Rock on Film Part 8: David Essex faux biaux

Ok, I need to write the synoptic opinions on these two before midnight:

THAT'LL BE THE DAY

70s pop star David Essex plays a boy coming into bloom in late 50s Britain. Filling with sap and ready to burst he runs away to one of the grey pebbled beach seaside resorts that Britain still boasts. Here he checks off all the formative experiences and makes a kind of living helped by his teddy boy chum played by ex teddy boy Ringo Starr. He lamely makes his way back home after too much failure and settles with the girl he fancied from the start but then he goes to an early rock gig and feels the hook pierce his skin and stay. He buys a guitar frorm a pawn shop and the rest is hysteria.

STARDUST

Well it would be hysteria if the director of the sequel wherein all the really good bits befall a fictional British rock star of the 60s hadn't laid such a turkey egg. Michael Apted who has made fiction features before and after this but most famously the Seven Up series for television shows NONE of that compassion in this gargantuan mess. What ought to be a steady tracing of conviction through decadance into fameshocked insanity is a series of plodding scenes that are stitched together with snippets of dialogue that seldom add sensibly. Worst is the attempt to show a kind of Beatlemania at the NME poll winners concert which only ends up looking like a rehearsal for a Countdown mimed setpiece without any editing. All you get from this one is a clear intention and the plummeting of its execution.

Done.

Right. Here's what's good about the first one: the film contains almost no rock music. It begins with school kids just talking about it. When it moves to the rites of passage/prodigal son middle section it really takes on substance and vindicates the decision to cast a pop star as a pop star in waiting. Essex is exactly what he needs to be, restless enough to run away to Blackpool but intelligent enough to learn how to use his looks and charm for what he needs. A scene of him trying out puerile song lyrics to his own delight is enlightening. He knows he'd never write a song like that for real but the pictures that must be occuring to him in the resulting daydream are imaginable from the look on his face. Ringo does a fine turn as a tough scouser carny and probably used all the memories he had of being the drummer in a Butlins Holiday camp band. Back home the scene is all the slow upward incline from rationing and the merest hint that good times are on their way, however endlessly cold it looks. Essex's character, Jim, sees the rock band at the very end and can't resist. His decision is a convincing imagining of that of a generation of British teens at the turn of the 50s to the 60s. The decision is as brutal as it is exciting.

Then Michael Apted was loosed on the sequel that was allowed by its subject matter (A Beatlesish band taking over the world and changing it) to be as big and flamboyant as it wanted. Didn't happen. Nothing connects in this one. A kind of progression ensues by virtue of the apparent passage of time from scene to scene but there is nothing authentic about the feel of what we are seeing. There is a lot of music from the period as well as attempts at evoking it (which sound like the 70s no matter how well they're disguised). There is no apparent contact between the filmmakers and any of the joy or even bleakness that crosses the screen.

The fanmania scene is a good example here. The concert sound is hammered with echo which is probably an attempt at demonstrating how confusing it is for the band but, even though the band on screen has real musicians in it (Dave Edmunds and Keith Moon, I begs yer pardons) no one looks like he's actually playing anything. A crowd of 70s looking high school girls jump on the spot around them and the edits come short and fractured. The only chaos is coming from the director's chair. Apted might have witnessed a Beatle concert. He might have even filmed one. Here he seems to be completely lost in close up. The scene is a mess, not a depiction of one. I didn't time it as I watched but it felt like it went for twenty minutes.

Through the attempts at fame's decadence and the eventual plunge into Syd Barret style madness towards the end (another passage of the film that seems interminable) the rest of Stardust keeps plodding until it ends in a supposedly triumphant redemption. And Essex, so good in the first film, simply seems to have nothing much to do. However, I'll give ex pop star Adam Faith a star. He's no more coherent as a character but I remember more scenes with him than with anyone else in this nonsense. If Ken Loach had directed an episode of Happy Days with Richie Cunningham as a kind of gawping village idiot and the Fonz as a surly mumbling northerner with an explosive temper ... I'd watch it more times than I watched this.

Ken Russell should have done this but he was busy with Tommy and didn't like rock music anyway. Pity.

Rock on Film Part 7: The Runaways

Here’s what I remember: some time between six and seven on a Sunday evening in 1976 and I, along with everyone else in Australia between about twelve and twenty-nine, was giving the family tv the zombie eye as Countdown was on. Emerging suddenly from the oversaturated video glare was a girl group playing a very tough thump, jeans and lingerie against a black background that might have been deep space. Not a smile among them. The blonde floozy looking singer then started her vocal which didn’t sound like it should: strong hard low notes as solid as the kick drum. And then it all soared to a tearing scream and stutter for the chorus: ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch cherrreeee bomb! Second verse better than the first and a guitar solo, a real guitar solo that I never imagined a girl could play (I was thirteen and could barely sustain a barre chord for more than a … bar). And then, slam, a key change that didn’t sound goofy but hard, raising the power. One last verse, an extended chorus and they were gone. And I glazed over, wanting them to come back on.

