rock n roll

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

Pavements (2025)

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The 90s alt-rock band Pavement is, undoubtedly, one of “the most important and influential” bands of their time. There’s just no way to point that out without betraying their relationship with artistic sincerity & professional ambition. So, the new career-retrospective documentary Pavements has to hide that sentiment behind several layers of self-protective sarcasm & ironic remove, declaring Pavement to be “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band” of all time, forever . . . as a goof. Here, Alex Ross Perry gives the rock-band mascot of 90s slackerdom the same kaleidoscopic hagiography treatment Brett Morgan gave David Bowie in Moonage Daydream, except in this case his subject is around to make fun of that idea the entire time they’re going through the motions of it. They made fun of the positive press & financial success they found in the 90s too, constantly mocking the concept of rock stardom until they were no longer in danger of achieving it. And yet, both their songs and this nostalgic overview of their history can be genuinely beautiful & moving at times, despite all efforts to undercut any overt sincerity. The words are pyrite, but the soundz are gold.

Pavements is a loosely constructed document of four simultaneous projects meant to commemorate the important, influential art of Pavement’s heyday: a diary of their recent reunion tour, an art-gallery exhibition of their vintage artifacts, a Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic spoof and, most improbably, a staging of an original jukebox musical. All of your favorite Pavement tracks from their Quarantine The Past greatest-hits compilation repeat several times throughout, but none are heard in total. They’re all fragmented between fictional & real-world variations in the four simultaneous projects, practically lyric by lyric. As a result, the film feels deliberately formless & unfinished, a documentary that runs over two hours in length but never feels like it truly gets started. That approach might be frustrating for newcomers hoping to actually learn something about the band or to at the very least be hooked by their standout singles. Anything I learned as a casual fan was entirely by accident – gleaning some interpersonal band member dynamics and album-cycle evolutions of their sound that I didn’t pick up on while discovering their records the decade after they broke up. Still, it’s a perfect approach for a band that was so stubbornly committed to maintaining their detached 90s slacker cool while contemporaries like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and The Smashing Pumpkins were becoming unlikely household names.

The biggest surprise of Pavements is the comedic chops of Stranger Things alumnus Joe Keery, cast here as the fictional biopic version of Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus. Keery outshines the much more luminary comedic performers Jason Schwartzman & Tim Heidecker in those sequences, making a big show out of impersonating Malkmus with unwarranted method-acting commitment. Like everything else in Pavement lore, it’s a flippant mockery of artistic pretension, but it also occasionally touches on something strikingly impressive & true. There are several interview clips in which Malkmus is being aggressively sarcastic & uncooperative with press that are indistinguishable from their corresponding Joe Keery parodies until the camera reveals which of the two brats is yapping. Much like Sophie Thatcher’s performance in the recent music video for the once-obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes,” Keery acts as a modern avatar for the band’s pranksterism so that they don’t have to take the spotlight themselves, and he provides a lot of the movie’s most coherent reference points for tone & narrative. Otherwise, Pavements is a scrapbook of 90s-era college radio slacker rock, as soundtracked by “the most important and influential” band to define the sound. Its fragmented approach that avoids enthusiastically committing to any one framework for retelling Pavement’s story is likely the only way that story could be told; it could only make fun of itself for trying at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Quadrophenia (1979)

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I’ve never fully understood where Quadrophenia fits in the grand rock ‘n’ roll continuum. A love-letter to the Mod craze among UK rockers in the 1960s, it was made in a time when that fad’s clean-cut, tailored look had already been nostalgically reclaimed by British punk acts like The Damned. As a result, it’s difficult to tell whether some of the jerky, pogo-style dance moves the Mod kids pull in the film are period-accurate to 1960s rock shows, or if the punks filling out the crowd scenes were bringing some contemporary energy to the production that blurred those temporal boundaries. It’s just as likely the teenage reprobates of both eras happened to dance like that because they were on the same drugs—namely, a combination of cheap beer & stolen amphetamines—so it’s an impossible distinction to make. The project was strangely out of sync with itself since the point of conception, though, considering that it’s a bloated stadium-rock opera adapted from a concept album by The Who at their most overwrought, but it’s set in a time when The Who were a definitive force of ramshackle, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll. One of the most iconic scenes in the film features a Mods-only house party in which the entire crowd erupts into chaos when someone spins The Who’s proto-punk classic “My Generation” on the turntable, which is in disorienting aural contrast to the sleepier, sappier Who tunes that score the soundtrack proper. It’s a picture entirely out of time, evenly split between its setting and the era when it was made. That usually is the case with period pieces, but the ever-evolving trends & deviations of rock ‘n’ roll just makes the dissonance ring even louder than usual.

