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| Lazy Bones |
Has anyone seen this Julien Temple documentary?
Comments?
I unfortunately missed a brief run it had at local theatre and I am wondering how it rates. I'm hoping it'll be released on dvd...
tia! |
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| Mel Belli |
Excellent movie. I wrote it up when it opened in D.C. last fall:
By Scott Galupo, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Are punks destined to become the new hippies - given, that is, to frequent fits of celebratory self-analysis?
It's a question not lost on filmmaker Julien Temple, who was present at the Big Bang of British punk in 1976. He has chronicled the history of the Sex Pistols in two films ("The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle," "The Filth and the Fury") and now does the same for the Clash with the superb documentary "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," which opens in area theaters today.
"An old punk is just as bad as an old hippie - maybe even worse," he says via phone from London. "I don't know. They're both bad things to be. You should move on."
Not yet, though. There are a few gripping stories to be told, and not just the late Mr. Strummer's. (He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2002 at age 50.) Rock-photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn mined the brief, ill-starred life of Ian Curtis, who fronted the influential post-punk band Joy Division in the late '70s, for the surprisingly moving drama "Control."
Taken together, the movies argue persuasively - though this was not their intent - that the era was as important a rejuvenation of rock music as was the British Invasion of the early '60s.
"I linked it personally to the moment when I was a school kid in the '60s, when we had great music from London coming out every week," says Mr. Temple, 53. "I'm talking about the Kinks and the Stones and the Who and the Small Faces."
"The punk thing felt very similar," he continues.
"You knew it was the same energy they were tapping into, the same kind of honesty that fired the music. It stripped it back to the streamlined energy of the form."
Mr. Strummer was an unlikely carrier of punk's anti-authoritarian flag. The son of a British diplomat, he was born John Mellor in Turkey and grew up in a privileged, worldly milieu.
Mr. Temple's deft portrait shows how Mr. Strummer turned such dissonance into a source of imaginative energy; it might even be said that Joe Strummer invented his true self.
An art school dropout, Mr. Strummer held onto his ambition to be a cartoonist. He remained a furious doodler into adulthood and moved plastic bags full of his work to every one of his various residences - ultimately to a barn adjacent to the English country house in which he died. Mr. Temple animates many of these drawings to flesh out parts of the narrative for which he couldn't find video or photographic footage.
The Mellor family's uprooting from various capital cities no doubt nurtured Mr. Strummer's appreciation of international folk music - from the dub-reggae experiments of the Clash to the world-music efforts by Mr. Strummer's last collaborators, the Mescaleros.
A pivotal moment in Mr. Strummer's evolution was the death by suicide of his older brother, David, while the pair were at a boarding school in London.
"The two of them were dumped into this cold, repressive, scary place around the other side of the world from their parents," Mr. Temple says. "His brother was very traumatized by it and didn't speak for months on end. I think Joe slammed the door real hard on that."
Thus, "John Mellor" was history. For a time, he assumed the persona of a wannabe Woody Guthrie, even calling himself Woody. He traveled around England and wound up on the "squatters" rock scene of West London, fronting a band called the 101ers. There he met Mr. Temple as well as his eventual Clash band mates.
Mr. Temple, then in film school, captured the band's first moment in a recording studio. "I smuggled them in on a Sunday night," he recalls. "We got them into this big old '30s art-deco movie soundstage with these ancient tape machines. They did five or six songs that were then used to try to get a record deal."
It was here, too, that the former John Mellor took on the name Joe Strummer, an anonymous-sounding guise as well as a tribute to the guitarist's inability to play what he called the "fiddly bits."
Even at more than two hours, "Joe Strummer" moves at breakneck pace. None of its talking heads is named on-screen (though pop-culture junkies will recognize many of them).
"If we had identified everybody, you would spend a lot of time reading, rather than watching it," Mr. Temple explains. "And I quite like the little bit of detective work that it makes people do. Maybe people haven't seen Mick Jones in a while, so it's like, 'Is that Mick Jones or the prime minister of Chechnya?' "
Mysteriously, the film's interview subjects gather around nocturnal campfires in New York; Los Angeles; Somerset, England; and Granada, Spain. The connection of this framing device to Mr. Strummer's life is revealed casually toward the end of the film.
Let's just say it has something to do with Mr. Strummer's embrace of his inner hippie.
As Mr. Temple explains: "The hippie thing in the '60s and the punk thing in the late '70s were two different stations on the same railroad. Those attitudes have to be expressed in different ways to have any life."
After scoring mainstream hits such as "Train in Vain" and "Rock the Casbah," the Clash found itself playing football stadiums, its members plagued by addiction and at loggerheads with one another. Living, in other words, the same jet-set cliches that the band famously rejected.
For Mr. Temple, the rise and demise of the Clash, and of punk rock generally, represents the last time that rebellious youth culture achieved mass commercial success, in contrast to today's constellation of tribes.
In a post-hippie, post-punk world, it's possible "music isn't the vehicle for those ideas anymore," Mr. Temple concedes. "Maybe it did its job as rock 'n' roll from the '50s through to the '80s."
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| Lazy Bones |
very nice. thanks for sharing, MB! |
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| mojoman |
no but i did see carbon/silicon the other nite |
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| RichardHurrah |
A must see. Available on DVD. |
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| pdog |
quote:
RichardHurrah wrote:
A must see. Available on DVD.
My Netflix says release date unknown... i too missed it in the week run in theaters! |
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| mojoman |
cut the crap? |
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