After that very very little. They weren’t going to tour any time soon and if they did they wouldn’t be making it to little ol’ Townsville, backwater to the world, haven to the escapee (whenever crim on Homicide or Division 4 had to flee the town they almost always said they were going to Townsville. “We got a mention,” one of us would yell somewhere between a joke and a cry of pride). An interview on Flashez with Joan Jett and Cherie Currie left me with the dismal news that the new album would be more sophisticated. I hadn’t even heard the first one apart from the single (still haven’t, as it happens). Sophisticated? Not rougher? Not tougher? Girls, you punched your way into every teenage boy’s nervous system and all you want to do is Tom Jones numbers? Oh god maybe they meant prog!

But there was nothing.  The second album came out. I bought it off someone who won it on the radio and played a few tracks a few times. Nothing. Joan Jett reportedly swept Rat Scabies off his feet when The Damned toured the US. A few years later Joan Jett had a solo career. As with most other types of music or low end culture, they were rendered invisible and inaudible by punk. Cherie Curry was great but Johnny Rotten was greater and Siouxsie when she appeared had mystique and durability. Etc etc.

This film is an attempt at filling the blanks. It’s adapted from Cherie Currie’s memoir and Joan Jett has a producer credit. So, is it as bad as that suggests? Actually, it’s pretty good.

Cherie Currie wags school with her sister and gets in a car with boys. There’s a sense of fun to this but it’s sinister, too. Joan Jett meets Kim Fowley outside club (the carpark is crawling with drunk teens who mope sloppily and slowly like drunk teens). Their conversation is character keynote 101 but it works. She’s introduced to a drummer and before you can say Sandy West they're slamming out some garage blag in a caravan. Couple of good things here. First, it sounds like two barely competent musicians trying to mesh in a caravan, loud and unlistenable but meant. Second, Joan Jett is playing a Silvertone guitar, a kind of pre-Danelectro beater that would have been ordered via a sales catalogue and sent with a little amp built into the case. They can go for a grand these days but Jett probably paid less than $50 for hers in the mid 70s. Later she's got a Les Paul because she can then afford one. Some attention to detail, there.

Meanwhile Cherie is trying to cope with life between a broken marriage, alcoholic father and a high school that thinks she's a freak. She enters the school concert with an inspired miming of David Bowie's track Lady Grinning Soul, complete with glitter jumpsuit and lighting makeup across her face. This scene works as not only does she flip the bird to the boo-ers (most of the the audience) and persist but she's terrible. This is a well encapsulated demonstration of teenage fantasy life and the dizzying ridicule that meets it at every point of manifestation. Her performance is not a triumph, it's material for name calling, taunts and open hostility. It rings true.

Now all we need is for these two in the same shot. Kim Fowley takes Jett to Rodney Bigenheimer's LA night club where all the British glam records are spun to maximise the chances of meeting a personality for the microphone of the new band that might start from the right spot. Cherrie is spotted swiftly spotted. Dakota Fanning is one shade of underage fragility in the thick pink light and one shade of nail tough survivor with a come-here-bugger-off glare beaming out over her unsipped cocktail. They hit it off in a tough exchange that takes the Runaways from being a flat biopic into a movie.

The first band practice with full complement is a constantly teetering racket. Cherie turns up with some middle of the road rubbish in mind that the girls in the caravan are only going to reject. School concert part two except this time Kim Fowley is ready to take the wheel and steer, bullying the beginnings of the vocal of Cherry Bomb out of Cherie and some 'tude out of the others. In a lot of films like this, his hectoring torrents might seem a little too scripted but a slight youtube acquaintance with the real man's style will correct that. Michael Shannon, rock-like and foghorn-voiced,  is a magister primus, all bronze sculpture and bellows but with wit and concentrated purpose. Check the actor out in Bug and Boardwalk Empire and watch his space.

A wild party/hype phone session later and the girls are on tour in Seedyville, USA where their absentee manager gets them a record contract and a tour of Japan. They're a hit, mobbed by schoolgirls in Tokyo, the teen rockstars are suddenly beseiged by fame, drugs, the press, and 24 room service. Cherrie is the star and the others are grumbling. She falls under the sludge tide of drugs and has to be carried hom in a body bag. Well, not quite but she's not quite well. The centre stops holding at a recording session and the band disintegrate. Joan Jett rises from the ashes a solo artist and reaps the wild whirl.