Perusing the extra features of the Criterion DVD copy of Quadrophenia I recently found at a Public Library liquidation sale, it seems that being out-of-sync with current rock ‘n’ roll trends was inherent to the Mod subculture from the start. Distinguished by their tailored suits, their rejection of early-50s rock ‘n’ roll, and their choice to ride motorized scooters instead of roadster motorbikes, Mods were in direct, violent opposition with the macho, leather-jacketed rockers that kept older rock traditions alive in the years before glam & punk changed everything. In addition to the usual talking-head interviews with the filmmakers, the Criterion discs include several French television news reports about these violent clashes, justifying the film’s third-act, beachside gang war with extratextual evidence that the two subcultures’ rumble was relatively credible to real-life events. However, what struck me most about those news reports was the culturally scattered, postmodern nature of their very existence. Here we have archived broadcasts from French journalists who are fascinated with the hard-edged lifestyle of British teens whose obsession with Italian fashion has spawned a newly mutated subspecies of American rock ‘n’ roll. The French reporters land a few zingers against Mod culture as a “new dandyism” that contextualizes it within older traditions of British counterculture. The postmodern multi-nationality of the phenomenon added an entirely new layer to rock ‘n’ roll cultural identity, though, whereas the motorcycle-riding rockers that the Mods clashed against were only one layer deep, idolizing American rock & fashion from earlier decades.

Appropriately, the strung-out protagonist who guides our tour through the Mods vs Rockers moment of the then-recent past is, himself, out of sync with the world around him. Phil Daniels stars as Jimmy Cooper, a pill-popping teenage Mod who can barely hold onto his entry-level mailroom job because he spends all of his nights sweating through his suits and jumping around to rock ‘n’ roll music with his dirtbag friends. Jimmy is constantly on the search for drugs he cannot find and cannot afford. He’s constantly crushing on a girl who’s only looking for a bit of fun, while constantly ignoring the flirtations of the other girl who actually wants him back. His desperation for Mod-scene notoriety (mostly so he can land his dream girl) only manifests in useless acts of teenage rebellion, like dragging his scooter through more uptight Brits’ flowerbeds, until he’s really given a chance to shine at a town-wide gang fight with rockers that ends in mass arrest. Only, when he’s released from jail, he’s found that his moment of fame was fleeting, his dream girl has already moved on, and the drugs are starting to weigh heavily on his fragile, hormone-addled psyche. In an early, telling scene he has a loud argument about music tastes with a rocker at the local baths (heads up for anyone who’d like to catch a glimpse of a young Ray Winstone’s cock & balls) that ends with the opposing Mod & rocker realizing that they were childhood friends, and there’s no substantial difference between them once stripped of their respective paraphernalia. The tragedy of the film is that Jimmy wants that subcultural distinction to signify a substantial difference between them; he relies on Mod-culture insignia to give his days & persona meaning, only to inevitably find it another empty frivolity, just like everything else in life.

