Jazz Vampires of the Pee-wee Punkpocalypse - POPULATION: 1 (1986)

Cult movies on DVD have become a big business these days, what with Shout! Factory raking in the cash with their 80's horror re-releases and MST3K box sets.  There's so many old crazies coming out that you'd think they could run out, though there are tons of great, cult-worthy movies that still haven't seen the light of a laser.  The trick is to create smaller subsets of cult film in order to get collectors obsessing over how many nunsploitation movies they can cram onto their shelves, and one of the most elusive and awesome subsets is the cult musical.  Borne from the phenomenal cultural attachment to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, cult musicals are few and far between, largely because most cult movies are low budget and musicals are quite difficult to make in cinema form.  A notable exception is Francis Ford Coppola's box-office disaster One from the Heart, such a tanker that it killed the New Hollywood movement for good, though through the power of video rentals and the continuing success of its composer Tom Waits the film has gained a small following.  Perhaps there simply aren't many that are good enough to watch; for example, I've known about the Canadian sci-fi spoof musical Big Meat Eater for a while now but everything I've heard about it makes me hesitant to make the plunge into its Balonium depths.  However, after hearing about Population: 1 (1986) at Arbogast on Film I had no choice but to give it a spin, and I quickly realized that my play-by-play of what transpired may be the last record of my mortal existence, as my head was about to explode from post-punk counterculture ecstasy.  Or because I was trapped in a Philip K. Dick-brand-Gnosticism Demiurge trap of post-punk counterculture ecstasy.  Actually, thinking I'm trapped in the 1st cenury AD seems a picture of sanity in comparison to Population: 1.  If I'm not back in 72 minutes tell The Ordinaires that I love them.

Scratchy-ass B&W and the results of Björk time traveling to 1986 to start a third stream/progressive punk group set the stage for a woman running around empty urban wastes and lip-syncing to the audience.  She wails, she has thick makeup, she sleeps next to backwater docks, and we get a voice-over from a man who was disturbed to find himself the sole survivor of a suicide pact.  It appears we're watching the memoirs of Tomata duPlenty, lead singer of the L.A. techno-punk group The Screamers, and he's a fan of using his impressive reel-to-reel tape setup to play Star Wars up a couple of octaves.  Then the door to his studio blows up and he hallucinates, and we know that we're in for a great party movie, the kind where he sees his mother holding the Olympic torch for no reason and falling over in a series of still shots.  Memories of flooding are accentuated by flexatone Boing!'s, and he recites a messed up variation on My Country 'Tis of Thee, because satire.


Movie or goof-assed pseudo-beat-poetry one-man-show?  Tomata poses these questions as he monologues in a top hat and wife beater to nobody.  The player piano has no idea what he's talking about, either, though as he appears to be the only person left on Earth I guess he's got the right to do whatever he wants in his Pee-wee Playhouse bunker.  His bathroom appliances fly around, and that's not nearly as odd as his talk-singing.  Actually, I think this bunker was intended for Pee-wee and this guy murdered the Right Honorable Mr. Herman while disguised as Floory.  Before he has a wavy Wayne's World memory transition a computer flashes between his picture and his picture plus an elongated Pinocchio nose, and then his presumably dead girlfriend informs us that she's a "Jazz Vampire" through song.  She pukes hand-animated blood, and Tomata takes a bath, and Renaissance paintings flash past, and-

KRAKATHOOM!!!