But enough plot, The Runaways works because its use of rock biopic cliches feels natural rather than contrived. The Cherry Bomb scene might seem a little too acted but it is being led by the overliving Fowley in full motivation mode. Joan Jett gets the idea for a hit song in the bath in an understated funny reference to Archimedes. Even Jett's lesbianism falls mercifully short of sensationalism. There does also seem to been some real thought put into the depiction of life in a rock band, famous or not, the politics, the boredom, the frustrations and strains. Perhaps the source materials and involvement of some of the real players worked this time (cif the Yoko-driven eulogy Imagine John Lennon released in the guise of a documentary). There's some tough stuff among the fantasy here.

This and the constantly uncomfortable scenes of Currie's family life and the apparent decision to let the warts in the portrait reveal the beauty reminded me of no one so much as Paul Schrader. There is attention given to the practical day to day frustrations of having a dependent parent which appears in some very cold lines from Currie's sister who stayed behind to clean and feed the sick man in the room. I probably should go back and look at Schrader's Light of Day which features the real Joan Jett in the cast. I bet I'd find a good companion to The Runaways.

Top marks for going beyond mere effort and making a biopic that also feels like a feature film. Yes, The Runaways continued after Currie's departure but in the interests of telling the story as a movie (rather than trying to cram everything in) this uninteresting fact was swept away. Come on, you really care about that? Ok, give me a song title from that stage of the band. While you're at it tell me the title of either Doors albums made after Morrison's death (without googling).

The Runaways sits beside Control and Backbeat for my money. It even outdoes those two in avoiding the goofy rock biopic moments. One last thing. As with Control, the audio of the band on screen was recorded largely by the actors. Makes a difference.

O Happy New Year!

Went to see Milos at ABC today where he told me that he'd sold more paintings from the last exhibition than from any previous. This had encouraged him to investigate new materials and the results were on the walls. The morphing creatures were still there but now exploding with solar yellows and shocking reds. He's done fifteen since October and won't be slowing down soon. Another exhibition will be in the air soon.

Also, without my prompting he suggested the resumption of Shadows. Nothing in stone as yet but he wants the summer clear before he can get into it again so we're thinking March. Begin the year with an autumn collection. Well that's when I began in 09 and started weekly screenings last year. So why not?

I'm thinking one or two preliminary nights perhaps a fornight apart before the new programs and am happy to entertain suggestions as to what those screenings might be (assuming they eventuate).

Talks continue. Watch this space.

PJ

Didn't you torture my bruvver?: Antipodean horror movies of recent times

Britain had one of the earliest working fiction film industries. We did, too. It worked like a Trojan up to the mid 60s. Same here. Then it slowly disintegrated. Ditto. But the quality that had been there turned up unexpectedly on the small screen. Er ... that didn't happen here.

UK tv from the 50s to the mid 90s boasts some of the best ever committed to the medium: great comedy, a kind of unforgiving toughness, sheer world leading style and, when it wanted to, a kind of creeping horror made of location, atmosphere, good acting and the kind of writing more usually found between two hard covers. Minds like that of Nigel Kneale saw to it that ideas could travel as effectively as the alien DNA in one of the earliest examples of alien invasion that needed nary a metre of tin foil costuming. All those concepts needed was a bit of video production and hey presto stories to entertain and disturb. None of this ended up on the big screen apart from a few adaptations from the tv originals. And don't bother citing Hammer movies. They have their fans but they are too ... campy and bright for me.

Lately, the industry (such as it is in that gem set in the silver sea) has been producing scarefests meant for the cinema. Here are a few I've taken in.


EDEN LAKE

A yuppie couple head out to the lush green and pleasant forest for a camping holiday before it gets developed into a concrete slab. A bunch of untamed youths set up nearby and act like right yahoos. While our heroes are splashing about in the paradisical lake o' the title our young chavs are busy vandalising the yup-mobile and nicking what they can. Discovering this on their return, the male of the two upwardly mobile ones decides to confront the hooligans who meet them with feigned ignorance. Little by little the two parties build a case against each other until it's guerilla warfare home counties style and everyone's a potential victim.

The makers of this film would only celebrate comparisons to Deliverance, Last House on the Left etc and feel honoured to be placed in that tradition. Deserved? Why not? All of these films centre on the violence of survival when the cloak of civilisation is torn off. Whether it's inbred hillbillies, Mansonish manipulators or bored unsupervised teenagers the idea that these bipedal dangers walk among us and could stab into our veneer of order at any moment. And then where would we be? Dead or fighting like savages is the usual answer. There's nothing particularly flawed about this argument at this level, scratch a yuppie and find a bogan, but the differences between outings lies in the depth of what this might mean.