Of course, Quadrophenia itself became a cultural touchstone to be disseminated in the great rock ‘n’ roll diaspora. The reviews & marketing for Jon Moritsugu’s 1994 punk-scene whatsit Mod Fuck Explosion reference West Side Story as the source of inspiration for its fictional gang war, but since the gangs in those films are the titular scooter-riding Mods vs. motorcycle-riding rock ‘n’ rollers, it’s a lot more likely Mortisugu was pulling directly (and cheekily) from The Who’s rock opera. So, there you have a snotty 90s-punk reiteration of a 70s-punk echo of a 60s-rock fad that split from 50s-rocker roots. It’s an out-of-sync rock cinema tradition you’ll find in other beloved period pieces like American Graffiti, Velvet Goldmine, and 24 Hour Party People — all precariously balanced between the eras they depict and the eras in which they were made. If there’s anything positive to glean from that temporal precarity, it’s the overall sense that rock ‘n’ roll never dies; it just tries on different silly outfits from time to time. The Mods’ outfits just happened to be sillier than most. I mean, who wears a tailored suit to a punk show?

-Brandon Ledet

The Colors Within (2025)

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The coming-of-age anime drama The Colors Within is about a teenager with extreme synesthesia who forms a synthpop band to express her unusual relationship with color through song. It’s a much gentler picture than that descriptor implies. Naoko Yamada’s color-pencil sketchbook vision is exceptionally quiet for a story about teenage rock ‘n rollers and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. It celebrates the soft smears of color you see when you view the world without eyeglasses. It dwells in the dead air of band practice as the collective idea of a song is just starting to materialize, before it has any foundational structure to cling to. The three members of the band are each fragile recluses who spook easy, to the point where you’re skeptical that they’ll ever have the courage to perform for an audience. When all that restraint melts away during the climactic concert, however, the relief of its release feels good enough to make you cry.

Our protagonist is an adorable, shy teenager who can only relate to the people around her by reading the colors of their auras. Her sweetness and mental abstraction are a kind of social liability, so her only real friend at her Catholic boarding school is a well-meaning nun who encourages her to find “secular ways to honor God” outside the official curriculum. The opportunity to do so presents itself when an older, more rebellious classmate drops out to work at a local bookstore, and a panicked schoolgirl crush inspires her to demand they start a band together to keep in touch. A third lonely, shy musician who hangs around the bookstore brings the project together, but it’s a triumph that mostly manifests as long stretches of downtime between sparse songwriting sessions.

While our protagonist’s synesthesia is presented as a defining character trait, it really doesn’t affect her journey to self and communal discovery except in providing the language to express something she can’t otherwise vocalize. This is mostly a story about youthful, innocent yearning, both in romance and in art. Every member of the band has a secret, both in their unexpressed attraction to each other and in the ways their individual duties to education, work, and religion conflict with their art project. A lot of their yearning is just the desire to spend more time creating that art, finding it difficult to engineer opportunities to all meet in one place, working on one idea. I remember finding time to practice to be an eternal struggle back when I used to write songs for punk bands in high school & college, but I also remember the times when everything aligned just right for us to play songs together satisfying my soul like few other joys of my youth. It’s easy to be nostalgic while returning to that distinctly teenage headspace, so the story can feel like it’s set decades in the past despite all the smartphones and laptops.

The music our trio of sweethearts eventually plays together is catchy, soulful, and well worth the effort of waiting through the stunted progress of its writing. It’s also the music of dissociation, finding immense beauty, joy, and creative expression through the distinctly intangible sounds of synths, theremin, and guitar feedback. Synthpop is a perfect aesthetic choice for a character who sees the world through hazy, swirling aesthetics. It gives her a way to reinterpret her visions of color into the sounds of color, in the process expressing her love for her bandmates in a more direct way than she could previously express anything about anyone. None of the routine prayer nor rigid interpretation of God’s will at her Catholic boarding school ever approaches anything so purely divine. Thankfully, there was one cool nun around to help her see the positive value in those secular pleasures without feeling any unnecessary, residual shame for the indulgence. This is how I remember writing songs with my friends feeling at that age, but that is not at all how I remember my own Catholic schooling.