As I tried to flatten my ash-covered, stuck up hair and mend the rips in my blackened clothes I made the realization that no review can sum up Population: 1.  At no point is the movie normal or even comprehensible, and would you have settled for anything else that has both the giant from Twin Peaks and a 12-year-old Beck playing the accordion?  I didn't think so.  For some Population: 1 will be unrecommendable; for other essential.  Its writer-director, Rene Daalder, made this after the minor cult high school movie Massacre at Central High and a failed (?) attempt at a Sex Pistols movie, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.  He was also an underling of Russ Meyer, which might explain the boobs and breakneck pacing a bit but not so much the male nudity and half-assed video effects.  Population: 1 exists outside explanation and any need of approval or even an audience - and in a way YouTube has provided the ideal platform for these kinds of movies, whatever that kind of movie is.  An earlier cousin could be 200 Motels, the Frank Zappa-conceived disaster where every kind of crude satire and member of the Turtles was thrown at the wall in the hopes something would stick, but while it's entirely apparent that nobody had any control over 200 Motels (most certainly not Zappa) Daalder and duPlenty at least had a consistent vision of Population: 1 and must have known what they were doing.  In fact, the experience is so whimsically unhinged it's almost kind of cute, like a clown mounting a balloon-animal tribute to GG Allin.  That doesn't mean that any non-Daalder/duPlenty viewers will emerged unscathed or even sober, and I might as well have become the bastardly head growth from Bruce Robinson's insufferable How to Get Ahead in Advertising for how Earthbound my brain was after the last drum machine had beat its last circuit.


How's about this: I'll post the first 10 minutes below, and you take a look to see if you can handle it.  That way I can spend that time crawling back to reality and you can start planning your next Pot-'n'-Punk Hootenanny with or without the woozy anti-normalcy of Sirs Daalder and duPlenty*.  Either way, get Beck to play the accordion, preferably as a 12-year-old, but don't invite too many Twin Peaks actors or else you'll wind up with a fish in your coffee pot.

~PNK

*Kind of sounds like a carpet installation company, don't it?  Daalder & Duplenty, Remnant Wizards!

Special Report - FINAL CUT: LADIES & GENTLEMAN (2012)

There are some ideas for movies that everybody has but are never realized - one that's been kicking around my head for years is to make a movie entirely from clips of other movies, building a rudimentary plot from tiny excerpts strung together.  While I conceived it as a psychological thriller, I'm overwhelmingly happy to say that a movie has emerged that is exactly that but is a love story rather than a thriller.  The film is called Final Cut: Ladies & Gentlemen, and it is a "film for educational purposes" (as well as a "recycled film") created by Hungarian director György Pálfi and a team of four editors who created a basic, but moving, love story out of clips from some 450 movies (mostly American and Hungarian).  The idea of making a short film by this method is mind-blowing enough, but Pálfi and company managed to make an 85 minute feature with a comprehensible plot.  After three years of work and several versions, the latest version is receiving a limited theatrical release in the U.S., and I was lucky enough to see it at SIFF Cinema Uptown in Seattle tonight with an overjoyed crowd.

The story is as old as time itself - boy meets girl.  After the opening credits form an image of a man and a woman kissing out of names of famous filmmakers and actors (as well as the ampersand in the subtitle), we follow a series of clips as a man wakes up in the morning, goes out to work and bumps into a woman, and sparks fly immediately.  Along the way they will see conflict, separation, despair and a miraculous renewal, and not a second goes by without some kind of tangible joy exuding from the screen.  The clips range from half a second to 10 or more, and the sources cover practically every famous movie you can think of off the top of your head from The Great Train Robbery to Avatar.  I recognized quite a few movies but a lot of them I didn't, such as all of the Hungarian ones and a lot of Far Eastern movies.  The trick isn't so much that you recognize the source film, but how seamlessly the clips flow together, such as somebody walking through a room shifting perfectly to somebody walking in the same direction towards a phone, or a woman in a 50's kitchen about to touch a pot of something shifting to a clip from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves showing the resolution of that action.  It's because of this meticulous action matching that we are able to follow the plot, and the plot is simple enough that the film doesn't disintegrate into a bad music video.  