In Deliverance the milquetoasts and weekend warriors from the city are shown where their status as citizens end and the test of their manhood begins. For all the machismo of the Burt Reynolds character on screen it's the perceived failure of Ned Beatty's tenderfoot fat man that strikes the hardest. Burt's always going to be ready to come back with a slammin' right hook. Ned in the world of the film can really only exist in the support system of the urban sward. His humiliation (which kickstarts the narrative proper) is what is meant to anger audiences but at the same time it's an example many in the seats would have savoured in the dark of the cinema. Deliverance's power derives from this contrary motion resolved in Reynold's heroism. No one needs to see the Vietnam parallells but they are there in spades.

Last House on the Left is both more complex and goofier than Deliverance but its points are still strong. The long first two acts follow a group of hippies closer to the Manson family than the Mamas and the Pappas. Krug, charismatic and bored, uses the people around him for his amusement, manipulating them to all kinds of atrocities including finally murder. The final act is the revenge of the relatives of the deceased which is where the civilisation is stripped and sheer bloody fury is loosed. Even though there is a confusion of themes here (are we meant to share the outrage against the hippies? are we meant to laugh ironically at the bourgeois couple turning feral?) the themes are yet there on the screen. Eden Lake doesn't suffer from a thematic problem.

That's because outside of a premise, Eden Lake doesn't have a theme. It doesn't have much beyond a series of payoffs and a subversion of survivalist horror films at the end. There are some well observed moments of peer pressure which carry the added weight of atrocity. After the ordeal, the terror, the violence, torture and suspense there seems less point to this film than the other examples I've given here. Bad things happen, says Eden Lake. I knew that.

MUM AND DAD

If Eden Lake seemed well made and pointless, Mum and Dad goes one step further and demotes the "well made" to competent.

Lena the Clena from Poland misses her bus one night and can't get back from the airport where she scrubs the loos. A smoko mate, Birdie says she can put the Pole up for the night and lives but a walk away. Home is a domestic prison with a knockoff Fred and Rosemary West except the two kids are in on it as well. There's a human abattoir downstairs and a cellar full of stolen goods. What do we do for depth? Well, what about having the victim come across ... kind of ... but still have enough in her to revolt at the end if she needs to.

What would make her revolt?


Have we tried cross dressing yet?  Dad cross dressing. And she has to do it with him.


Ok, put that in then. Have we done dismembered but still alive? How about hanging on the wall?


Yes! Oh, at Christmas! Do it then. Like a decoration!


Half a bloke nailed to the wall in a santa hat! Still squirming!


You're a genuis. What about wanking?


We're doing enough of that ourselves, mate.


Seriously, let's put some wanking in. No one shows that. We can shoot from behind if the actor's too self conscious.


How do we know it's wanking, then?


Shoot the jizz ... so to speak.


Right. Alright.


A shot of the jizz IN the liver he's just cut out of one of his victims!


How much are we paying you, again? Right. Let's set it up before it gets cold!

Sorry (it's me again) but all this film shows that its creators can think up nasty stuff. So can I. So can the average five year old. Schoolkids regularly do this while waiting for the teacher. It really only works when there's a point to it. The point of torture porn films like Hostel is getting to see self centered yuppies get their tongues drilled in. I can daydream that, too, but at least it's something.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Don't you bloody dare! TCM has a similar shock survival premise but crucially shows only as much as it needs so that its audience can do the rest. Imaginative audiences (ie pretty much all of them) are always going to make something worse than could ever be shown on screen. That's the real aesthetic crime of Mum and Dad. It seems to think the unrelenting graphic ghastliness is going to provide substance enough for all the great unwashed cor-blimeys out there in the dark. The effect isn't horrifying but bland. Oh, they're doing that now. Oh, they're trying that. Right. Ok. The problem is not that the gore and cruelty is confronting, it's that it's smug. Smugness has no place in horror. An effective horror film cannot afford to put anything between its audience and the screen. This is like almost every example of a non-genre filmmaker trying genre out; there's often a sense of them slumming it and throwing a bone to the audience now and then. It's like finding out the mark in a filmed practical joke was in on it. Blargh!

Mum and Dad starts, gets nasty, gets nastier and ends.  You've just lost 85 minutes of your life.

THE CHILDREN

Hmmm. Better. Actually, a lot better.

A couple of small families get together for a weekend in the snowy country. One of the kids is ill. The others start acting odd then violent and become literal little terrors. Survival hijinks ensue.

