a marvelous job behind the camera. He shoots from below, above, inside the back of a garbage truck, sets the camera on a ferris wheel for one shot, and moves over and around objects in a style similar to Sami Raimi. Street Trash was filmed at the same time (if not prior to) Evil Dead II so I can’t say if there was inspiration involved or just a coincidence of style. The first death scene, which takes place in the bathroom of a crumbling tenement, is as well planned and executed as Hitchcock's shower scene in Psycho. I kid you not. Muro never directed another feature film but he’s a highly paid Steadicam operator who worked on both Terminator II and Titanic.

James Lorinz is great as the loudmouth doorman, and word has it Martin Scorsese was so impressed with Tony Darrow’s performance as the mob boss that he cast him as “Sonny” in Goodfellas, which led to a long career playing mobsters. My two favorite lines from the film are “Were you born stupid or did you study?” and “I read like old people f—k”. Street Trash should be seen in a room full of both idiots & geniuses, cretins & moralists, cultural dimwits & snobs, and the tasteless along with the tasteful. Just to see what different people think because once you get past the shock points there's much to consider. I think it’s an all-time classic for kids of all ages, but the voices in my head constantly argue about my capacity to make such judgments.

Suburbia - (Video) (1983): Writer and director Penelopee Spheeris followed up The Decline Of Western Civilization with this parable about homeless punk kids living as a family in a neglected suburb of Los Angeles. The film was produced by Roger Corman, the man who gave us Rock'N'Roll High School. Roger wanted that film to be about disco, but that's another story. Part expose, part comedy, but mostly cheap exploitation, Suburbia continues Spheeris' love/hate relationship with her subject matter evident in the two Decline Of Western Civilization films. Suburbia focuses on about a dozen kids who squat in an abandoned tract home in L.A. They call themselves "TR" - The Rejected. They've been rejected by family, society and even themselves. One's dad sexually molested her, one lost his dad in Vietnam and doesn't like his black cop step-dad (who is actually cool), two ran away from an abusive, alcoholic mom, while another can't stand his gay dad and his lover. It’s a film about punks who accept each other for who they are, yet they seemingly have no problem with racism and gay-bashing.

The symbolism and social commentary are laid on thick and heavy. To stay at the T.R. house you have to brand the initials into your arm for life. Get it? Kids scarred by life scar themselves for life. The TV is always on and they watch in a zombie-like trance. In one scene they steal fresh sod and lay it out at a mall in front of an electronics store with TVs stacked up like a wall. They watch the TVs like it's a picnic. Catch the metaphor? When one girl reads a bedtime story to the little boy with the mohawk (he’s cute), two girls run in to hear the story too. Get it? They're little girls inside the makeup, torn clothing and punky 'tude. Suburbia as a place is described as "slums of the future". Packs of abandoned dogs run wild and sometimes turn vicious - just like the kids of the TR house. This is level 101 writing.

The TR gang are basically good kids who can't catch a break, but they also steal and vandalize for food and fun. The bad guys are various ill-defined punk-haters, two of whom are gun-luvin' out of work auto plant workers. When you first see them they're shooting wild dogs for fun, and it's easy to hate them, but later you learn they're frustrated, laid-off factory workers with homes and families to support. Wow, what a vicious cycle! After a fun-filled afternoon of stealing food from people's homes, the TR kids pull up to a garage sale where the film's major bad guys are desperately trying to sell their belongings to keep their lives together. The lead punk asks to buy the wife's dildos, which infuriates the husbands and makes the inevitable sad conclusion that much more inevitable. At this point I can't blame them for wanting to crack some punk heads. Someone says something like that to my girlfriend and I’m stopping until teeth are missing. Unless you're a total dick, who would have any sympathy for these kids? Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody's a victim of society, so nobody's responsible for their actions. Boo fugging hoo.

Being a Roger Corman production and a teen exploitation film (a redundancy), there's gratuitous nude scenes (the one with a fat old stripper is an appetite suppressant) and the standard parents’ meeting where the kids are reviled and explained. (Citizen arguing with Cop) "I get the feeling you're not doing your job!", "And I get the feeling you're using innocent people as scapegoats", "Scapegoats? We're talking about a bunch of sickos, of mental rejects running wild in our streets.", "We're talking about kids - kids like your and mine!", "Well, I'm damn sure they aren't my kids." If you didn't know from the start the most innocent of the innocent will die, you don't know squat about exploitation films. At times Suburbia tries to be funny, like when the punk club chases out the kids by playing muzak and they retreat like vampires from sunlight. See Repo Man if you really want to laugh.

The writing is goofy, the direction OK, and the actors are very good. Time-filling concert footage is of D.I., T.S.O.L. and The Vandals. With their puffy pirate shirts and cabaret leanings I see where Tesco Vee of the Meatmen came up with "TSOL Are Sissies". This is a punk movie that's fondly remembered for good and bad resaons. Find it if you can. 

Summer Of Sam (video) (Touchstone): There's so much wrong with this Spike Lee movie I don't know where to start. It only succeeds when it emulates the production values of a 1970’s Martin Scorsese film or the grim colors and mood of David Fincher's Seven. Lee also mixes media and style like Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, if that floats your boat. What would have saved the film from its killer lack of coherency and mind numbing length of 142 minutes is a complete re-edit by someone not involved with the production to begin with. Maybe even Scorsese himself. Throw out the entire plot line of John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino's failed marriage. Trim down the punk rock aspects to its bare essentials. What makes up a typical Spike Lee film? Biting off more then the director can deliver, anti-white sloganeering, some anti-black sentiment and a love-hate-hate-hate relationship with Italians. How he gets Italians to be in his films is beyond me. Summer Of Sam is a real frigging mess.