While much of the sequencing is empirical and smooth, some of the superimpositions are surprisingly funny.  For example, at one point the woman is at a hospital being shown her baby as an embryo inside of her, and the movie cuts to a shot of the Star Child from 2001.  A set of shots meant to be the same character can suddenly switch to a strikingly different person, and Yoda is used a few times like this to hilarious effect.  The audience, as well as me, was delighted every time a shot of The Addams Family was used, and it's a reminder of just how funny that movie was.  The director restricted himself to using no more than two movies per director, and you can tell what his favorite directors are by the frequent use of clips from Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice; a LOT of clips from Sleepy Hollow), Terry Gilliam (Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and most strikingly David Lynch, for whom he breaks the rule (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Dr.).  I hated every second of Wild at Heart, so much so that I had to shut it off after 15 minutes, so his inclusion of multiple clips from it is the only thing I found irritating about the movie (at least they were vaguely interesting).  He also includes some lesser-known but interesting movies, like Luc Besson's Subway (featuring Highlander's Christopher Lambert with white hair) and Tarsem Singh's The Cell (an underrated favorite of mine), and a handful of animated films (including Spirited Away, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie and Paprika*).  While some predictable filmmakers get featured, like Tarantino, he is able to not overuse them, such as Spielberg and Hitchcock, and one movie in particular, Bram Stoker's Dracula, got used quite a bit, which made me quite happy.


The audience had a blast at my screening, with a lot of laughs as certain famous movies showed their faces (the biggest one arguably with the inclusion of a shot from Species).  They also laughed a lot at an extended sex scene around the 1/3 mark, which includes a few highly explicit shots (like some cunnilingus and an erect, gold-painted penis).  These shots prompted the theater to put up a warning sign on the front door, saying the movie was an "unrated, European film" (a descriptor I find really funny as well as apt, considering how much more laid-back Europe is about sexual content in movies).  There's also some violent content in a fight scene in the first half of the movie, but nothing too graphic.  Teenagers would get a kick out of the movie, and in a better world (or Europe) they'd be able to see it just as easily as adults.  And honestly, everybody should see it.  

I can't remember the last time I had a more astonishing and entertaining theatrical experience as Final Cut, and considering the multitude of possible copyright issues the film could encourage you may never be able to see it again (without some trickery, anyways).  If you live in the Seattle area you can see it at the SIFF Cinema Uptown (down the road from Seattle Center), but hurry, as they're only showing it nine times and two of those have already passed.  Do yourselves a favor: check out the showtimes here and get your butt downtown to see the thing - you may never get another chance and it's more than worth the price of the ticket.  It also comes with Precious Images, a 1986 short film that won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short that year and was made for the 50th anniversary of the Directors Guild of America.  It too is cobbled together from hundreds of movie clips, but has no plot and is much shorter.  It's somewhat cheesier than Final Cut but it's pretty fun and a poignant homage to great film.  Whatever you're doing tomorrow, forget it - go to the 5:00 or 7:00 showings of Final Cut and have the time of your life.  It's the film experience of a lifetime, and you shouldn't let it pass you by.  The clip below doesn't even begin to sum up how great it is.

~PNK

*I'm a huge fan of anime director Satoshi Kon, the mad genius behind Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paranoia Agent, but I'm really not a fan of Paprika, which unfortunately appears to be his most popular movie right now (and his untimely death at 47 means that it'll probably stay that way).  The movie is everything that anime's detractors dislike about the industry, and all of his other work does a great job of avoiding those qualities.  Unfortunately, those qualities are more profitable than the stuff I like from his other projects, and that's probably why the movie made it to Hungary in the first place.  Do see those other movies, by the way - really, really awesome stuff.

A Roaring Short-Order - LIONPOWER FROM MGM (1967)

You come up to a ramshackle treehouse with a rope ladder.  As you ascend the ladder, you notice a sign on the door:  "FANZ OF THE 60S ONLEE - ALL OTHERS R POOPOO HEADS!!!".  If you're not game for a blast of late-60's nostalgia, turn back now.  For those of you still left, come on in - the Cinerama is warm tonight.

