DVD REVIEWS II - Miscellaneous - http://maxpages.com/aeazine2/ISSUE_12_DVD_REVIEWS

The Great Rock N Roll Swindle
Shout Factory, 1980/2005
Released to theaters and independent film festivals in 2000, when Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were well underway taping performance after performance for MTV and HBO audiences, a documentary by Julien Temple called "The Filth and the Fury" remembered a similar period in the history of popular music, referenced in documentaries about the Ramones and Kiss, when radio and television were oversaturated by slick entertainment manufactured by labels in obvious endeavors to make a quick buck, more often than not at the expense of the artists. That four lads from poverty stricken neighborhoods could cause an effect on this system akin to a 100 megaton nuclear warhead just by starting a band, and maintain a cult following for thirty years, demonstrates how fragile the moneymaking machine truly was.
Even so, "The Filth and the Fury" maintains the Pistols' rebellion went deeper than just changing the face of music, at least as far as Johnny Rotten was concerned. For him, it wasn't simply a matter of rebelling against music that was too saccharine sweet for his tastes, or that the labels were cashing in on the artists' success. If you heed closely what he recounts about the times he was living in, he viewed popular music as one product of an order that was systematically numbing the collective consciousness of the working and lower classes, regardless of what their creed happened to be. Singing "No future!" in "God Save The Queen," he told poor English citizens something similar to what Malcolm X told oppressed African-American citizens years earlier: "You've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, run amok, led astray..."
This cultural explosion that emerged back in 1976, with the Sex Pistols in the United Kingdom and the Ramones in the United States, created inertial waves that persisted for three decades. Now that what has came to be termed "punk" is as deeply ingrained in American music as classic rock and heavy metal, the impact the Pistols had on music is taken as a matter of course, even if such an explosion couldn't be repeated within the genre nowadays. Today, you can watch "The Filth and the Fury" and hear Rotten recount those days and see it as a change that was inevitable. In 1976, it was a completely different thing to watch this outbreak of rebellion against the ruling classes happening right in front of you.
It was only a year later that "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" presented a threat to the status quo so great it shook an entire nation to its core, as if the Apocalypse was nigh. People took this movement in music, led by an aggregate of snotnosed kids raised by families on the dole amidst massive garbage strikes, racial tension between rich and poor and a mainstream society that felt more comfortable pretending what was happening in their backyard wasn't happening. Sound familiar? The hybrid of Jamaican ska music and androgynous glam/sleaze rock that became punk led to veiled panic from clergy and newscasters who wondered alike how the youth culture could have become so angry.
1980's "The Great Rock N Roll Swindle," Temple's first Sex Pistols documentary that was released on DVD this year, can be seen as a play on the frenzy permeating the media at the arrival of the band in those crucial years between '76 and '77, when "Never Mind the Bollocks" was out, "God Save The Queen" was reaching #1 on the English charts and a series of headlines featuring the band were being made. By virtue it can also be seen as an animadversion of the ethic of growing wealthy on the latest musical trends, taking into consideration the calculating megalomania of then-manager Malcolm McLaren. Here he maps out a get-rich-quick scheme involving conning the record labels and the local press.
To this day, McLaren assumes credit for the societal upheaval caused by the Sex Pistols and insists the entire thing was his joke on society. Find a bunch of poor kids who can't play instruments or tolerate each other's company, avoid competing with established musical norms, shun fans and critics, arrange attacks on society to cause the music press to resent them, raise the bar on their outrageousness when the media responds to them, then make sure they burn out in the briefest instant possible. Then pat yourself on the back for your ingenuity while laughing all the way to the bank. This is McLaren's formula for success. Only problem is, it wouldn't work. The band knew it, and that's why they were a success long after their flame burned out. "The Great Rock N Roll Swindle" seems to know it too, despite everything.