The surface plot takes place in the summer of 1977 when David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer, terrorized New York. The real plot (or plots, to infinity and beyond!) revolves around a bunch of NY Italian goombahs who act out their stereotypical lives as Eye-talian New Yorkers. In a Hitchcock film the surface plot is called the "Red Herring". It becomes less important and gets less attention as the film progresses because he’s only using it as a means of introducing his real interests of betrayal, fear, etc. If he wasn't a master storyteller Hitchcock would be ridiculed for his film’s lack of plot continuity. The only good thing about Summer Of Sam is the Red Herring. Leguizamo and Sorvino are great, but who cares about their personal lives? Adrien Brody steals the show as Ritchie the punk, but he's not the star of the film, nor should he be. Punk, more specifically a fear of people who act different and look dangerous, plays a major role. Still, like everything else in Summer Of Sam, there's too much of it, and it's another reason why it never seems to end.

At most this should have been 100 minutes long. It should have kept a tense pace by constantly focusing on scenes with the Son of Sam. If Lee wanted to include his signature themes he should have tossed them in periodically, and as footnotes. Why the hell is there so much sex in this movie? If I want porn I'll rent a video. Spike remembers 1977 like it was last week and he wants to touch on the disco era, the sexual looseness, the punk explosion, the Yankees in the World Series, the heat wave, the blackout, and the riots that followed. He could have dealt with all this in context and setting, not plot. Or at least not as much plot as he's given it. It could have been done cleverly without being so wastefully tangential.

I would see this again if it was edited down to what it should and could have been. All the film has been shot - it's just been put together all wrong. I'd also use only one quick shot of the "Dead End" street sign, and not have the dog's lips move when he talks.

In punk rock related news: -- Adrien Brody is great as a ‘77 NYC punk, and he does a lot with a character that could have been more one-dimensional. He sometimes fakes a British accent (a rite of passage for many) and projects his pains and insecurities convincingly. When asked if he's ever been to London he replies "No, but it's all in the attitude." In 1977 I was sixteen and lived outside NYC, so I have a sense of what the people portrayed in this film were really like. The actors and screenwriters depict the places, personalities and atmosphere very well. If you want to get a sense of what it was like to look punk in the ‘70s, Summer Of Sam gets it all right. Ritchie's called "Porcupine", children are afraid of him, guys get offended and violent and in general people won't leave him alone.

Two scenes are shot in the Bowery at CBGBs, and L.E.S. Stitches perform part of a live song that sounds as '77 as last week's top-40 countdown, but can you do. Ritchie's band has the name "Late Night Abortion" on their drum kit. He asks a DJ to spin a Dead Boys song. George Tabb plays "Spider" and about seventy lower Manhattan scuzzballs get to dress like they always do and earn some dough in front of the camera. I don't think everyone pierced their tongues and faces back then, but Hollywood wouldn't film it if it wasn’t real!

Jennifer Esposito, who plays Ritchie's girlfriend, sings a song, but since the closing credits are tiny I can't see who wrote it. Ritchie's a punk but he loves The Who, whom he calls the "Godfathers Of Punk". The only non-disco song on the soundtrack is The Who's "Baba O'Riley", which is a centerpiece of the film and quite effective. Pete Townshend also wrote additional music for this film. It's a small world after all. 

Tapeheads (video) (Pacific Arts): From 1989, this funny film stars John Cusack and Tim Robbins as slackers who start a rock video production company, meet wacky people and fall into all kinds of trouble. There's enough shtick, sketches and surreal nonsense to keep you on your toes, and the cameos are great. Michael Nesmith (The Monkees), Stiv Bators and The Lords Of The New Church, Fishbone, Weird Al Yankovic, Don Cornelius (Soul Train), Ted Nugent, Lyle Alzedo and Jello Biafra put in enough screen time to keep their SAG cards active. Jello plays an FBI agent and gets the last line of the film, "Remember what we did to Jello Biafra?" It's made even funnier by the fact that he lisps like Cindy Brady.

Cusack, the most underrated actor of his generation, steals the movie with his dim-witted con-man based on how-to-be-rich infomercials, Dan Ackroyd's greasy pitchman from Saturday Night Liv, and Michael Keaton's manic morgue attendant from Night Shift. Tim Robbins is good as usual, even though his character is limited mostly to numb reactions to Cusack's hyperactivity.

Here's the plot: childhood friends John and Tim are layabouts with boring security guard jobs. Tim has a talent for shooting videos, and John, who's always thinking, decides they'll open their own production company, called Video Aces. They do a rap commercial for Roscoe’s a chicken and waffle joint, which I didn’t know was a real restaurant until I moved to Los Angeles. Then they film a living will and a funeral, hook up with Cornelius for videos "on spec", shoot a video of Stiv's band, and through dumb luck become the hottest video directors in town. The main sub-plots involve a blackmail video tape, a pervo politician and the Video Aces soul singing heroes, the Swanky Modes.

With the exception of the silly, patched together ending, Tapeheads is well written, and there are enough great lines to make this an underground classic. They’re out of context but here's some keepers: "Am I crying?", "There's a bonus for the man that puts it in my hand.", "'You need what I got'… 'Herpes?'", There's only one thing that adds real production value - tits and ass", and "'Are you famous?' 'Sign my butt'… Teach me to read'".

Fishbone provides music and appear in the film as a bizarre country band. A Swedish band fashioned after A Flock Of Seagulls plays Devo's "Baby Doll", recorded by Devo for the film. There's graffiti that reads "Thrasher Mag". Stiv Bators and The New Lords of the New Church are funny in a Spinal Tap kind of way. Jello wears a trenchcoat. Sam Moore and Junior Walker burn up the screen as real-deal Blues Brothers.

This looks like it was shot on video and for a 1989 production it seems more like 1984. Don't let that distract you. Tapeheads is great. It grossed only $200,000 when it came out.

Team America (DVD review): Team America hired Charles, Edward and Stephen Chiodo of Killer Klowns From Outer Space to work on puppets. The Chiodo brothers hired The Dickies to write Killer Klown's theme song. The Dickies's last studio album was All This And Puppet Stew. Yes, my point exactly.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are idiot savants but idiots all the same. Happily they hired talented people and Paramount poured in all the money it took to create a technically staggering film. Working on 1:3 scale (22" string puppets w/computerized facial controls) with all effects in-camera, they've created stunning sets with attention to detail and color you've never seen before. The making-of features are better than the film itself (if you're a geek like me).