Lionpower from MGM is an unusual entry for this blog - it's a 27-minute promotional reel of MGM's 1967-68 season, only shown to distributors and exhibitors.  I saw it as a filler short on TCM the other night and it blew me away, and I watched it again tonight with and equally wide grin fixed on my face.  I've always had a soft spot for late-60's movies ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this is one of the best payloads of late-60's Hollywood hooey I've ever seen.  The studio system was falling into a state of crisis, as the introduction of the ratings system, the growing counterculture, and the phasing out of short subjects were all radical changes to how movies were made and marketed.  One of the treats with these kinds of promotional reels is how well its content has dated, and this particular selection of films is heavily conflicted, at once readying for the future and clinging desperately to old models - and man is it a hoot.

The lineup is split into five seasons: the usual four of Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer, and a fifth "season" of roadshow movies, meaning they got a limited big-city release before a wide release and required reservations (a practice phased out in the 70's).  It's narrated with glorious cheesiness by Karl Weber (Search for Tomorrow, Perry Mason) and initially set to music from the 1950 movie The Magnificent Yankee, fixing MGM's grasp of promotion squarely in the past.  He boasts the most "creative filmmakers" and the "biggest stars", and doesn't lie in either claim - not only are directors like John Frankenheimer and Stanley Kubrick in the roster, nearly every movie has a huge, blockbuster star at the helm, some of them baffling in their combinations (two in particular I won't dare spoil, but be forewarned that David Niven and Raquel Welch are embarrassing themselves).  This short also makes for a fine drinking game, wherein the viewer takes a shot for every movie they've actually seen - the majority of them have fallen into obscurity, with a few popping up in the recent wave of big-studio on-demand DVD-R releasing catalogs (and a couple of those may show up on this blog in good time).  

The transitions from film to film are hysterical, such as the transition from Fall's Point Blank (a stylish thriller starring Lee Marvin) to Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Your Teeth are in My Neck: "From murder...to madness...and biting comedy at its best!"  A George Hamilton heist flick, Jack of Diamonds (never released to video, more common than you'd think in this lineup) has the narrator stating, "Excitement is another breed of cat - a cat burglar who dares danger at every height!"  Another fall movie, Our Mother's House, is another never-on-video movie that I've been seeking for ages, and if you know where I can find it I'd give you 12 million Mickey Mouse monies for the privilege.  Fall tops off with the bloated-looking Sophia Loren/Omar Sharif historical romance More than a Miracle, and then Winter "surges ahead on Lionpower!".  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton headline - "People...politics....passion...in heat...in Haiti...in Graham Greene's The Comedians!"  David MacCallum fires guns in the go-go-riffic Sol Madrid (which I've got to see, but is not on video, much to the dismay (or is it relief?) of fellow stars Rip Torn and Telly Savalas).  Dark of the Sun is the serious-sounding filling to an unbelievable dud sandwich of The Biggest Bundle of Them All (whose VHS is available for the low, low price of $84.99 on Amazon) and The Extraordinary Seaman (mercifully never released to video), both of whose segments must be seen to be believed.  Also MIA for the home market is another go-go inflected thriller, A Man Called Dagger, and the Charles Bronson co-starring-western Guns for San Sebastian has a VHS for the comparatively modest price of $47.96 when compared to the aforementioned Bundle.  

"Lionpower springs into Spring", and I'll bet that most of you forgot that Hermans' Hermits even had a movie, much less that it had the portentious title Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter.  If your eyes recover, the mysterious force of The Power, another George Hamilton flick but seemingly much better than Jack of Diamonds, will knock them right out (or turn them upside down, or whatever happened to that one guy strapped in the g-force chair...).  Once Lionpower "roars into summer" the viewer is subjected to an Elvis movie, Speedway, here paired with the comparatively poor singing voice of Nancy Sinatra in a year when these movies should have been dead for a long time.  Surprisingly, the Richard Burton-helmed Where Eagles Dare doesn't even have footage ready, and the spot is illustrated through delightfully cheesy "animation".