-Brandon Ledet

Urgh! A Music War (1981)

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After over a decade of avoiding the evil conveniences of streaming music on Spotify, I have finally given up.  I’ve been enjoying the exploitative service for a full year now, contributing fractions of pennies to my favorite artists and turning my head when Belly’s “Delete Spotify” profile-pic message appears while their songs play.  As proof of this shame, I’ll share my Spotify Wrapped data for 2024 below.  As you might expect, it’s changed my music-listening habits quite a bit, fracturing the full-album sessions I get listening to LPS & cassettes at home to instead rely on shuffling songs on discordant playlists while I’m on the go – something I haven’t experienced since owning iPods in the aughts.  That fracturing is not entirely inherent to the digital-listening era, though.  There were plenty of artist-showcase compilations that preceded the LimeWire playlist era, and some were even released into movie theaters.  I remember being especially blown away by the near-impossible line-up of the 1964 concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, which improbably included performances by Chuck Berry, Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, James Brown, and The Rolling Stones.  That roster is nearly indistinguishable from hitting shuffle on a 1960s playlist on Spotify, and I have since discovered its 1980s punk equivalent in Urgh! A Music War.

Urgh! A Music War is a no-nonsense marathon of live performances from early-80s New Wavers, attempting to document the exact moment when punk got weird. It’s like stumbling into a local Battle of the Bands contest and discovering your all-time-top-10 favorite acts in just a couple hours . . . mixed in with a bunch of other bands that are pretty good too.  The MVPs of this live-performance playlist include Devo, Oingo Boingo, The Go-Go’s, Klaus Nomi, Gary Numan, Joan Jett, The Cramps, Gang of Four, Dead Kennedys, Au Pairs, Echo & the Bunnymen, Pere Ubu, Magazine, X, XTC, and I guess The Police, if you’re into that kind of thing.  There is no narration or context provided to connect these acts and, unlike the single-event documentation of The T.A.M.I. Show, the performances are split between separate concerts in the US & the UK.  Urgh! makes more sense as a live compilation album than as a feature film, which might help explain why it was released on vinyl a full year before the movie version hit theaters, and why it mostly faded into obscurity outside a few cable broadcasts and a subsequent made-on-demand DVD-R release from the Warner Archive.  Still, it’s a staggeringly impressive list of new wave & post-punk acts to collect under one label, as long as you’re willing to look past the disconcerting number of white Brits playing reggae in the mix.  I even made a couple new-to-me discoveries in the process, adding some tracks from Toyah to my “Liked” playlist on Spotify and finding no results on the app when I searched for the band Invisible Sex.

The major triumph of Urgh! is entirely in the assemblage of its line-up, since most of its filmed performances are straight-forward rock & roll numbers; such is the essence of punk.  Only The Police introduce a stadium-rock grandeur at the film’s bookends, concluding this breakneck showcase on a bloated, dubbed-out medley of “Roxanne” and “So Lonely” that’s drained of whatever punk ethos the band might’ve had in them before they blew up.  Without the sing-along crowd participation that bolsters The Police, the 27 other bands on the docket have to stand out through pure rock & roll energy, since the camerawork & editing do little to back them up besides occasionally scanning the crowd in the pit and on the curb for streetwear fashion reports.  The political reggae band Steelpulse spices things up with a skanking Klansman.  Lux Interior from The Cramps enthusiastically fellates his microphone while teasing the exposure of his actual dick, which is barely concealed by sagging leather pants.  Spizzenergi vocalist Spizz goes a little overboard trying to add novelty to the band’s performance of their punk-circuit hit “Where’s Captain Kirk?”, putting more energy into spraying the crowd & camera with silly string than into reciting his lyrics.  Since the talent on hand is so overwhelming in total, each band’s memorability relies on small moments of novelty.  That is, except for Devo, Gary Numan, and Klaus Nomi, who incorporated a keen sense of visual art to their stage craft that translates exceptionally well to this medium.