Here's what's good about this film that the two above left out. There are characters to care about. The transition from happy holiday to nightmare is made in smooth and easy paces and never feels forced. The atrocities are variously aggravated accidents or believably childlike in conception. There is a recognisable allegory all the way through about the  unpleasantness of infection in childhood and how alarming it is to see something (even just colds) spread through school populations. Making the victims of infection the threat is not new, nor is rendering childhood innocence sinister, but having the two together pretty much is. The young chavs in Eden Lake are just uncontrolled yahoos. The kids in The Children are bound by microbes, monstrous, soured,  ruined. Ask any parent about the point where they lost the bond with one of their own, however briefly, and their account will be imaginably close to the events here.  See? All you need's a point.

HEARTLESS

This is more like it. Phillip Ridley who made the sustainably weird The Reflecting Skin makes few films. His other careers include childrens books, written and illustrated, as well as installation art. That might tell you that he has a taste for fable and its often gruesome innards. But three films in about twenty years is Terrence Malik territory. But instead of hours of screen time filled with botany and murmurs we get one of the most engaging pacts with the devil I've seen since Angelheart.

Jamie works as a photographer in his uncle's business but also goes out in his time off taking photos of the derelict buildings and odorous underpasses of his native London. Jamie has Britpop looks (Jim Sturgess) which are interrrupted by the heart shaped birthmark which covers half his face. One afternoon he takes a picture of a figure in a window which he can't explain. Returning to the scene later he finds a backlot teeming with demonic figures around a bonfire. Gang attacks are on the rise on the tv news, hoodies like these demons attacking people with molotov cocktails. One of the victims is his own mother whose death by fire he witnesses helplessly. Life could be better.

Through his extreme emotional state he is finding it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the cruelty of reality and the nightmarish ugliness of his visions. He is led to a hulked out towerblock where a scarred Cockney called Papa B trades him the beauty he ought to have for a few trivial favours. Jamie agrees and gets a full body burn for his compliance. Then again, when he emerges from his scars his face is clean. Life is beautiful. Well, we all know it isn't.

No spoilers here. You only got that much plot to indicate how much more work was done on this film than the others featured in this post. Ridley likes his realism magical and knows how that will always reveal something wicked if left to its own devices. But he also knows that the glories it promises can themselves be an uneasy mix of awe and horror. Jamie's pact with Papa B is a wish fulfillment and carries the cost they always demand.

Beauty and its capture, boredom and violence, lights and lightlessness, all of it adds up to the London where Phillip Ridley grew up and turned into a city of shopping and drunkenness. There is a little nostalgia here but more than that there is anger and seldom has that emotion been painted so seductively. Maybe this film shouldn't be in this post. While it does contain some generic elements it's far closer to being a fable, three wishes with the devil. But it should be here because it shows that a film can be British, new, inventive to the point where it's almost of its own tribe and yet still perfectly acceptable to the mainstream audience. It shows that good British film doesn't have to be a distillate of the glory years of British tv and it doesn't have to be as smug, try hard or as flat and charmless as Eden Lake or Mum and Dad (or for an example from our own shore, the abject hollowness of Wolf Creek) ... and still be a horror movie.

Out locally on dvd. See it if you can find it.

Review: Severed

I'm going to see if I can do this in 500 words, starting after the colon:

Severed is a Canadian film set in a forest where loggers are fighting protesters. Two scientists, meanwhile, find an anomaly in the tree sap. The loggers merrily lop old life forms until one of them nicks himself with his chainsaw and his blood mashes with the gluggy red sap which looks like the strawberry jam in market donuts. The other loggers run to his aid but he turns nasty, biting them and glaring into the light of the world with wild red eyes.

Back on the shore of the corporation , the boss shows the suits some old school and ropes his only begotten in to enter the forest and investigate the slackened production. Scene of father-and-son-drift and the boy goes off and finds the zombies who are all like the first, rabid, red eyed and hungry. He meets up with a small group of survivors. George A. Romero anyone?


Well, yes and no. First, it's unashamedly on video which lends it the authenticity it needs if it insists on being so generic. Second, the score is a low key drone that shifts the lush Canadian forest from visually pacifying to disturbing. Characterisation and performances are on a par with the average Romero piece: competent enough to keep the narrative going. There is the obligatory stronger settlement where the survivors have fortified themselves to weather the terror until the zombies are gone and the company's gunships stop flying over. The company's a big pig intent on filling the world with the junk of GM forestry. The climactic scene and final sequence play out as a call for responsibility and bring the whole exercise some unexpected dignity.