However, it's not nearly as cheesy as Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, with Doris Day heading up an embarrassed cast trapped in a chintzy living room and stock sex komedy krap.  Ice Station Zebra is another big hit in the lineup, but beforehand we get a glimpse of the Sunset Boulevard-esque psychological drama The Legend of Lylah Clare.  Now come the two Roadshow pictures, both well-known now: Far from the Madding Crowd, which gets the longest segment of them all, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, which the narrator doesn't elaborate upon in terms of plot or stars.  Instead, all we see is one of Douglas Trumbull's slit-screen effects and some stars while Karl Weber talks about "all the stars of the solar system".

The most curious portion is a parade of cartoon teasers for movies yet to be produced, done in the same minimalist 60's style of the Where Eagles Dare bit, as nothing had been shot yet.  Some of them are remembered fondly, such as The Shoes of the Fisherman, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Phantom Tollbooth (not released until 1970 and done in a completely different art style from the one in the bit).

Some others are less well-known, such as The Fixer from the novel by Bernard Malamud, Tai-Pan (not released until 1986), James Michener's Caravans, released ten years later by a different studio, and The Appointment, an apparently terrible Sidney Lumet movie that features the funniest piece of animation:

The most unusual are a trio of movie that were never made, two of them: Cornelius Ryan's WWII history The Last Battle, James Eastwood's totally forgotten mystery The Chinese Visitor, and The Tower of Babel, a Middle East-set political thriller to be directed by Peter Glenville (whose last film turned out to be The Comedians).  Announcements rise and fall all the time, but it's odd to see promotion for movies that never came to be, and it's impossible to tell if those would have been any good.

Whatever your tastes, the short is a ton of fun, and most of the films will be new on you unless you're a near-masochistic freak for 60's pop culture.  If you've got TCM they may play it again as an interstitial, but I have no idea how often they do it.  It's the exact kind of thing that'll never get a video release, so don't hesitate if you get the chance to see it in high quality.  For those of you who don't care about clarity of picture, here's a generous YouTube upload, which is where I got all those screencaps.  I guarantee you'll laugh, cry, or puke no matter which movie you're rooting for.

~PNK

Special Report - LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS (1980-1982)

The rise of punk scenes on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 70's saw a fascinating change in how music was marketed, not just what kind of music but how.  Media was turning its focus towards a bottomless underground collective, each group as exciting as they were nameless.  As marketing teams noticed the sheer mass of talent and joyous rage, the film industry saw the opportunity to capitalize not only on a couple artists but a genre, and ever since The Blank Generation punk, new wave, and no wave movies were churned out and sold based on their soundtracks.  Some movies employed punk rockers as actors, such as Richard Hell in Susan Seidelman's acidic debut film Smithereens (1982).  Many of them were documentaries (such as Urgh!  A Music War (1982)) and others were just movies that crammed every aural nook and cranny with cheaply-licensed songs (such as Get Crazy (1983)).  You'll notice that both of those movies came out after the initial explosion of punk had died off and post-punk and new wave had taken over (which may have been better music but more distanced from the raw emotion that started the movement).  Many of these movies have been locked up in copyright issues for years, such as those two, because of how cheap music licensing was in the 70's and 80's and how expensive it is now.  The technique rose again in the early 90's once grunge, college rock and jangle pop came to the fore, with movies like Singles and Reality Bites doing good business because of their OST's (lasting into the late 90's, when straightforward rock music giving way to rap rock and nu metal).  It's an interesting reminder that subcultures are generated by corporations just as much as genuine volition.  It came back in the mid-2000's, with Garden State being the maidenhead of the indie-rock soundtracks (and actually having some good music on it), and is still going to a certain extent.  I'll return to the first wave in good time (I've got the intriguing Incident at Channel Q coming in the mail), but for today we've got one of the rarest and most legendary: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.