Urgh! A Music War is glaringly imperfect. As amazing as the line-up is, it’s sorely missing The B-52s, whose Wild Planet-era material would’ve fit in perfectly.  Of the acts included, there are a few like X, XTC, and Peru Ubu that appear to be suffering late-in-the-set exhaustion, not quite living up to the energy they bring to their studio recordings.  The imperfections and inconsistences frequently account for the appeal of this musical-styles mashup compilation, though; it’s the same appeal in listening to a well-curated Spotify playlist on shuffle.  The cut from Gary Numan’s future-synth phantasmagoria to the no-frills rock & roll of Joan Jett and The Blackhearts is especially jarring and says a lot about the precarious identity of punk at the start of its new decade.  It’s the same thrill I get when my Spotify “Liked” list jumps from City Girls to Xiu Xiu to Liz Phair, except that it used to be immortalized on vinyl & celluloid instead of relying on the whims of a malfunctioning algorithm.

-Brandon Ledet

Tokyo Pop (1988)

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The names behind the production & restoration of the international 80s punk romcom Tokyo Pop can be a little jarring at first, but you quickly get used to it.  Kino Lorber’s recent Blu-ray release of the movie states that its restoration was made possible by the Jane Fonda Fund for Women Directors.  I did not previously know that fund existed, but it does track with Fonda’s keen, career-long political awareness within the Hollywood system.  The statement goes on to say that funding was supported by contributions from Dolly Parton & Carol Burnett, who aren’t regularly in the business of film preservation & distribution.  The Dolly Parton donation makes the most immediate sense, given both her collaboration with Fonda on the classic workplace-politics comedy 9 to 5 and her philanthropic contributions to other worthy causes, like developing a viable vaccine for COVID-19.  Burnett’s involvement only makes sense once you learn that her late daughter, Carrie Hamilton, stars in the film in her biggest role outside of her TV credits.  So, the only collaborator here that I can’t fully make sense of is the namesake of the Woman Director in question who’s being supported by Fonda’s fund.  Tokyo Pop was Fran Rubel Kuzui’s debut feature as a director and earned great accolades after its premiere at Cannes.  What I can’t fully wrap my mind around is the fact that Kuzui’s only other directorial credit is the 1992 movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another high-style cult classic with great sleepover VHS rental appeal.  Why didn’t she get an opportunity to direct more movies?  It’s the kind of sexist Hollywood funding disparity that requires activist intervention, say, from a Jane Fonda type.

Hamilton stars as an NYC rock ‘n’ roller who moves to Japan on a whim and becomes an unlikely popstar.  Arriving without a plan or much pocket change, she’s saved from going destitute by a soul-crushing job playing hostess to drunk businessmen at a karaoke bar and by a fortuitous hookup with the singer of a rock ‘n’ roll band who’s looking for a gaijin (foreigner) vocalist.  She’s reluctant to take the singing job at first, since part of the reason she fled New York in the first place was that she was tired of “singing backup for creeps.”  She eventually gives in, though, and the band quickly becomes a kind of Japanese novelty act, performing karaoke-style covers of pop tunes like “Do You Believe in Magic?” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”.  The songs are admittedly corny, but Hamilton is admirably thorny in a Smithereens kind of way, playing the sour counterbalance to romantic co-lead Yutaka “Diamond Yukai” Tadokoro’s childlike sweetness.  In one standout sequence, he teaches her Japanese as sexual foreplay, but then she stops the session short once he mounts her with boyish over-enthusiasm.  The movie constantly undercuts its romcom beats in that way, ultimately deciding that it’s even more romantic if its central players don’t end up together in the end – prioritizing personal triumph over interpersonal connection.  As far as white-women-soul-searching-in-Tokyo stories go, it’s at least as effective as Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, with the added benefit of not taking itself nearly as seriously.  Incredibly, Diamond Yukai also appears in that film, but that time without his band Red Warriors in tow.