Isn't this a little like 28 Days Later? 28 Days refined an old idea of zombies being infected from industrial science (Jean Rollin's Grapes of Death). Danny Boyle's film bloats and lumbers into line early. Severed, by comparison is like a groove- rather than note- perfect blues band grinding out standards with style. They're a covers band but that shouldn't stop them being sexy.

If you're going to cover Romero you need do it right. Remember that relentlessly slow moving zombies are more frightening than ones that can run. Remember that if you can't pull off a suspense sequence with performances and minimal editing you're in the wrong business or you're Michael Bay (same thing). Remember if you are going to hammer big business you should put some effort into bringing something fresh to that creaky old table. Overall, go back and watch Night of the Living Dead and remember how much can be made of how little if your idea can survive the premise.

Severed checks out. It's not a remarkable entry in the subgenre but it does its job very well. It also avoids tiresome attempts at injecting stoogey comedy into a situation that works well enough as horror. Leave your eight barrelled shotties and ironic one liners in the first draft. Everyone finds them grating and no one will miss them.

Recommended.

Did it.

Unsungquels II

DAMIEN: OMEN II
Cautionary qualification: you will need some form of silliness suspension but if you made it through the first Omen film you should be ok.

All the bad stuff of the first movie has happened and a pubescent Damien is now lodged with his uncle and family. He and his cousin are borders at a posh American military school. Here Damien is getting acquainted with his birthright and some nifty powers that come with it. At home his aunt is having to fend off the attacks of her mother in law who sees Damien for the Antichrist he really is. Meanwhile at the mega corporation run by Damien's uncle, the middle eastern digs have turned up a mural depicting the apocalypse starring Damien's likeness as Mr Anti. Enough plot for you? Happy now?

Ok, well this is a pretty good film taken within its scope as an entry in a horror franchise. The first film still strikes me as a collection of effective set pieces cuffed to each other with some overwrought performances and fanciful reinterpretation of scripture. Reinterpretation? Rewriting, more like. There's a famous faux pas credit from the glory days of Hollywood of a Shakespeare play which begins "additional dialogue by..." I was actually interested enough in the first Omen to read Revelation (don't let anyone at all try to sell you the book as a plural, it's ONE revelaTION given to St John, everything, the trumpets, horsemen, quakes and hail, New Jerusalem, the lot happens in that ONE revelation). Anyway, none of the Nostradamus-ish prophecy in the movie made it into St John's prose. Disappointing but true. And telling. For all its success as an hysterical horror piece, The Omen is projected from a proveable fabrication. I don't mean that it's fiction but that the text it bases its narrative on is easy to check. The one they come up with might as well have been penned by the guy who did the additional dialogue for Shakespeare. Anyway, Damien: Omen II doesn't have that problem.

Damien: Omen II is superior to its predecessor in that it makes no pretence to biblical authority beyond the idea of the Antichrist itself. Actually, as all the overacting and silly expository dialogue (less here than in the first one) the Antichrist as a teenager is pretty compelling stuff. Damien is a likeable and popular boy among the kids at uniform school. He's going through changes the same as they are. Well, apart from the pubic hair and the bumfluff on the upper lip, acne and stirring hormones, he's getting some extras (while they're getting boners he enjoying a bonus).

Two scenes at the school show this splendidly and they arise from the narrative rather than are obviously engineered by it. The first is when a bully tries it on the dark one and pushes him to the limit. A series of quick cuts between the gazes of the two show the sweet faced Damien suddenly become icily intense. No make up or lighting, just acting. The bully is reduced to a twitching wreck seeing untold horrors while writhing on the floor. We don't see what he sees. We don't need to. The next is my favourite. Damien in history class is brought up by the teacher and drilled by him about some significant dates of military history. Damien's face again freezes over as he not only gets every one right but starts to answer questions the teacher hasn't yet asked, in a rapid fire exchange that derails into a shattered teacher and almost oblivious student. Dialogue, editing and performance. This not only fulfills the promise of the first one where the preverbal Damien showed some tantalising power over the big nasty black doberman and made the apes go ... all baboony in the safari park. This is a sequel doing what it says on the tin.

Other set pieces include a blinding by raven on a lonely country road, everyone's nightmare lift ride as one goes plummeting twenty floors, a extended drowning scene under an iced over lake, the revelation of Damien's likeness on the mural and a fine fiery furnace of a finale. All that and a younger Lance Hendriksen as a kind of minder who cautions Damien against revealing his nature too early. Mention must also be made of Jerry Goldsmith's improvement on the already impressive work he did on the musical score for the first one. The black mass extends out into the gutteral squawks of ravens and a darker, more insidious aural landscape on this outing. The look of the film also has a richer palette than the first, in line with the heightened senses of a teenager.