The film itself is a mess with some good bits mixed in with the usual adolescent shock value. They take two steps forward, three steps back, one forward, another forward, then one back again. It equals another near miss. My personal take on cursing and obscenity is that regular films should go no higher than PG. Porn should be so obscene it would make a sailor puke.

Much has been written on the politics of Team America. I don't believe anything Parker and Stone say because they talk without thinking, but this is what I did notice: the fictional characters are over the top action genre stereotypes. The real characters are of the left and portrayed as superior, pompous, hypocritical assholes. Parker and Stone are assholes, but I like that they hate with a raw passion assholes who pretend they're not.

PS: I liked that the Spotswood character was based on Phil Hartman. He was the best.

Tears For Fears - In My Mind's Eye: Live At The Hammersmith Odeon (video) (Music Media): Taped between the albums The Hurting and Songs From The Big Chair, this concert provides ample anthropological evidence that the age of parachute pants and skinny guys in cut-off t-shirts extended until at least 1984. Big Brother also watched a pretty bad hair year. In My Mind’s Eye also serves as a demo for every computer assisted video manipulation known at the time, from heavy pixilation to flying video shingles. The visual editor was said to have been murdered for calling everyone over to his computer a hundred times a day by yelling, "Hey, check out THIS effect!"

It's hard to say which is more goofy - taped concerts or video collections. As far as I'm concerned buy the album or see the concert. A taped show is a detached way of enjoying what is designed to be an interactive experience. It's the cousin of "My Parents Went To The Grand Canyon And All I Got Was This T-Shirt". Rock videos went from cute to sad as soon as the novelty wore off, which took about a year. In My Mind's Eye is ok, even in spite of how every band member moves in his own stunted dance step. The only truly annoying visual is the split screen mirror effect, which either makes people look like either twins or horrible genetic mutations.

The songs, pulled mainly from The Hurting, are entertaining and some of the best of a synth pop genre flooded with limp-wristed crap. Every song stays in the same slow, rhythmic two-step groove, but thankfully Tears For Fears never takes the east way out with exaggerated funk beats, and the drummer/percussionist combo work well together to create moods heavily influenced by Peter Gabriel's early, brooding flirtations with world music. Roland Orzabal (say that ten times fast), and Curt Smith write songs with catchy lyrical hooks that invite you to sing along.

Orzabal has a double-jointed jaw which he opens to the size of a cantaloupe when he sings, exposing thirteen more teeth than humans are granted genetically. He also looks a lot like former Selecter singer Pauline Black. He does have a nice, rich voice. Curt Smith is a pretty boy given to fits of falsetto singing.

The thirteen songs on the tape stick close to the studio versions, which works out well. "The Prisoner" is nicely harsh & disorienting. "Ideas As Opiates" had me thinking for a moment it was a cover of Peter Gabriel's "Biko". The inhuman wailing noise in "The Hurting" is also taken from a PG song. The only downside to the concert is that the pace never changes. Not everyone likes to dance under the influence of Nyquil.

Teen Spirit: The Tribute To Kurt Cobain - (Video): Here’s my up front disclaimer: I haven’t listened to music on the radio in years. In my 36 years on the planet I’ve watched MTV about four times. Seattle bands always sounded like hard rock to me, not the punk I grew up with. I didn’t mind “Teen Spirit” when I hear it in passing but it’s not punk to me. It’s PC to say anything you’re into is punk, but still, at first I thought grunge was New Day Rising-era Husker Du played at half-speed. Eventually I agreed with what a local critic wrote, “the secret of any good grunge band - play heavy metal”. If you can bang your head to it, it’s hard rock or heavy metal. When Kurt killed himself I barely took notice. Another rock star bites the dust. News at 11:00. The grunge kids ran around like their world had ended. It’s odd to invest so much of yourself into a rock singer, but I guess you have to believe in something. Maybe I’m worse off not having heroes, only people I admire. I’ve met too many famous people to be impressed anymore. I rented this to mostly see how I’d react. Either I’d scream “loser!” at the TV for sixty minutes or gain a new respect for grunge and Mr. Kurt. Neither happened. This short video release was visually interesting like an MTV video, but shallow in its research and presentation, also like MTV.

I assume this was produced overseas because it opens with “The Producers wish to point out that no Nirvana recordings or music feature in this programme.” There’s numerous quick cuts, cut-out graphics and headache-inducing hand-held camera shots. I know hand-held gives the feeling of cinema verite, but here it’s like you’re drunk and about to fall on your face. The Nirvana appearances come from interviews not filmed for this video. The bulk of the tape consists of interviews with peripheral players in the Seattle music scene. Charles Peterson was a photographer who shot many Seattle bands, and his work is excellent. Grant Alden, former editor of the Seattle Rocket, gets much time, and thankfully he’sliterate and even-handed. Nils Bernstein, “Sub Pop Publicist”, is goofy but tells a few good stories. Ann Powers, a Senior Editor for the Village Voice, provides annoying background on Nirvana and their “meaning”. If she was any more pale you would see through her, and she couldn’t have been more pretentious - the kind of person who dresses in black and cries while reading long poems about her own death. She’s so obsessed with “sex roles” you want to choke her, with your hands.

Historical Nirvana facts periodically roll across the screen like weather advisories: “Kurt discovers music - Aerosmith, Led Zepplin and Kiss”, “He reads about UK punk but has never heard any - he begins to play what he thinks punk is – ‘Three chords and a lot of screaming’”. Someone describes the Seattle sound as the sound of metal and the attitude of punk. Damn, I hate being right all the time!

