Cast:
Featuring the bands Black Flag [Ron Reyes, Robo, Chuck Dukowski, Greg Ginn], Germs [Darby Crash, Pat Smear, Lorna Doom, Don Bolles], Catholic Discipline [Claude Bessy, Robert Lopez, Phranc, Craig Lee, Rick Brodey], X [John Doe, Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom, D.J. Bonebrake], Circle Jerks [Keith Morris, Roger Rogerson, Lucky Lehrer, Greg Hetson], Alice Bag Band [Alice Bag, Terry Graham, Rob Ritter, Craig Lee], and Fear [Lee Ving, Spit Stix, Derf Scratch, Philo Cramer], with Brendan Mullen, Bob Biggs, Philomena Whinstanley, Chris D, and Wayne Mayotte. Produced and Directed by Penelope Spheeris (#238 - The Little Rascals, #806 - Wayne's World, #1019 - Dudes)
Review:
“You get to a certain age and you go, ‘OK, what is my identity?’ My identity is The Decline of Western Civilization. It’s not Wayne’s World or any of those other movies I did.”
Penelope Spheeris managed to hone her interests in music and film into an interesting career that spanned three decades and attracted attention for what she did with her vision of filmmaking. Spheeris was the daughter of a carnival operator, who would move the family across Louisiana through the South, but her father's death in a dispute (the elder Spheeris saw someone being beaten with a cane but was shot when defending them). Subsequently, she would live with her mother in California within trailer parks, and she would use music to (as she once put it) “get my head out of the bummer that my life was", although cinema would also prove an escape as well. She studied art at California State University (Long Beach) before being influenced to change course and study psychobiology at the University of California, Irvine. Hearing about a film school in the University of California in Los Angeles, she decided to change schools again, for which she would use money earned from work as a waitress to put herself through UCLA Film School; she would start making her first shorts in 1968 while graduating from the school with a major in film in the 1970s. She formed the first company dedicated to filming music videos in the city of Los Angeles in 1974 with Rock 'n Reel. Spheeris made her first effort in the film industry through serving as producer of the first film done by Albert Brooks with Real Life (1979). She had first connected with Brooks through serving as producer for some short subjects that featured him as director/writer/star, which were featured through the first season of Saturday Night Live (1975-76). Ultimately, Spheeris has directed eleven feature films and seven documentaries through a career of music and comedies, with mixed results in audiences and with time spent with the studio system. When it comes to this film, it makes sense that Spheeris would cross music within the world of filmmaking. While visting clubs around southern California like Club 88, she found interest in the burgeoning wave of punk music enough to want to document it because of what she found so interesting - she found her reason was the same for the metal scene, in that one could express frustration and anger at the same time with it. This would be the first of three films that Spheeris would do involving the music scene in Los Angeles: Part II: The Metal Years (1988) featured the heavy metal scene with a mix of noted artists in the genre like Ozzy Osbourne and others such as W.A.S.P., while Part III (1998) involved the punks living in poverty (predictably, the latter was less popular with distributors, who would only want to release if it Spheeris gave up the rights to the first two films) - an ironic title became a self-fulfilling prophetic trilogy (incidentally, the success of the second film would lead to the offer to direct Wayne's World (1992), which proved a blessing a curse in terms of putting her into the mainstream). It was only in 2015 that one could see the films on media besides VHS, owing to Spheeris' reluctance to revisit her films, until she was spurred to by her daughter.
The film was shot over the course of six months from December 1979 to May 1980. Four decades have passed since its release, but one certainly can see how prescient the film has been in terms of its visceral insight into what makes music and its fans tick - this balance of time could even have been seen from the time it was released in 1981. By that point, Darby Clash (who is featured on the cover as lead singer of the Germs) had died, three of the bands had already disbanded (Bags, Catholic Discipline, and Germs - although the latter would reunite decades later), while others would persist on with their own levels of varying influence such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Fear, and X (who, I truthfully admit I know for exactly one song, which was their cover of "Wild Thing" for one of my favorite baseball movies, Major League). Obviously, folks in the scene liked what they saw - one premiere showing attracted hundreds of punks that led to a raucous display with police and a letter to Spheeris to never show it in the city again - that city was Los Angeles. If Spheeris had to be remembered for just one film, this film most certainly serves as a crowning achievement to talk about, particularly in its portrayal of a time and place that has never looked so far from our memory and yet still seem so relevant now. It is a chaotic affair, featuring the hectic lives and philosophies (in some way) of seven bands alongside shots of the folks around the emotions expressed in those loud moments spent in the lights (there also are a few moments spent within the perspective of Slash, a fanzine dedicated to punk that ran from 1977-1980 that Bob Biggs developed alongside Slash Records to specialize in punk rock). Some of the folks stand out more so than others, moving from point to point with moments that start with living in an abandoned church and sleeping in tight spaces or a candid conversation with Crash that plays in contrast to the wild persona on stage, or Bussy and his distinct rebel voice as a journalist/singer, or even folks playing guitar like Zoom (with his wide-leg stance and grin). By the time one closes with Fear and their confrontational style with the audience (complete with storming the stage), one has fully absorbed all the chaos with satisfaction. When it comes to having a good time with nihilism and a punk spirit that never reaches hagiography or seems too distant for anyone with good sense to check into; it is a music movie that to put it mildly doesn't give a fuck what one thinks, a punk winner for those who embrace the chaos.
Next Time: Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Overall, I give it 10 out of 10 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment