punk rock

Twisted Issues (1988)

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The shot-on-video punk scene relic Twisted Issues is difficult to categorize with a solid, workable genre definition. The project started as a no-budget documentary about the local punk scene in Gainesville, Florida, and scraps of that initial idea make it to the screen in-tact, detectable in lengthy scenes of D.I.Y. punk showcases in dive bars & living rooms and in montages of kids lazily pushing their skateboards down endless suburban pavement. However, sometime during production, someone decided to actually make money off of this endeavor, and the project deviated into the most viable option for low-budget, low-talent backyard filmmakers to earn a spot on video store shelves: it became a horror film. One of the skateboarding slackers became a monstrous horror icon who could hunt & kill his buddies in standalone vignettes, fleshing out the monotonous punk-show footage with the kinds of goof-off gore gags that could later be strung together in the edit to tell a somewhat linear story. It’s in that post-production edit where director Charles Pinion mutated the project a second time into something much stranger and less definable than either its documentary or creature feature versions could’ve achieved on their own. He transformed it into an oddly surreal piece of outsider art, constantly teetering between happenstantial genius and total incoherence.

True to its initial pitch, a large portion of Twisted Issues illustrates songs from local punk acts like The Smegmas, Hellwitch, and Mutley Chix with ironic news footage clips, unrelated skateboarding footage, and staged acts of violence that match the images suggested by their lyrics. The non-music video portions of the film follow one skateboarder in particular, who’s murdered in a hit & run by car-driving bullies straight out of The Toxic Avenger, then resurrected by a Dr. Frankenstein-style mad scientist to avenge his own death. The undead skater picks up a sword, hides his disfigured face behind a fencing mask, and screws his foot to a wheel-less skateboard that gives him a classic Frankenstein limp. Once loose on the streets of Gainesville, he kills his former bullies one at a time in standalone scenes that could be assembled in any order of Charles Pinion’s choosing without affecting “the plot.” The most curious decision Pinion makes, then, is including himself onscreen as a godlike figure who watches all of this gory violence and punk scene tomfoolery on his living room television. His character is clearly part of the scene, as he sometimes shares dead-eyed interactions with buddies who he later watches get killed on the TV as if he were tuning into late-night cable creature features or the local news. He’s also clearly in control of the film’s reality in some loosely defined way, as if everything we’re watching is only happening because he’s observing it through the screen. Is Pinion the punk rock Schrödinger? If a skater falls off his board and no one’s around to watch it, did he really scrape his knee? Could God videotape a gore gag so gnarly that even He couldn’t stomach it? The omniscient television set is the only element of the film’s narrative that can’t be fully defined or understood and, thus, it’s the one that elevates the picture from cute to compelling.

Twisted Issues grinds its metaphorical skateboard straight down the border between sloppily incoherent slacker art and sublimely surreal video art. Given the means and circumstances of its production, that TV-static-fuzzed incoherence was likely the only honest way for these kids to make movies, considering that every single suburban experience in that era was mediated through beer cans & TV screens. The filmmaking is, to put it kindly, unrefined. Every dialogue exchange is dragged out by awkward pauses that double their length. Each vignette is harshly separated by a cut-to-black transition. When it comes time for an original score to fill in the gaps between local punk acts, sequences are set to the most pained, aimless guitar solos to ever assault the human ear. The undead skateboarder’s accoutrements and the weapons used to fight back against him are all props that appear to have been collected from the local nerdy Sword Guy’s bedroom (credited to Hawk, who plays a nerdy Sword Guy mystic in-film to maintain verisimilitude). The whole thing is very obviously a document of friends goofing around on the weekends between punk gigs & service industry jobs, which in a roundabout way fulfills its initial mission. The way Pinion pieces everything together through the all-seeing eye of his bedroom TV set is impressively surreal, though, and it abstracts the entire picture into something that can’t be outright dismissed as home movies of local punk mischief. He mixes his friends’ goof-off hangouts with war atrocity footage recorded off TV news broadcasts. He matches local bands’ lyrics to scripted scenes of violence to the point of verging on making an SOV movie musical. Most significantly, he likens the act of shooting, editing, and watching all of this footage to a kind of godlike omnipotence that underlines the plasticity of reality in all media. He made art out of scraps.

-Brandon Ledet

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

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2005’s Linda Linda Linda is a very quiet movie about a very loud band. After a couple decades of spotty distribution in the US, the live-action Japanese high school drama has been restored and theatrically re-released by GKIDS, who mostly deal in hip, artful anime. The timing and the choice in distributor for this re-release make enough sense to me, both as a 20th anniversary celebration and as a companion to GKIDS’s recent theatrical run for the anime drama The Colors Within, which largely plays like Linda Linda Linda‘s animated remake. What I did not expect after years of seeing stills of its teen-girl punk band in social media posts championing the movie as an out-of-print, semi-lost gem is that it would be so gentle & understated. When the fictional band Paranmaum plays a hastily learned trio of raucous punk songs at the climax, the movie is exciting enough to make you pogo around the cinema. While Paranmaun is learning those songs in the few days before their first (and presumably only) gig, however, the energy is remarkably lethargic, to the point where the main narrative conflict is that the band is too sleepy to rock. To be fair, that’s exactly what I remember experiencing as a teenager: some of the most ecstatic, memorably chaotic moments of my life interspersed between long periods of feeling long overdue for a nap.

The name “Paranmaum” is presented as a Korean translation of “The Blue Hearts,” a real-life Japanese punk band. In the few days leading up to their high school’s annual rock festival, the teen girls of Paranmaum quickly form as a Blue Hearts cover band, inspired by the discovery of a cassette tape recording of the Hearts’ 80s hit “Linda Linda.” Initially, the major obstacle of their formation is the keyboardist scrambling to learn guitar after losing a couple former bandmates to injury & petty teen squabbling. The even bigger challenge, however, is the impulsive recruitment of a new lead singer, who didn’t fully understand what she was signing up for. Paranmaum takes a Korean name because their new singer is a Korean exchange student who can only speak rudimentary Japanese, agreeing to join the band through polite, confused nodding. As the guitarist learns a new instrument and the vocalist learns a new language, the girls learn to work as a real, legitimate group, effectively turning the band’s formation into a 72-hour sleepover. It’s an intensely romantic week in their young lives, one in which friendship & band practice are the most important things in the world; schoolwork & puppylove crushes can wait. When that cram session pays off and their three Blue Hearts tunes come together at the climactic concert, there’s no better feeling, and they’ll likely cherish that high for the rest of their lives.

This is primarily a movie about cultural exchange, with Japanese & Korean students reaching across a language barrier to become true friends and artistic collaborators. A lot of its nuance is likely lost to American audiences through its two levels of cross-cultural translation, but the rock ‘n’ roll bridge between its Japanese & Korean teen sensibilities is largely American made. While The Blue Hearts may be a Japanese band, their brand of ramshackle rock ‘n’ roll is inextricable from Western pop culture. As such, it was fun to take stock of the generic early-aughts rock posters that decorate Paranmaum’s practice space, which include artists as discordant & irrelevant to the text as Led Zeppelin, Marilyn Manson, Bob Marley, and The Verve. The only two band references that feel directly connected to the music that Paranmaum plays are the college-radio twee group Beat Happening (who appear on a background poster) and the CBGB-era punk icons The Ramones (who appear in a mildly surreal dream sequence that plays like a precursor to the 2010s Thai curio Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy). The other nondescript rock acts in that mix make for an overall sweet & unpretentious sentiment, though, one in which projecting hipster cool cred is secondary to having fun playing loud music with your friends.

Nostalgia for the playfulness of rock ‘n’ roll teenhood is obviously a major factor here. Maybe it’s for the best that I couldn’t access the film until 20 years after its initial release, when I was still a teen myself. Its early-aughts camcorders, flip-phones, and glue-on bling are firmly rooted in that era, but the film is so reserved in its pacing & tone that it likely would’ve tested my tastes at the time, which leaned towards more rambunctious punk rock chaos. Director Nobuhiro Yamashita views these teen bonding rituals from a physical & emotional distance. Characters are often shrunken by extreme wide shots that corral them into cramped doorframes while the camera studies them from afar. As a result, the film is oddly nostalgic for high school architecture as much as it is nostalgic for high school camaraderie. The most Yamashita gives himself a voice in the narrative is through the melancholic ramblings of a middle-aged teacher who gets overly emotional every time he attempts to reminisce about his own memories of forming a band with his high school buddies during the same festival. He gets too choked up to get the words out, so he instead keeps his distance, enjoying Paranmaum’s brief existence as a teenage art project for what it is. When that three-day punk band takes the stage in the final minutes of runtime, it really does feel like the most precious thing in the world, partly because it’s not designed to last. That’s a sentiment that only gets more potent with age & distance, even if the songs being played are immediately satisfying to everyone in the room.

-Brandon Ledet

Times Square (1980)

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For anyone out there arguing that movie studios should start cutting “unnecessary” sex scenes for the sin of not “advancing the plot,” I recommend seeking out populist art from earlier, safer decades, when that kind of conservative moralism was more shameless. Take, for instance, the teen-punks-on-the-run love story Times Square from 1980, which had all of its sex & kissing scenes removed post-production by money men who were scared that its queer themes would cut into the film’s profitability. The surviving prints are proof of sex-scene-censorship in action, leaving behind implications of sapphic teen romance without any physical consummation that might scare off the cinematically illiterate who don’t catch on. Of course, this very nearly ruins the movie. Not knowing exactly when the two girls at the center first acknowledge their mutual attraction is alone frustrating enough, but there’s also so much communication & characterization lost by averting the audience’s eyes from their bedroom intimacy that it feels like a story half-told. This is the future Liberals want: sexless, indistinct, defanged. That contingent even gets their own onscreen avatar in the form of the film’s villain, Peter Coffield as a Liberal politician who’s campaigning to “clean up” the smut of late-70s Times Square, to make it safer for families (and business). Eat up, prudes.

That politician’s daughter is effectively our main character: Trini Alvarado as a sheltered Uptown Girl who’s essentially left catatonic by her father’s blowhard moralizing. She’s checked into a mental hospital for being an inconvenience in her father’s busy schedule as a public figure, despite the fact that there’s nothing medically wrong with her. Her hospital roommate is a street-smart punk rocker played by newcomer Robin Johnson (counterbalancing her porcelain-doll fragility with some manic Linda Manz brashness), who might legitimately be mentally ill. The girls quickly bond over mutual disregard for the authority figures in their lives and make a break for it, fleeing the hospital in a stolen ambulance to their new, domestic life squatting in a warehouse by the river. It’s unclear exactly when their friendship tips over into romance, thanks to post-production censorship, but that aspect of their dynamic is undeniably present throughout. They write each other poems, they scream each other’s names, they wear each other’s clothes; they’re in love. Meanwhile, their new life on the streets is turned into a publicity flame war between the Liberal politician who believes Times Square has become an “X-rated” public space in need of governmental censorship and a shock-jock radio DJ who wants to keep the city grimy for the punk-at-heart, played by an especially pouty Tim Curry.

While I don’t think the kissing or sex scenes removed from Times Square would have been redundant, I did laugh at the redundancy of the concluding title card that announces it was “filmed entirely on location in New York City.” This a film that spends half of its runtime strutting up and down 42nd Street in search of classic New York City cool before Giuliani power-washed it off the sidewalk forever. It’s a treasure trove for movie freaks who like to take notes on what’s being advertised on vintage marquees in the background. Its soundtrack is overflowing with classic New York City bands, including The Ramones, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and that one Talking Heads song where they name-drop CBGB. The runaways aren’t solely fighting to carve out a place for themselves at the edge of adult surveillance & censorship; they’re also fighting to make it big as micro-celebrities in the first-wave NYC punk boom. They brand themselves as The Sleez Sisters, smashing televisions on city streets as a vague protest of modern complacency and crashing the alt radio station to speak directly to their adoring public of frustrated, sheltered teen girls. The major political question at the heart of the film is who really owns New York City, the freaks who walk the concrete or the inhuman politicians who govern their public & private lives from afar? It’s a question with a loud, celebratory answer, as observed from the rooftops by Tim Curry & Robin Johnson, who survey the city streets below from gargoyle perches like a punk-rock Batman.

Times Square is the most [SCENE MISSING]iest movie I’ve fallen in love with in a while.  It was crudely chopped to bits by The Man, but its crudeness & messiness is at least appropriate for a story about teenage runaways in love. Director Allan Moyle has, understandably, expressed frustration over the surviving, compromised cut of the film, but he still at least seems proud of its documentation of Times Square’s final days in sleaze, and he effectively plagiarized its rooftop concert ending for his record-store hangout comedy Empire Records years later. The film shares a lot of post-production-fuckery woes with fellow teen-girl-punks-on-the-lam relic The Fabulous Stains, but it likewise has outlived attempts to chop it down and achieved a kind of cult-cinema immortality. To be clear, though, it’s a great film despite its sex-and-smooches censorship, not because of it. Audiences have been robbed of experiencing the film’s full passionate glory by Liberal do-gooders who sought to make a safer, cleaner picture at the expense of honesty & art. It’s the same political principles that scrubbed Times Square clean of all of the grit, smut, and vitality that made it interesting and replaced them with a Disney Mega Store & Guy Fieri’s latest restaurant venture. Congratulations, the streets are no longer X-rated; now it’s just as formless, indistinct, and sanitized as everywhere else in this corporate hell hole of a country.

-Brandon Ledet