Nils talks at length about the first time “Teen Spirit” was played in concert. People cried, vomited in rainbow colors and spoke in tongues. Ann boasts that Kurt was anti-sexist and pro-gay, and a lot of bashers stopped their stupidity after listening to Nirvana. If Kurt’s anti-hate messages were new to anyone you have to wonder what rock these losers were hiding under. Fans are given a chance to say something about the band and Kurt. They’re a mixed blessing - they either provide heartfelt insight or they say things so dumb you have to look away (like “dude!, they could really ROCK!!”). Here it’s not too bad, but it’s obvious they pulled random people off the street to say anything that pops into their toasty little heads.

There’s not much to be learned from Teen Spirit, but it’s not a bad production. I still couldn’t care less about Kurt Cobain. He needed to bathe more. His hair was oily.

Throbbing Gristle - Destiny (video): A live performance of unknown vintage, Destiny is interesting not because it's good, which it isn't, but because it provides a glimpse into the origins of industrial music. At one time industrial had zero to do with disco - it was literally the sounds of machinery. Throbbing Gristle (TG) coined the term industrial. A prolific band to say the least, they released on vinyl and cassette just about every sound they ever recorded, both live and in the studio. They’re from the UK but sound like austere, pissed off German. In temperament TG made Krafkwerk seem more like the Beach Boys. The question of how listenable they are is always the big question. It's one thing to make a guerilla artistic statement when you can, but only either drugged or psychotic people can listen to repetitious drones for more than a few minutes at a sitting. The Velvet Underground through John Cale introduced avant-garde droning to the punk world, but I doubt they’d have made it one inch beyond Andy Warhol's little freak show if they could only play 45 minute versions of "Sister Ray". Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music is two albums of raw noise. He did it to get out of is record contract, but there are people who took it as a serious statement. Sheep in berets.

I turned this off about 45 minutes in. I think there were four songs, but it's hard to tell. The lighting sucked and the copy I rented looked third generation. Most of the music was sparse electronic Italian horror movie soundtrack noodling. The musicians walked around stage randomly hitting buttons, playing guitars and beating drums. One guy literally stood there with one fist up to his mouth, touching things on a panel like, "Huh? Wonder what this does?" I did find a discernable pattern in one song, and I’m guessing it was called "Discipline" because it was sung about 300 times.

Eternity is forever. Thanks to TG I know that now. I'm also aware that if I don't get it, it's over my head and I shouldn't pass judgment, but I own enough of this kind of music to know when someone's pulling my chain. I had to turn this off because one more pull and my chain was going to rip off. As there was little to actually watch on screen, I sewed a button on a shirt, ironed seven others, and put more change into bankrolls. If you're into the roots of goth and industrial and ask for nothing from a concert tape, rent this. Otherwise I recommend you watch Eraserhead or The Emergency Broadcast Signal.

Throbbing Gristle: Live at Oundle School (video review): An easier row to hoe than Destiny, 1980's Live At Oundle School is still more bizarre mind-fugg experiment than concert film. A student asked them to play and afterwards I fully expected the lights would come up to reveal the kids suffered aneurysms and swallowed tongues (theirs and others'). As this article states though, "The show finished with the schoolboys carrying singer P-Orridge around the school on their shoulders." Yes, but how many grew up to become corpse sniffers?

Throbbing Gristle, boy howdy, what can I say. They are to industrial noise what knives are to cuts. Read this. Or start here and read the customer's reviews. The noise people love them and the younger/newer industrial people have no idea what to say when they don't feel cheated. I'd start with 20 Jazzz Funk Greats and wade out from there. If you don't like where there is going, it only gets worse, so stop. The $225 live box set is what's known in serial killer trials as "Exhibit A".

I like Throbbing Gristle songs when they do occur, and this live set has at least four so I didn't feel cheated. I did pause a few times to clean my kitchen floor, take apart my stove to light the pilot and work on some Word files. This happens all the time with me and TG. For me they're "Industrious Music" since I get so much done while dealing with it.

Single camera, bleeding colors, disturbing overlayed images - check. Cosey Fanni Tutti wearing a tight leather mini-skirt - check. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (real name Skippy McHuggncuddle) looking blank and angry - check. The other two guys not looking forward - check. All in all a great show.

Tie-Died: Rock 'N Roll's Most Deadicated Fans (video) (BMG): Here's my disclaimer: I was never a Deadhead but in high school I listened to my brother's Grateful Dead greatest hits album a lot. I even saw The Grateful Dead Movie a few times at midnight (great cartoon in the beginning but I never could stay awake for the second half). Deadheads enjoy a real sense of community, and even though they're flaky as hell they're for the most part harmless, friendly, easygoing people. That said, let's make fun of the smelly hippies, shall we?

This rock-umentary on the most devoted fans in the world, The Manson Family - no! the Deadheads, is interesting after the first thrity minutes only if your name is Earthglow and you're on LSD and communing with Jerry right now. Not that Tie-Died is a bad film, it's not, but after they hit on the same themes for the fifth time you get the feeling they're stalling for time. At 88 minutes this is a major motion picture. At the 44 minutes it should have been it's a nice home movie and coherent enough for the short consciousness span of Deadheads. The Grateful Dead did not allow any Dead tunes to be used, which is a shame, because with some concert footage and real Dead songs this could have been a decent document of the band and their fans.

Deadheads come straight out of the 1960's free-love hippie subculture centered in San Francisco, which descended from the Beats which descended from earlier forms of Bohemia and paramecium. Political punk comes directly from this tradition. Peace punks are black leather hippies, and while gutter punks may smell like hippies they eat meat and aren't peaceful. Until Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 there was a van-based gypsy culture that followed the Grateful Dead on tour. For every ten people in the show there was one outside who didn't have a ticket but hung around anyway. It was a  carnival in the parking lot, where you could buy t-shirts, bootleg tapes, mushrooms and 42 flavors of pot.

Tie-Died hits a few themes hard and beats them mercilessly. Dead fans are the most devoted in the world. Check. A lot of the year-round road warriors come from broken homes and are attracted to the sense of family found with other Heads. Got it. Minimum sentencing for drug violations was killing the scene. Bummer, Dude! Cops target the Deadheads for arrest and persecution. No! Not all is free love and roses because some posers and violent baddies take advantage of the innocent Deadheads and cause trouble. Darn!