As smartly balanced as its romantic-comedy notes are, Tokyo Pop is most remarkable as a documentary time capsule of 80s Japanese pop kitsch.  It gawks at the pop-art iconography of Tokyo from every angle it can manage, taking the audience on a tour of psychedelic rock clubs, karaoke bars, fast food restaurants, kaiju-scale advertisements, pro wrestler locker rooms, unlicensed Disney-themed hostels, and pay-by-the-hour sex motels.  Our lead has no defined persona of her own, imitating famous American singers in her stage performances and advertising her availability to any band who’ll take her, regardless of genre.  Tokyo’s cultural persona more than makes up for that deficiency, overwhelming the screen with the bright, cartoonish colors of a city-size arcade.  It’s entirely possible that Fran Rubel Kuzui never directed much after this debut because she never wanted to leave that arcade.  Most of her non-Buffy career highlights after Tokyo Pop are tied to the Japanese entertainment industry rather than Hollywood or the NYC indie scene, mostly exporting low-budget American films and seasons of South Park there.  Tokyo Pop ends with Hamilton bravely deciding not to allow Tokyo to swallow her up, so that she gives up a loving relationship with a fellow rock ‘n’ roller so she can be her own person instead.  Maybe Kuzui gave into the candy-coated mania of that city instead, allowing herself to get fully lost in translation.  Or, just as likely, she just wasn’t given many worthwhile opportunities by the money men of American film studios so she created her own career path outside the US instead, refusing to play “backup for creeps.” 

-Brandon Ledet

The Sore Losers (1997)

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I recently saw Guitar Wolf perform at a crowded, raucous dive bar and was impressed by the band’s continued ferocity.  The Japanese garage-rock trio has been around for as long as I have been alive, but they’re rocking and rolling as hard as ever, shredding & crowdsurfing through neighborhood venues the size of living rooms.  Meanwhile, it took me two full days to recover from just one of their shows, suffering both headbanger’s whiplash and tinnitus from standing too few feet away from their overcranked amps.  I am convinced that a single week of touring with Guitar Wolf would literally kill me, especially since they insist on continuing to wear their black leather pants & jackets (the official Jet Rock n’ Roll uniform) in the Gulf South heat.  I left the show with a reignited excitement for the band, though, so I spent more time with them by revisiting their most prominent cinematic showcase to date: the late-90s splatstick horror comedy Wild Zero, in which they fight off a local breakout of astrozombies between playing gigs.  Despite only currently being accessible via YouTube, Wild Zero has a sizable cult following—partially due to Guitar Wolf’s Ramones-style rock n’ roll superheroes presence in the film, partially due to its surprisingly progressive queer themes—and it was without question my first introduction to the band.  That cult doesn’t account for all of Guitar Wolf’s audience, though, as evidenced by a recent failed Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel titled Wild Zero 2: The Strongest Blood of Humanity.  There’s apparently a disparity between the ecstatic enthusiasm of rock n’ roll maniacs who show up to see Guitar Wolf in concert (basically anyone who’s familiar with the phrase “Goner Records”) and the dimmed enthusiasm of schlock gobblers who’d show up to see Guitar Wolf onscreen again (aged internet nerds who used to trade zombie schlock recommendations on long-defunct message boards).  There’s obviously plenty of overlap between those two groups; there’s just not enough.

Fear not, Jet Rockers! There’s already another Guitar Wolf movie out there waiting for anyone who’s seen Wild Zero a few too many times but wants to spend more time with the band while the buzzsaw feedback from their most recent tour fades from your eardrums.  The 1997 indie cheapie The Sore Losers featured a small onscreen role for Guitar Wolf years before Wild Zero entered the chatroom.  The band appears as The Men in Black (Leather): a mysterious trio of villainous space aliens who frame a rival alien gang for intergalactic murders.  They’re introduced chugging beers in a Mississippi graveyard about halfway into the film, then randomly materialize at arbitrary points in the plot to wield swords, ogle strippers, and shoot CGI laser beams out of their eyes.  They’re very much like the Guitar Wolf of Wild Zero, except they have yet to learn how to use their powers for good.  The Sore Losers traffics in that kind of continued-adventures comic book storytelling throughout, directly referencing EC horror comics in its guiding iconography just as often as it references 1950s drive-in B-movies.  Guitar Wolf is only one faction of local garage-rock royalty who parade across the screen. Members of The Gories, Oblivians, and New Orleans’s own The Royal Pendletons appear alongside them to make it clear this is the document of a specific, contemporary scene just as much as it is a nostalgia piece about vintage schlock media.  Specifically, The Sore Losers is scuzzy, D.I.Y. exploitation trash starring hyper-local celebrities of the Memphis garage punk scene – a lost broadcast from the non-existent film division of Goner Records.  Given that Goner was initially established as a means to book & distribute Guitar Wolf in America just a few years before this film’s production, it fully has the credentials to back that up (even if competing garage label Sympathy for the Record Industry initially released the tie-in soundtrack, as advertised in the credits).