On that, one of my favourite scenes from the film again testifies to Jonathon Scott Taylor's title role performance when he offers the hand of Satanic protection to his cousin. No lightning bolts or gothic music, just two kids arguing the stumbling awkward way teenagers do when going through hurtful disputes about things like loyalty or jealousy. It's not kitchen sink realism but it isn't goth central either. It could have been a scene from Summer of 42.

This film needs its predecessor but by the sequel's finale the original feels like a prequel. Like it.

Rock on Film Part 6 : Pistols on Parade

I'll out myself again as being an early x-er which places me as a teenager when punk rock happened. This is important for this post as it might tell you that I don't buy the American origins revisionism about punk nor do I care much about disputes as to what the first punk rock actually was. All you need to know about the value I assign to punk rock is in the following brace o' paragraphs.

Christmas holidays 1976. I was in the rumpus room with my brothers Stephen (two years older) and Greg (I think nine years older). Countdown had just finished and we were just zoning out in front of Weekend Magazine before the ABC news. Weekend Magazine was a soft news show that could have anything from models of the Sydney Harbour Bridge made of matchsticks and guano or the Birdsville Races. This day it had a story on punk in London and featured the Sex Pistols. In those few minutes (about four of them) I watched the screen in rapture as behind my chair a divide was forming between my older brothers and me. As Greg ridiculed the name of the band and its singer I was aglow with freedom. For my tens and two teen years I had been eagerly taking his lead on music and culture in general, loving some of it and wincing at a lot of it but having nothing of my own to replace it with beyond the garbage on the radio. That door opened in those few minutes and still hasn't closed.

It took a long time for the Pistols album to be released but when it was everything I'd kept as a fading memory came explosively true when the needle hit the vinyl that fateful day late in 1977. Between the two times I devoured as much as I could about what was happening over there. There were inklings in some quarters that there were things worth the listen happening in America, too. When I heard them they didn't really stick. There's merit there, of course but none of it had the violent excitement of the British stuff. So, now when I hear that it all came from New York I ask people to go back and listen to what was actually coming from there and compare it to the Brit stuff. Old hippy ravings of Patti Smith (sorry, never heard much in her), cartoony thrash of the Ramones (never seemed serious enough), and garbage like the New York Dolls didn't convince me. Put all of them against Anarchy in the UK and I know who I'll declare the winner. Subjective? It has to be. Anyway...

Here are some representations of my favourites from the time, The Sex Pistols on screen.

THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE

This is the one we all waited for. We knew it would be manager Malcolm McClaren's encomium to himself, a grand ninety minutes of after dinner lies about how much influence he had over the residents of the Milky Way in the late seventies. We knew that. We grumbled about it in the cinema queue. We sat in front of it in sheer overwhelming awe and went to the pub afterwards and whinged about what a wanker McClaren was. He wasn't going to win and didn't deserve to.

He did, however, bring the Pistols to the big screen and we in the Anitpodes who would probably never get to see them for real (that changed in the nineties) had this experience. It's still hip to damn the piece for its message of narcissism and tits 'n' bums 'n' raincoats attempts at offence, hip among people who weren't born until years after the band broke up. Odd how trad youth can get in the struggle to distinguish themselves from the previous guard (did it myself and still find it funny).

So what's the film really like? It is indeed McClaren's show. He is the first to fill the screen in a rubber fetish suit, hissing the introduction to what will be ten lessons in how to get cash from chaos. Guitarist Steve Jones plays a private detective on McClaren's trail and the two threads make enough of a weave to hang a babel of imagery from the band's brief public career augmented by animated sequences. McClaren's claims are grand and often completely out of sorts with the facts as they emerged.

McClaren tells the tale to a dwarf in punk regalia, variously on London Bridge, bathing in a mansion, bamboozling press drones at a private airstrip and other locations suggesting he is in control of all the cultural elements he boasts of altering. Steve Jones' detective goes from one sleazey situation to the next, having sex in a cinema, having sex in a bondage club, crapping on the floor of McClaren's abandoned office. The animations are similarly what was referred to in the seventies as blue (though there are some genuinely atmospheric serious sequences too). Sid Vicious plays up his rep as a walking chaos generator on the streets of Paris, riding a Harley down a country lane and most infamously emptying a pistol into the audience after singing his version of My Way (still my favourite, btw). Jones and Cook apparently reveal themselves as McClaren's loyal abettors in Brazil (Jones in another sex scene) writing songs with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs and someone playing exiled Nazi Martin Bormann. Everything ends with an animated credit sequence on a pirate ship set to Steve Jones' version of the highly blue Good Ship Venus as something more like the real story of the band is told through members being forced off the plank or just falling off and drowning.