Here's some sad but true facts. 1) Much of these people's mellowness comes from being too fried on downers to be anything else. 90% of those interviewed are so zonked they can barely keep their eyes open, forget about being coherent. 2) Of course there's violence and predatory behavior going on - some of these people have no jobs and are addicted to narcotics. Do the math, Dexter. 3) Drugs are illegal. Cops have jobs and quotas. Deadheads are like ducks in a pond. Once again, do the math.

!Punk Reference! : A pair of street punks appear in the film and one observes "This is the last place I expected to be shunned because of the way I look".

Here's a true story. In the early ‘80s I worked concert security in the DC area. The two worst shows were a rap concert (duh) and Jerry Garcia. The easiest were the punk and new wave shows. For the Garcia Band hundreds of stoners came from all over the country with no tickets, but they expected to get in anyway because their acid trip told them so. The parking lot was like Dawn Of The Dead at the shopping mall. One cretin in the back tried to loudly recruit fellow morons to storm the doors. I told him I was going to turn him over to the P.G. County cops. He ran. DC can still be the Deep South when it wants to be. Only one of the following did not actually happen: 1) the fire and police departments, with dogs, arrived and declared the area a danger zone because so many people were wasted and bottles were being smashed against the building, making the grounds dangerous, 2) fifty stoners refused to leave and kept on twirling and popping up and down, and one yelled, "You may be able to keep us out, man, but you can't keep Jerry in!", and 3) canisters of liquid soap were thrown into the unruly crowd, which acted as Hippie Napalm and reduced them to goo.

Times Square (video) (EMI): When this 1980 film was announced in the late 70s, we thought this would be our Saturday Night Fever - before we knew it the world would go punky new wave and we'd be able to brag we were hip before it was hip to be hip. It didn't happen. Times Square wasn't good and it quickly faded from memory. A completely forgettable film from start to finish, it's as if, in an act of pity, the world decided to pretend it never existed. A highly anticipated "event" movie, many video review books don't even bother mentioning Times Square. The Videohound's Guide, rightly critiquing it as "Unappealing and unrealistic", doesn't even give it a rating, the only theatrical release I could find in the book without one.

There are good movies, bad movies, and movies that are good because they're bad. Times Square just exists. The plot is silly, unbelievable, and often pretentious, but not enough to be taken seriously. Nothing pisses me off more than a stupid film with no redeeming qualities. Times Square is discomforting because as you're watching it you're constantly trailing off with "What the...?, Who the...? Where the...?, but there's nothing to really get worked up about. You can't say this sucks, which it does on every level, maybe because the actors are working with poorly conceived characters and a plot that's going who knows where.

Tim Curry, in the Eric Bognosian role, is a graveyard shift NYC radio deejay who is also the disembodied voice of Times Square, where the hookers, drug dealers, porno and kung-fu theaters, Three-Card Monte, the homeless, ranting street preachers, and horse-meat kabob vendors gather 24 hours a day in a twisted dance of performance art. One minute Curry's an omnipotent teller of truth, the next he's a coward or potential pedophile. I can't tell if he's trying to cover up his English accent or not. It's distracting, though, like when Mel Gibson does his NYC voice. Trini Alvarado, in the Jennifer Beals role, is the introverted, arty teenage daughter of the man trying to gentrify Times Square. She's a thirteen year old acting like she's sixteen. Robin Johnson, in the Joan Jett role, is a street-wise mental case with the voice of Selma Diamond. You could feel sorry for her tough life, I guess, but she's such an asshole it's hard to care if she blows up into puddles of goo.

The story is about a tough street kid who meets a shy rich girl, and they have wacky homeless teenage adventures in NYC, until the rich girl has come out of her shell while the tough girl reaches the abyss of her own self-destruction. Meanwhile the funky energy of Times Square and Curry's radio broadcasts shape and comment on the proceedings. A movie can't be quaint and “real” at the same time, and that's one of the movie's major flaws. The "Sleez Sisters" set up residence in an abandoned warehouse on the docks, and they decorate it with enough found items to make it a gypsy paradise. They roam the streets in total safety. Alvarado gets a job dancing in a strip club - but she doesn't have to take her clothes off. They steal wigs and run from the law giggling. The one thing that really pissed me off about Times Square was the theme of throwing televisions off tall buildings as a form of protest (or something). Maybe this is a statement on freedom in the face of TVs mind-numbing qualities, but to advocate hurling heavy objects from rooftops is irresponsible enough to earn the makers of this film a beating.

Director Allan Moyle didn't direct for another ten years and the bad reviews for his film sent him into such a mental state he developed an illness and lost his hair. Years later he directed Pump Up The Volume, which isn't too far off in theme from this earlier fiasco.

The soundtrack is good and it was the original draw of the film. There's XTC, The Ramones, The Pretenders, Lou Reed, The Cars, Talking Heads, The Ruts, Roxy Music, Patti Smith and Suzi Quatro. Too bad the film couldn't match the music.

Tromeo and Juliet (video) (Troma): Troma is my favorite movie studio. You know you've seen a Troma film when the effects are gory & cheap, the girls are bimbos, the acting is amateurish, and the scripts are haphazard and juvenile. Troma's most popular film is The Toxic Avenger, and other titles you might have seen are The Class of Nuke 'Em High, Surf Nazis Must Die, and Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D. Troma releases other people's sorry excuses for dumb sexploitation, so be choosy and be sure to rent their in-house productions and the horror-comedies. They’re on the inter-tubes at www.troma.com.

Troma began 25 years ago as the distributor of Bloodsucking Freaks. Since then they've accumulated a library of over 150 films they've either purchased or produced themselves. The core of Troma are Michael Herz, not the fat guy Lloyd hired to portray him in promos, and Lloyd Kaufman, either a poor man's Soupy Sales or a dead broke guy's Joe Franklin. Troma's aesthetic is a New Jersey not far from John Water's Baltimore, and a quickie exploitation streak not seen since Roger Corman filmed Little Shop of Horrors in 2 1/2 days on a bet. There's movies that are bad and bad movies that are great. Troma films are usually really bad and really great. Tromeo and Juliet came out in 1996 in the wake of the other, higher budget version..