I call this article a "special report" because I had the extraordinary privilege of seeing this at a midnight screening at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA.  The theater had secured an extremely rare print from a private collection, and I can't think of a better way to get acquainted with this movie than the original print with all fading, dirt and grain.  Set for a theatrical release, Stains had a troubled production and spent a year in editing, being pulled from wide release after a disastrous test screening in Denver.  Aside from scattered festival screenings it's studio, Paramount, dumped the movie to late-night cable, where it slowly gained a cult following and the admiration of rock figures such as Jon Bon Jovi and Courtney Love.  It didn't get a video release until 2008 with Rhino Entertainment.  I can't begin to tell you how lucky I was to see this movie on the big screen, and tonight you can too, at midnight at the Coolidge.  It's the last night they're doing it, so let me give you all the reasons to see the thing right here, right now.

Diane Lane (only 14 when she auditioned!) plays Corrine Burns, whose mother has just died from lung cancer.  She keeps smoking.  She had been interviewed for a TV news special on teens in her backwater mill town, and in the process blew up at her fast-food boss and lost her job.  Being interviewed for a follow up on her now broke and basically homeless state, she says she's going on tour with her band, The Stains.  It's just her, her sister Tracy (Marin Kanter) and their cousin Jessica (Laura Dern), who prefers to be called Peg, to the chagrin of her mother Linda (Christine Lahti).  At a local show they see The Looters (an electrifying Ray Winstone as Billy and members of the Sex Pistols) and are transfixed, only to see that they are merely the support group for the washed up Metal Corpses headed by Lou Corpse in terrible makeup (Fee Waybill of The Tubes).  Corrine gets a deal with Billy to play on their American tour, despite the Stains only having three rehearsals, and they hop on the bus, driven by a fascinating Rastafarian (Barry Ford).

Their first show is some 70's styled club in Pennsylvania (though the movie was shot in British Columbia), and from the first note it's apparent the Stains can't play.  At all.  After being laughed off stage, Corrine storms back on and takes her outer clothes off, revealing an outrageous hairdo and a see-through blouse with no bra.  Though catcalls erupt, some of the women are awestruck.  What follows is a brilliant anger catapult, with Corrine verbally abusing a man in the front row and espousing the Fed Up Teenage Girl manifesto ("I'm perfect!  But nobody in this shithole gets me, because I don't put out!").  She tears of stage, and Billy recognizes her raw spirit, encouraging her to practice more and hone her music.  Unfortunately, tragedy strikes - the guitarist for the Metal Corpses, who spent the first part of the movie hiding behind hilarious sunglasses and sleeping off highs, is found dead in the ladies' room*.  Sent into scramble mode, Billy calls his agent to get them a support group, as he's not interested in the Stains opening for them despite his supportive words.

Something curious happens in the wake of the death of the Corpses's guitarist.  The female newscaster who did the interviews on Corrine from the beginning of the movie covers the scene and gets Corrine's take on events, which are complete lies made to impulsively grab attention and notoriety.  The newscaster gets a grand idea.  She begins following the Stains and encouraging young girls to see them in makeup, creating a feminist movement out of thin air.  Corrine gets Tracy and Peg/icca to dress like her, and the band does improve dramatically, but she remains stupid and impulsive.  The problem arises in that a Stains fanbase, calling themselves Skunks, is erupting at an alarming rate, fueled by the media coverage following the tour, and neither Corrine, the Looters or the bus driver know what to make of it.  Things only get more insane as Billy's slimeball agent gets involved, but I shouldn't spoil the rest.