Before I continue, I should stress that "The Filth and the Fury," an account of the Sex Pistols' history from the band's point of view, presents a different story than what McLaren presented as Temple interviewed him for "The Great Rock N Roll Swindle." The Pistols' surviving members; Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and original bassist Glen Matlock; stick more or less to the same story that McLaren is a habitual bullshitter and the Pistols were their own act, not his creation. From Rotten's sneering, invidious repartee to the late Sid Vicious' Elvis Presley-meets-Frankenstein's-monster persona, all they had to offer gestated when Jones and Cook formed the band in the early '70s, and there was more to offer the not-so-affluent than people cared to look for. Most of the hype about their being public enemy #1 came from McLaren.
"The Great Rock N Roll Swindle" gestated as "Who Killed Bambi," which was to be the Pistols' chance to cross over from music to cinema, as many labels were trying to prod them into. The late Russ Meyer ("Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" & "Beyond The Valley of the Dolls") was hired as director and McLaren collaborated on a screenplay with Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert. Filming stopped after two days due to lack of sufficient finances (McLaren claimed the project was dropped by 20th Century Fox who was "in the business of making family entertainment"), but Temple resurrected what footage they managed to get in that time, including a cameo by Sting, for "Swindle" and "Fury" two decades later.
By the time Temple started work on "Swindle," Rotten had already left the band (McLaren claimed to have fired him) and refused to be associated with the making of the movie. In "Fury," he describes any endeavor on McLaren's part to transform the Pistols into cinema stars of some kind as misstating the meaning of why there were Pistols to begin with. The only times Rotten appears in "Swindle" is in archives of live concerts, interviews or footage from news programs. If punk represents defying the establishment or not taking part in an industry looking to cash in on the latest trend, then Rotten's rejection of any project involving McLaren is understandable, and arguably more punk than taking part in it.
Aside from this, Temple made "Swindle" because after the Pistols imposed themselves on England's consciousness, kids were worshipping them as rock stars when the band intended to crawl under their skin and anger them out of the complacency they were entangled in. As Temple stated when Daniel Epstein interviewed him for Suicide Girls, "They were not meant to be worshipped, but meant to inspire people to get up and do a similar thing. The idea of the film was to knock that notion on the head and confuse truth and reality in an infuriating way so fans would get angry again." He found "Swindle" a success in this regard; in this interview he went on to say Sex Pistols fans loved and hated it at the same time, and even filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard described its editing as indicative of what film would be in the future.
Whether you construe McLaren's version of the Pistols' tale as a hugely consequential element of what Temple had in mind when completing his documentary or simply the pompous persiflage of an opportunistic would-be music mogul, what shines through most strongly is the lasting aesthetic effect the band had on England and the United States when word spread. Despite claims to the contrary the Pistols were a capable band whose whole was greater than its parts. Their archived performances, most of which was resurrected for "Fury," shows the band surpassing both the circus McLaren tried turning their career into and the reaction this got from two nations that learned quickly to distrust them.
Temple blurs the lines between truth and myth by adding sequences that symbolically thumb their noses at a motion picture industry eager to cash in on the success of Elvis and the Beatles; the same industry that conveniently ignored the origins of punk and hardcore in Jamaican culture and leveled a sweeping stereotype of all skinheads as neo-nazis. From one scene of a funk act covering classic Pistols songs to another of Sid Vicious on a motorcycle singing Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody," "Swindle" seems to build to a climax that reveals itself as Vicious sings Frank Sinatra's "My Way," ending the spectacle by pulling out a gun and firing at the crowd. Mindless violence, or a symbolic message about the media?
If you've seen the latter Temple documentary and are familiar with the Pistols' story from a first-person perspective, you can appreciate the pains Temple took to reinforce the disquiet the status quo greeted them with. From recapturing the growing infamy surrounding the band and adding McLaren's account of how he set out to fool his way to celebrity, Temple created in "Swindle" a biting satire of the music industry that has kept its social relevance as long as the Pistols had a cult following. You may even conclude in trying to achieve stardom at their expense, McLaren defeated his own purpose since the hype he created ultimately strengthened the band's mystique and generated a healthy interest in the real story, obligingly told by those who lived it. It's enough to make you wonder who was really swindled in the end. -DW

Land of the Dead Unrated Director's Cut
Universal Studios Home Video, 2005
It's staggering to consider the momentous impact the zombie genre has had on horror flicks for almost four decades, whether you're a cult fan or not. Before George A. Romero released "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968 the zombie flick was the stuff of pulp fiction, low budget pictures you saw at your local drive-in theater. This changed drastically when Romero scraped together a shoestring budget working in the Pittsburgh industrial film industry, making his debut feature film about a group of besieged citizens trapped in a house somewhere in the boondocks, surrounded by a mob of flesh eaters. Its initial release barely made the cash that went into it but soared in popularity when an appalled press insisted it be banned because of its extreme violence, which involved graphic depictions of the consumption of living humans.