For a Troma film this is fairly classy, with its clever Shakespearean lingo and Lemmy's fancy UK accent. That didn't stop Kaufman from making Juliet a lesbian, showing a nipple being pierced for real, and writing a scene just so the three-foot penis monster could do a cameo. Troma put anything in their movies as long as it's funny and cheap to do. They bastardize The Bard from here to Tromaville, but for Troma it's snazzy. Tromeo plays a video game called "Much Ado About Humping" while Juliet's husband-to-be, an heir to a meat packing fortune, delivers lines like a demented Bob Saget: "It's raisin loaf! It's like olive loaf, but it's not, it's raisin loaf! Why?...because there are raisins in it!" A policeman later declares "Now you f--kers have gone too far. Goddamn heads bouncing off of cars while Long Island families are singing 'Found A Peanut'". Other Troma touches are the Troma posters tacked up all over and the many extras in the background who make up their own hammy business for the camera. The closing credits include the "Guy who got pissed off sitting around all day waiting to do a nude scene and then we cut him out of the film". Did I mention how much I love Troma-directed films?

The soundtrack includes The Meatmen, Sublime, Supernova and Unsane. For a good time rent The Class Of Nuke 'Em High, Part II. That’s a good one.

True Stories (video) (Warner): This 1986 feature was directed and co-written by David Byrne of The Talking Heads. As the creator of some of the Talking Heads videos, Byrne brings his own brand of other-worldly inquisitiveness to this small yet oddly quaint musical. You'll often find this tape in the comedy section, but that's only because it's quirky and deadpan. Byrne is a cultural anthropologist by nature, and when the phrase "Shopping Is A Feeling" flashes on the screen in big block letters, there's no comedy intended. As he later narrates, "The shopping mall has replaced the town square as the center of many American cities. Shopping itself has become the activity that brings people together." You may think he's winking at you, but if you wink back he'd probably ask you what's wrong with your eye.

This is "A film about a bunch of people in Virgil, Texas", but it's really about landscape, architecture, commercialism and the stories (as opposed to lives) of the people who inhabit this world. As he later explored in depth in the Storytelling Giant video collection, Byrne loves the idea of letting anyone tell any story they choose, each person and tale a window into some other layer of consciousness. The Leonard Malton video guide gets it wrong when they call True Stories a "Smarmy, pseudo-hip tour of modern-day Texas. Is there anything easier to satirize than eccentric Lone Star crazies?" There's no contempt here. Even the fashion show in the mall where people are dressed as toaster covers and wear clothes made out of lawn is nothing more than a "Celebration of Specialness". Does John Waters have any contempt for the people in his films? Hell, no, anyone who's even heard of Waters knows these are his kind of people. So too are the citizens of Virgil, TX John Byrne's kind of people - dreamers, lonely hearts, schemers, but mostly average people with stories to tell and lives that by default must be lived.

What's the film about? On a shallow top layer it's about a small Texas town, but there's not much plot going on and that's not the point. It's an opportunity to explore Byrne's thoughts and visions of the physical and cultural landscape. On one level the film works like Waiting For Godot, with dialogue like "I have something to say about the difference between American, and European cities...... but I forgot what it is....... I have it written down at home somewhere." Some of the characters fall into categories like the lazy woman, the cute lady, the liar, the businessman (played by Spalding Gray, a master of monologue), and the lonely man who wants only to be married and loved. Played by John Goodman, this character is reason alone to see True Stories more than once. He's great - sweet, vulnerable, lonely, hopeful - you want to give the Dancing Bear a big hug. After this, catch Goodman's performance as the unstoppable psychopath Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink. He's a national treasure, up there with Harry Dean Stanton. Byrne himself narrates the film and interacts with the characters. Who he is and how these people know him is a mystery – he’s like a Spirit whom everyone trusts and knows on site without the need for introduction. As a director, Bryne's style is minimal with a love of bright primary colors. There's a great shot where the camera runs parallel to cookie-cutter suburban tract homes at the same pace as loose newspaper pages blowing across the lawns. It follows the pages until they are caught in the shrubs of the vacant lot at the end of the street, the wild landscape stretching into the horizon. Fans of directors Jim Jarmusch (Down By Law) and Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho) should appreciate this film.

On the musical front there are multiple soundtracks related to True Stories. There's a collection of incidental music and the Talking Heads album, True Stories, which carries the disclaimer, "This is not the soundtrack to the movie. Rather, this album contains Talking Heads' versions of songs from the film. In the movie, most of the songs are sung by the actors, and will be available on separate recordings. Additionally, the musical score is available..." That pretty much says it all. The actors do only a fair job as singers - the David Byrne versions are way better. Even Pops Staples of the legendary Staple Singers doesn't know what to do with "Papa Legba". If you've ever seen The Last Waltz you'd remember The Staple Singers from "The Weight". When Pops steps up to the mike you know you're about to be bowled over. I love these songs. The album wasn't given its due by the critics. "Love For Sale", "Puzzlin' Evidence", "Radio Head" and "Wild Wild Life" are excellent, the last one the happiest karaoke video of all time. True Stories is a  nice, simple movie with a great soundtrack. The end and ta da.

24 Hour Party People (DVD review: It’s hard not to equate 24 Hour Party People with Hedwig And The Angry Inch. They’re inventive, witty and fun films, and they both die in the last act. Hedwig heads south when Heddy longs for love while 24 Hour Party People withers on the rave vine.

The story of Manchester, UK’s Factory Records and its founder, lovable fop Tony Wilson, 24 Hour Party People is front-loaded with whimsical scenes, nonlinear story-telling and neat effects. Steve Coogan is wonderful as Wilson, an erudite putz who builds a thriving music scene for art’s sake alone. Real clips of The Sex Pistols, Iggy, Siouxie, The Jam and The Stranglers help visualize the revolution in music that gave birth to the Manchester scene of The Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Real and Memorex Sex Pistols mix to recreate the show that launched a thousand Mancunian ships (as it were).