A feature length fabrication by someone who never quite admitted he was lying but also never seemed ashamed at being exposed as a liar. It's all Benny Hill and vaudeville, a kind of romp made of elements that all seemed embarrassingly obsolete in the "ideologically sound" early eighties when it was released. 


SID AND NANCY

All I'll say about this one is that it joins films like The Doors as depictions of rock music history that lose themselves in their own adolescent wish fulfillment. I hate this try hard bullshit waste of time.

THE FILTH AND THE FURY

In the late nineties, Julien Temple shot new interviews with the surviving members, dredged any archives he had access to and recut the footage he had shot and recut them to produce this film in a kind of atonement for having made the McClaren atrocity and put his name to it.

What emerges is a documentary (which Swindle doesn't pretend to be) in which the members reminisce with what sounds like more authority than they were previously allowed. From this a clarity develops to the picture of the origins of the people in the band, the culture they moved through, reacted against and then contributed to. Context setting footage from news, shockingly out of touch youth-orientated tv shows, etc trades screen time with some great unearthed material from the time. Temple had been recording the band on video and film from their earliest days. This way he establishes a direct connection with the band that tends to squeeze McClaren out. Indeed, of all the talking heads on screen the self styled Fagin is absent in the contemporary plane.

On that, the Pistols themselves are interviewed backlit and any suggestion of their aged facial features incidental as they are almost entirely in shadow. Temple's justification for this was that he didn't want to put a lot of middle aged men on screen whose appearance might distract from the message.

This is where the problems I have with Filth and the Fury begin. I just don't buy the distraction excuse. Temple is doing something insidious here while appearing to be benign. Not only has he edged out McClaren who, tosser notwithstanding, was always articulate and worth the listen, he has put his own contribution higher than it deserves. But worse than that, his keeping of the flame has a jealous feel to it. No, you can't see what they look like now. Only I can. No, you can't project your own emotional responses on to this story, it's MY story.

Worst of all, The Filth and the Fury constitutes a kind of betrayal of the legacy. The Pistols, between being art directed and actually delivering substance (go and listen to the recordings if you don't believe that) constituted a generation's worth of confrontational culture based on a do it yourself ethos, promoting an unforgiving view on the rubbish doled out by the mainstream. This film undercuts that ethos by sentimentalising its subject. I don't, for the record, mean the moment where John Lydon breaks down while talking about Sid. That looks nothing but sincere and profoundly felt. I mean the us against them nonsense that the members contribute to themselves. Oddly, for a band whose interview with a drunk and smug tv host gave them massive press coverage, the air of the film, especially its concluding moments, feels smug.

This is a relative criticism, though. If you want an engaging and exciting account of one of the most important bands in rock music history this is a superb place to start. It will take you through the cultural need for punk rock and might give you pause to wonder if the self pleased assurance of "indy" rock might not itself be due for a similar onslaught. It's a great experience. Just don't let it be your only one.

CLASSIC ALBUMS NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS

This should be watched soon after Filth and the Fury as it cuts all the sentimentality away and has the surviving members simply talk about themselves, the band and the times candidly and pithily. As the task here is relating how the album was made any historical anecdotes outside of that immediate context carry a veracity that feels unforced. The members appear on camera in full middle aged glory, apparently unashamed of their looks and time's effects. They are interviewed separately and seem at ease. McClaren, too, is allowed his accounts and opinions which, juxtaposed with the others' seem small and self aggrandising.

The album's producer and engineer as well as the artist behind the epochal sleeve art are also interviewed which reinforces the task at hand and all supply depth through professional insights as well as their own anecdotes. A fairly detailed account is given of the recording process and some fascinating deconstructions at the mixing desk provide some brass tacks clarity to the overall image.

To my mind, this is the most satisfyingly coherent acccount of the Sex Pistols as a band as well as a cultural phenomenon. It is purposed, unassuming and fact packed. If you only watch one account of the band make it this one.

BUT

Of all the fare on offer here, my favourite watch is Swindle. For all its clunking attempts at prefabricated offence, laddism and the woeful faux sophistication of its host, it is yet in the idiom of the times it describes. The late seventies were years of tits'n'bums comedy and appeals to humour that didn't ask questions as to why it guffawed at difference. There's an authentic charm to this which is completely devoid of the fireside sentimentality of Temple's revision. Swindle is a time capsule, unreconstructed and bare in its plain mendacity. Also, of all the accounts, it's simply the most fun. You already know the real story. Now see the silly version. You know you want to....