In Romero's independent production turned groundbreaking blockbuster, NASA launched an unmanned probe to orbit Venus for planetary research. While en route back to Earth, the probe was mysteriously destroyed by the government. No explanation for the probe's destruction was offered to the newspapers, other than it was discovered to be infected with an unknown radiation. By the time the probe was blown away, it was already too late. An outbreak of murder had erupted in several states across the country, and newscasters everywhere announced what most sane minds would have believed impossible: the recently deceased were returning to life and preying upon the living. Romero's depiction of a society unprepared to cope with this revelation was a new exercise in interpreting Yeats' The Second Coming.
Romero's apocalyptic trilogy of the living dead overrunning the world became a worldwide franchise, spawning two sequels ('78's "Dawn of the Dead" & '85's "Day of the Dead") and attracting generations of fans. Generations of movie directors were likewise inspired, most notably the controversial Lucio Fulci who directed Zombie in 1979. A remake of "Night of the Living Dead" with Tony Todd and Patricia Tallman happened in 1990; then the genre remained dormant for fifteen years. In 2004 it was reanimated, to coin a phrase, when "Dawn of the Dead" was remade for the "28 Days Later" crowd. Zack Snyder's adaptation was a slicker affair than the original with undead creatures running marathons instead of creeping, but with the truer-to-form parody "Shaun of the Dead" it elevated the genre to mainstream status.
What set Romero's trilogy apart from the genre were the social allegories accompanied the blood and gore. "Night of the Living Dead" was a figuration on race relations in the 1960s. "Dawn of the Dead" was a parable of consumerism and greed in the "me decade" that postdated the hippie era. "Day of the Dead" raised questions of which species was the more violent and dangerous between zombies and humans. "Land of the Dead," the fourth installment of the Living Dead series, continues the tradition of societal critiques in post-9/11 "Bush America" as Romero was quoted as saying in an interview in Fangoria. Veteran and apprentice horror buffs alike get to see Romero's unique brand of thinking man's splatter, and something that wasn't present in his previous installments: hope for the future of the human race.
When "Land of the Dead" was released in theaters in June 2005, it became the most successful chapter in Romero's saga, earning over 10 million on opening weekend, and reaching profits of more than 20 million throughout the following month. A good showing for an indie director who only worked on three movies in the last twenty years. The box office success of "Land of the Dead" inspired Romero to begin working on a DVD release in addition to his planned Showtime series, "Masters of Horror." When announcing its October '05 release date, Romero said the DVD is "about six minutes longer, but it's all just adding back or putting in some effects that were excised, and putting in some little things like little bits of dialogue in existing scenes that we cut out just to tighten the pace. It's mostly that, and that penthouse scene."
The unrated cut of the movie the theatrical release didn't show you, deleted scenes and director's commentary from Romero is just some of what you'll get for the price of a DVD. A special feature about the making of "Land of the Dead" called "Undead Again," a firsthand diary about making the movie from cast member John Leguizamo, an interview with makeup/effects artist Gregory Nicotero and a feature about how some of the visual effects were created with zombie extras and computer generated images are to be found here. As if that wasn't enough there's a section on the original storyboards and their conversion into the movie, a short "zombie casting call: animation and a special appearance from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright of 2004's "Shaun of the Dead," who were cast as undead extras in the nightclub scene.