Sean Harris looks a lot like Ian Curtis even though he does have a chin. I was expecting an immediate epileptic seizure but it took 37 minutes to get to the Ian Curtis money shot.

At 117 minutes the film is a long 27 minutes too long. If you watch this up to the demise of Joy Division you’ll have a great time and nobody gets hurt. When rave rears its trippy head the film loses its charm and becomes a lesson in exponential stupidity.

Many music scenes have drug cultures attached to them. A few drug cultures have their own music scenes. Reggae’s what happened to Ska when pot slowed down the mind and reflexes. I like Reggae. Ecstasy brought with it rave which allowed horrid bands like The Happy Mondays to record white soul dance crap. I like when Ravers drive off cliffs.

Rave provides the last euphoric high and catatonic low of Factory Records, and the demise is laid out like a police procedural. Wilson reveals himself to be both impotent and morally indifferent, a quasi-Buddhist approach big with intellectuals (Bowie comes to mind).

The first half of 24 Hour Party People is great. The second half pretends the slide to oblivion was fun while it lasted. If you like rave you might agree. I don’t.

200 Cigarettes (video) (Paramount): Shhh, I've managed to sneak away to write this review. I'm tapping very softly on the computer keys because I don't want this celluloid abomination to realize I've escaped. I guess I could turn it off, but I'm afraid it'll come back later to complete its mission of wasting my time. Christina Ricci is tawkin like dis and dat because she's from, ya know, Lawn Guylind. Specifically Ronkonkoma, a small town of little note chosen because it's a funny word like "pickle" and "goo".

First time director Risa Bramon Garcia calls in favors from her continuing career as a casting director to get the likes of Janeane Garofalo, Ben and Casey Affleck, Courtney Love, Dave Chappelle, Gaby Hoffman, Martha Plimpton and Jay Mohr to act in what has to be one of the most meandering, pointless, unfunny movies you'll ever see. It's a Robert Altman-type affair of a zillion story lines that somehow intermingle and come together at the end -- an "actor's movie". All 200 Cigarettes lacks is a usable script. The actors are talented but it's like watching improv drama exercises. I can't even think of a lame excuse to see this. It's not good bad and it's too dull to be bad bad.

Set in NYC in 1981, there's many new wave sounds on the soundtrack but it could just easily be about Madonna fans or disco kids. There's a scene at a punk club and punks were hired as extras. Lower Manhattan is filled with people who look like movie extras so I doubt the makeup and costuming budgets were dented. Uh oh, Courtney Love is yelling at Paul Rudd, who's kinda like Ben Stiller. Thankfully she stopped. Now they're playing a Ramones song. Elvis Costello appears in an Alfred Hitchcock cameo and some Costello album covers adorn a party loft. He's an unseen recurring character throughout. Why, I don’t know. Before I forget, the plot has something to do with a New Year's Eve party. Smoking is also big, but the cigs are just there. It's not like they serve any purpose. Maybe the film adds up to 200 actual smoked cigarettes. Wouldn't that be something. Quick, duck, I think the film's looking this way! Hooo, that was a close one.

Devo spuds Mark and Robert Mothersbaugh are credited as scoring the music. I don't hear anything in the way of scoring. Ben Affleck asks some chickies if they like Devo. Is this product placement? MTV Films helped produce this, like I needed one more reason to hate MTV. Is 200 Cigarettes only 101 minutes long? It feels like it's already next Tuesday. Now they're blasting "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love And Understanding". As if that'll make up for everything else. Nice try. Is it just me, or is Christina Ricci's face and body getting rounder and rounder? All she needs is a tan and she'll be a full-color circular. Hooray for esoteric humor!

Just when you think (and I hope) the film should logically end, it keeps on going. Oh, thank God it's ending now. The credit says David Johansen played a bartender. Huh. It also says Elvis was a "Special Music Consultant". Betsey Johnson provided clothes. Yeah, well, you need her if you want to dress like Cyndi Lauper. It's over. Finally. If I hit myself on the temple with this frying pan maybe I'll forget the last 101 minutes of 200 Cigarettes. Ouch!... Ah, sweet sweet head trauma.... A much, much, much better movie about how kookie NYC can be in the wee hours is 1985's After Hours. Martin Scorsese directed and both Dick Miller and Terri Garr appear in it. New York is the city so nice they named a movie about escaping from it.

Tuxeedomoon - Four Major Events (video) (Target): With the exception of two songs this live performance is fairly dull, plus the video effects are way out of hand in how they try to mirror the obtuse complexity of the music. Tuxeedomoon released a fair amount of single-worthy material along with endless atmospheric mush. I rented this because the box listed a set of songs I like. Too bad they all weren't on the tape.

A collective of San Francisco artists and musicians, Tuxeedomoon formed in 1977. They were pioneers of modern theatrical electronics, mixing mime, guitar, drums, bass, sax, violin and an array of electronics worthy of Throbbing Gristle. They adopted the romanticism of Roxy Music and infused into it avant-garde jazz and no wave noise damage. Always to be thought of as a Ralph Records band, they released most of their recordings on their own label. By 1982 they moved to Rotterdam, where they thought their art would be better appreciated. Many band members came and went until their last album in 1987.

Four Major Events finds the camera crew using every special effect in the manual instead of simply showing the band perform live. One tune doesn't look live at all. I would have loved to hear "No Tears", but instead there's much standing around while one of them turns a nob on his synth and then stands back to see what happens. I saw them in concert at around this time (mid ‘80s) and there was a lot going on visually. This video shows you very little and jettisons detail for static, blurredness and slow motion. Which is too bad. A collection of their hits is worth finding. This video tape is worth leaving. 