The plot is familiar, now much more so from the parade of fallen music idol movies and Spinal Tap imitators over the years.  However, the strength of the movie isn't just in the set-up but rather in the conflict, density, and character depth that drive the film towards its loaded conclusion.  The character dynamics in Stains are terrifically rich, and both Corrine and Billy, as well as many of the lead supports, are deeply drawn and entirely engaging.  Diane Lane is astounding here, this being only her second movie, energetic and completely fearless.  The movie would have been a lot less compelling if she didn't completely sell her vitriolic, kick-in-the-pants role.  I'm not sure Thora Birch has ever seen this film but I wouldn't be surprised if she based Enid in Ghost World off of Corrine.  I've always loved Ray Winstone and he's perfect as the pissed-off leader of a second-tier punk outfit far from their home.  His presence and assured movement radiates from the screen, and he adds a great deal of depth to a role that could have easily been one note.  Fee Waybill is excellent as Lou Corpse, turning in a simultaneously repulsive and fragile performance for a non-actor.  Barry Ford's Rastafarian bus driver is perfectly placed, and I wouldn't dare spoil his character's secrets here.  And Christine Lahti, though not in much of the movie, brings a lot of sober heart to a somewhat out-of-control story.  I've only seen her in three movies (the others being Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty and Bill Forsyth's Housekeeping, which I'll get to in good time) and already I'm entranced by her worldly sensitivity and appealing down-to-Earthyness.  She's something of another Catherine O'Hara (another actress I don't see nearly enough), and if they played sisters in a movie I'd pre-order tickets before it was even filmed.


The script is dense and full of emotion, coming from Nancy Dowd (Slapshot, Coming Home), who actually took her name off the film because of her dissatisfaction with the production and sexual harassment issues.  She didn't see the film in its entireity until she caught it on cable years later.  Her story of punky teenage girl rebellion has similarities to Times Square (another wonderful and hard-to-find movie from the early 80's), where two runaways amass a small cult of defiantly-dressed followers, though that movie was more naive in its message and at least got released properly.  The director is record producer Lou Adler, turning down Airplane! to make this and coming off of Cheech and Chong's Up In Smoke.  For somebody who wasn't trained in film school and had only directed one movie prior, Stains looks great.  The shots are knowing and sensitive to the drama of the story and characters, and the movie does a great job of making rainy, dismal British Columbia stand in for rural American doldrums.  He also does a great job of filming the music performances, of which there are naturally many.  Adler spent about a year editing the movie by himself, and the continual trouble shows its face now and again.  I normally don't want movies to be longer but this is one that could have used a few more establishing scenes and another edit from an industry professional.  The only other problem I can think of is the slimeball agent, whose character is completely stock and could have been much more interesting, though everything else in the movie is so captivating I didn't care all that much.

Despite it's production trouble, unlikely talent (including producer Joe Roth, who went on to head Disney!) and somewhat rushed pacing, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is one of the wisest, richest, and most engaging movies I've ever seen about music.  The central conflicts between teenage feminist rebellion, the dark side of rock stardom, and the pains of growing up are brilliantly played out and could inspire endless discussion.  The performances are marvelous and Lane and Winstone should have won awards for their work.  The fact that Paramount pulled the movie from release angers me immensely, considering how everybody involved with the film thought it was going to be a hit.  The DVD release is a godsend to fans of punk on film, and there are plenty of cheap used copies on Amazon if you're curious.  And for those of my friends still in Boston the Coolidge is doing one last screening of the super-rare 35mm print tonight at midnight, and if you have any interest I would suggest supporting their excellent series and coming out to the show.  I couldn't find the movie for free on YouTube but I did find this 11-minute documentary of the movie and its impact, so have a look.  Perhaps we can all love Stains, but nobody in this shithole will get us because we don't put out.

~PNK 

*One of my favorite moments in the movie is really subtle.  Once Jerry Jervey is found dead, most of the time is shots of people looking into the bathroom.  A bunch of people come by, look into the bathroom, talk about how he's dead, and have diverse reactions.  We only see Jerry for about five seconds at the end.  It's a nice reminder that, in a fame-driven world like rock, the fact that people are looking at the subject is more important than the subject itself, which is more often tragic than not.