Like Wild Zero, The Sore Losers opens with CGI UFOs invading planet Earth, except in this case the UFO transforms into a hotrod the second it lands.  We’re told in voiceover that our antihero alien lead (Jack Oblivion) has been in exile from Earth for the past 42 years, punished for failing his 1950s mission to kill a dozen Northern Mississippi beatniks.  He immediately picks his mission back up again in a scheme to get back into the good graces of his alien overlords on The Invisible Wavelength, finding it much easier to locate & kill hippies in 1990s Mississippi than it was to locate & kill beatniks there four decades prior.  There are a lot of convoluted negotiations around hitting the exact dead-hippie metric that would earn his freedom, but narrative coherence isn’t among the movie’s priorities anyway.  Really, the hippie hunt is just an excuse for the intergalactic assassin to go on a short road trip to Memphis, so he can pose in vintage rock n’ roll gear along the way with redneck farmers, astrozombies, heavy-leather dominatrixes, and Betty Page pin-up girls.  The cinematic influences on this episodic adventure are clear: John Waters, David Freidman, Gregg Araki, Russ Meyer, etc.  The vintage sexploitation bent to that reference material leads to a lot of onscreen nudity, but not a lot of genuine horniness, giving the whole thing the feel of a rockabilly-themed Suicide Girls strip show.  It’s all mugging & posing, which is perfectly fine for a movie that’s clearly designed for an insular group of musician friends to celebrate how cool the scene they created together is by mimicking the cool the vintage media they grew up with.  It feels appropriate, then, that the end credits scroll includes the organizers of The Sore Losers Bash, since the local premiere & party for the film was almost more important than anything that actually happens in it.  As of yet, you cannot time travel back to that party to experience it for yourself, but you can order a reissue of the accompanying garage-rock soundtrack from Goner and blow out your eardrums in an attempt to recreate it.

It says something that the reissued Sore Losers soundtrack currently has a better at-home presentation than the film it promotes.  I rented The Sore Losers for $2 on VOD and was shocked by how gorgeous the digital restoration of its 16mm footage looked streaming at home.  The cranked-up color saturation vividly highlighted the vintage comic book influence of its guiding aesthetic, whereas just a few years later it likely would’ve been filmed in a grim, grey DV format.  However, the version I rented via Amazon had sound mixing issues that made the garage-rock soundtrack barely audible as a background whisper, as if those tracks were accidentally muted in export.  There are much fuzzier copies of the movie uploaded to YouTube where you can hear that the songs are supposed to be much louder in the mix, but a lot of the visual & aural details are lost in the lower quality of those transfers, so it’s really a matter of picking your poison.  The reason it’s worth mentioning is that the entire draw of the movie is watching cool people model outrageous leather outfits to loud rock n’ roll music (especially if you know those people personally), so a major component of that is experiencing missing if you can barely hear the rockin’ tunes.  The best way to view the movie, then, is likely to buy a physical copy on disc.  Better yet, don’t watch it at all.  Just go to the next garage rock show at your local dive bar and do some covert people-watching while the amplifiers cause irreparable brain damage.  From what I can tell, not much has changed on the scene fashion or personality-wise since the 90s.  You’re just likely to see more people wearing earplugs now, and I wish I was smart enough to be one of them.