Two Moon July (video) (Pacific Arts): A PBS- financed production from 1986, the 80 minute Two Moon July brings together a healthy number of no wave, minimalist and multi-media artists to promote the work of The Kitchen, a venerable art and performance space in lower Manhattan. To quote from their website, "The Kitchen is an interdisciplinary laboratory for visionary emerging and established artists. In the coming millennium, The Kitchen will remain a nurturing space for artists to collaborate across disciplines and push the boundaries of their fields, and will support the artistic exploration and application of new technologies that help connect artists and audiences from around the world. The first institution to focus exclusively on multi-disciplinary work, The Kitchen is preserving an archive of performance work, which is of great historical significance." It’s the usual hyperbole but The Kitchen has lived up to it with aggressive programming and a hardcore group of supporters that include Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass, both of whom appear on this tape.

Now that I've trumpeted the virtues of The Kitchen, I must say this tape stinks. It has no idea what it wants to be, and the small attempts at running two simultaneous plot lines lead to nothing. You have periodic banter between the two audio/sound people that's supposed to give a behind-the-scenes feel, and a running gag with an agent handing out promo tapes and making excuses for a performer who doesn't make it to the show as promised. The original idea might have been to have Two Moon July be an eclectic evening of performance with other distractions added, but there’s no audience and no ongoing show, so the result is a mishmash with no continuity.

This should have been a straight taping of performances from the live and multi-media artists on hand. The viewer should sense the excitement of the audience and of a gathering of prodigious talents as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, David Byrne, Arto Lindsay and John Lurie. You should watch this and wish to god you were there. Instead, everyone performs alone for the camera and there's no connection between what you see now and ten minutes from now. The short films are dull and the two dancers basically improv their pieces while you both marvel at their dexterity and wonder what if anything their movements mean. The only highlight is David Byrne, who performs something called "Report From L.A.", where he walks and then runs around the studio while reciting a poem and leafing through a glossy magazine. It's typical Byrne but Byrne at his best.

There's no need to rent this, so instead bake some cookies, floss your toes or scream back at the crazy guy on the bus. Or, you can always ponder if Laurie Anderson ran out ideas after "O Superman". 

UK/DK: A Film About Punks and Skinheads (video) (Cleopatra): In 1994 Cleopatra re-released this 1983 film for the latest generation of spikey-tops to enjoy. When I first rented it I thought the 55 minutes running time was weak for anything calling itself a film, but for a number of reasons this works out to be more than enough to get its points across. I enjoyed it, but another ten minutes and I would have turned it off.

UK/DK is a document of the second wave British punk movement, consisting mainly of oi and street punk bands. It followed a number of similar films about the first wave of the Sex Pistols, Clash, etc. UK/DK doesn't have anything really new to say - it's mostly an update on UK punk in the aftermath of its initial explosion. It's more bands and fans explaining what they like about punk, why they're punk and what punk means to the world at large. The only notable statement this film makes is that punk was still going strong after the death of the Sex Pistols and subsequent belief by the larger culture that punk was dead. Some punks present punk as a valid means of expression while others are C.H.U.D. with mohawks. Some want to change the world for the better while others are lazy slobs content to live on welfare. There's much generic philosophizing and a few good points too. This should all be new and exciting to, uh, probably nobody.

The following bands are interviewed and/or shown lip-synching along to their records: The Exploited, Vice Squad, Adicts, The Damned (here to show continuity from the '77 scene), Blitz, The Business, Varukers, Chaos UK, and Disorder. It's a conscious decision to not have the bands recorded live, especially considering how odd it is to see a live show being used to film a punk band basically miming their own music. The intent had to be a desire for professional presentation of a genre infamous for its sloppy live shows. Or maybe it was cheaper. The songs in the film sound the same and do nothing to show the true variety of sounds found in the early ‘80s. The quality of UK/DK is generally very high. My copy had bad sound quality but I'm sure it was defective.

Professional critics Gary Bushell of Sounds magazine (famous in oi circles) and Carol Clerk of Melody Maker give running commentary on the continuing punk movement, which gives the exercise more credibility than simply having punks rationalize their existence. As with the first punk wave,  these journalists are using their enthusiasm for the genre as a means of establishing themselves in the mainstream press.

I've seen and reviewed too many documentaries to get all worked up in my analysis of DK/UK. It's well made and worth your time if you're into the bands. No new ground is broken and nothing special is revealed, so there’s no need to rent one less porno just to see this, unless it's your first time -- seeing a British punk movie I mean.

Up In Smoke (video) (Paramount): You wouldn’t have a film like Dumb And Dumber if not for this 1978 marijuana classic, starring Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, the Abbott and Costello of pot humor. Dumb and Dumber differs in that Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels are dopes high on obliviousness as opposed to high, oblivious dopers. Most of Up In Smoke, Cheech and Chong’s first and best picture, is a loosely structured series of sight gags and expanded stand-up routines. The ending is a punk rock extravaganza that gave ‘70s Los Angeles punks the chance to appear in a real live movie!

Up In Smoke is a movie about pot smoking, and even though there’s some good lines, mostly what you have are “funny” drug situations that dopers find funny because anything to do with pot makes them laugh. Any reference to smoking a bowl is a guaranteed chuckle, and “the munchies” is a high concept that sends potheads into hysterics of deeper understanding, because not only is it funny, it’s true! Everything revolves around pot smoking, there’s a truck made out of pot that lights on fire, Stacey Keach (that's Mike Hammer to you, punk), the pot hating cop, gets the munchies, the van rocks back and forth, everyone thinks Chong’s getting some love action and…dude… I forgot the rest (hahahahahaha…huh?)

The last scenes take place at the Roxy in Los Angeles. They also show the Rainbow club. Cheech and Chong enter a “Rock Fight Of The Century” contest where they scare up a band and call themselves “Alice Bowie”. Cheech plays guitar and wears Mickey Mouse ears, pink tights and a pink tutu (inspired by The Plasmatics?). You can catch a few seconds of the Berlin Brats, The Dills and The Whores playing live as part of the contest. Cheech plays his ow