Picking up a heretofore unused plot hole in "Dawn of the Dead," the citizens of one of America's last inhabited cities (presumably Romero's hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) have been relocated into a central area. Separated from the outside world with electrified fences patrolled by armed guards, its denizens are parceled into two distinct classes: the affluent and, well, the not-so-affluent. Allowed every privilege they want, the rich are conditioned by their creature comforts to ignore the reality of what's happening beyond the city borders. Think of the world the four survivors made in Dawn of the Dead on a much larger scale. The poor are offered their own pacification on the streets of the city, but more than a few of them seem aware they're being held captive there as much as the zombies are being kept out.
A revolt against the powers that be doesn't seem like much of a possibility, however, since the city is presided by a ruthless businessman (Dennis Hopper) who's as draconian as he appears altruistic. His dominion ostensibly entails not only banishing undesirables, but offering them to the zombies in a gruesome gesture to placate them so they are not as apt to attack the people inside. Hopper's businessman, Kaufman, a combination of Donald Trump and Donald Rumsfeld, exercises a rule-through-fear influence on the citizens and the military from the city's unofficial capital, Fiddler's Green, a place that looks like it was built to remind the populace of its privileged members while they survive day to day on the streets. His authority is carried out by a military force trusted to take care of everything for Fiddler's Green's wealthy.
Unofficially keeping order in this city is a monstrous tank constructed to protect society from the threat of the walking dead, and venture out to gather food and supplies. Christened Dead Reckoning, the tank is fully armored, heavily armed and equipped with a fireworks show to distract the ghouls, making it easier to blast them if the need should arise. Dead Reckoning is owned by a military team led by Riley (Simon Baker), the moral center of "Land of the Dead." During these regular excursions outside the city, one military officer, Cholo (Leguizamo), does Kaufman some additional favors while gathering booze to sell on the street, hoping to move into Fiddler's Green someday. Refused citizenship, the disgruntled Cholo steals and ransoms Dead Reckoning, plotting to destroy Fiddler's Green if his demands are not met by Kaufman.
Riley ventures into the indigent section of the metropolis outside Fiddler's Green where the chain of exploitation goes from the impoverished to the zombies. There he is apprehended for coming to the aid of Slack (Asia Argento), a military officer in training who was demoted to hooker after Kaufman decided it would be more profitable. Kaufman arranged a more gruesome fate for Slack when it was discovered she was conspiring with revolutionaries against the status quo. Incarcerated together, Riley and Slack forge an alliance to stop Cholo, forming a bantam resistance group consisting of a handful of rebels and extremists. Meanwhile, the zombies outside are beginning to show some indications of thinking and evolving. Led by Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), an offshoot of Bub in "Day of the Dead," they set out to lay siege to the city. On their way, they learn to organize, use weapons and keep from being fooled by Dead Reckoning's fireworks.
The introduction of Dead Reckoning makes for thrilling action sequences and Romero demonstrates his adeptness at making it appealing to his cult following to watch zombies rend the living to shreds. Romero's most poignant talent is his ability to adapt to the modern age of filmmaking, without renouncing the personalities he gave his heroes and villains, or blurring the lines between the zombie crisis and how we may react to it to make a point about what he sees happening in our society. Unlike directors who use computer generated effects to dazzle audiences, Romero uses CGI effects to enhance his style of horror, not replace it. In an interview for the Independent Film Channel, Romero said he had made it a priority not to overdo CGI to the extent where it wouldn't be believable, and keep the effects as organic as possible.
As always, the biggest appeal of "Land of the Dead" is the cosmetics given the ghouls, this time handled by makeup supervisor Gregory Nicotero. Also, if you look closely, you'll see a cameo appearance by Tom Savini, who reprises his role as one of the bikers who raided the shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead" before being killed by Peter (Ken Foree). To expand on the enhancement of brows, cheekbones and teeth seen in "Day of the Dead," the zombies are furnished with enhanced facial structures to make the ghouls appear even more ghoulish. A variety of contact lenses are also used to make Big Daddy and the other zombies appear a little smarter and able to adapt to their physical state. This brings their potential to become more human closer

Sign Guestbook

View Guestbook

Visitors: 00058

Page Updated Mon Jun 12, 2006 4:30pm EDT