-Brandon Ledet

Stunt Rock (1978)

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As a result of last year’s Hollywood labor strikes, there was a short-term drought of big-ticket blockbusters at the top of this summer’s release calendar, which has sent media journalists into a doomsaying tailspin.  A lot of attention & pressure has been focused on the box office performance of the mid-tier actioners The Fall Guy & Furiosa in particular, whereas most years they would’ve enjoyed their solid critical reviews without all the grim financial scrutiny weighing them down.  I don’t want to join in the collective handwringing over the short-term profits those films scraped together for their investors, so instead I’ll just point to the bizarre middle ground I recently discovered between them while they’re still a hot topic.  Like The Fall Guy, the 1978 action novelty Stunt Rock is a love letter to professional stuntmen, offering audiences a peek behind the scenes of film production stuntwork that’s usually left invisible.  In particular, the film was created as a star vehicle for Australian stuntman Grant Page who, among a hundred other credits, worked on the Mad Max series all the way up to Furiosa.  Unfortunately, Page did not live to see Furiosa‘s release, though, as he died in a car crash earlier this year as an octogenarian daredevil who did not know when to quit.  There’s been no better time to celebrate his life’s work, then, and there’s no better way to celebrate it than by watching Stunt Rock.

Grant Page stars as himself: a charismatic stuntman with an uncanny fearlessness.  The film is essentially an advertisement for his professional skills, with newsreel announcers cheering him on as “Australia’s favorite stuntman goes to Hollywood.”  While working his first regular gig on an American TV show, he woos two awestruck blondes: the show’s Dutch star (former Verhoeven collaborator Monique van de Ven, also playing herself) and a fictional reporter who’s fascinated by his craft (Margaret Trenchard-Smith, the director’s wife). There’s not too much drama behind Page’s flirtations with those women, though.  Mostly, the film is an excuse to watch him perform what the opening title-card warning calls “many extremely dangerous stunts.”  Page drowns himself, sets himself on fire, hang-glides, and jumps into the windshields of speeding cars with the going-through-the-motions calm of a bureaucrat filing paperwork.  His stuntwork is framed as an extension of Australian independent filmmaking in general, advertising the many thrills & spectacles of that industry with repackaged clips from Page’s resume.  Aussie schlockteur Brian Trenchard-Smith creates his own exciting filmic language during that clip show by doubling the 16mm frames of the cheaper films to fill the wider 35mm scope for a psychedelic splitscreen effect.  More importantly, though, he just wholly commits to worshipping at the altar of Grant Page, whom he was convinced he could make an international star.

Of course, “Stunt” only accounts for half of this film’s title & premise, and I’m somewhat burying the lede here by not also mentioning where the “Rock” fits in.  While brainstorming in the shower, Trenchard-Smith came up with Stunt Rock as a simple combination of two popular mediums, envisioning a showcase for Page’s talents that would score his stuntwork with bitchin’ rock n’ roll.  The Dutch production company who funded the project was confident that they could land a legitimate, popular rock act for the soundtrack, reaching out to bands like Kiss, The Police, and Foreigner before finally settling on a much-less famous Los Angeles act named Sorcery.  Instead of a perfect marriage of stunt & rock, the combination of Sorcery’s stage act with Page’s screenwork ended up being more of a hat on a hat.  The band plays generic, sub-Zeppelin stadium rock that wouldn’t be much to speak of on its own, but they pair it with a live performance of two pyrotechnic magicians who dress like Merlin & Satan to pantomime a Good vs. Evil battle while their songs narrate a play-by-play.  There is a vague gesture in the plot that ties Page’s stuntwork to the band, contracting him to help innovate stunts for their magic act as a favor to his cousin.  For the most part, though, the stunt and the rock of the title exist side by side as two separate, competing forces.

I suppose there’s some historic value to Stunt Rock‘s peek behind the scenes of 1970s movie-production stuntwork.  At the very least, it includes early acknowledgements of filmmaking techniques that have since spread to general public knowledge: wigging, squibs, fire gels, etc.  However, by the time Page is narrating the history of cinematic stuntwork over old-timey Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd footage and comedic slide whistles, it’s clear you’re not supposed to be taking any of its film production insight too seriously.  Most of its cinematic history is rooted in watching Page conquer America like King Kong, climbing our highest peaks and immediately falling off them.  Meanwhile, he’s sharing the stage with one of the goofiest rock ‘n roll acts of all time, whose own stuntwork makes for a fun novelty while also elevating the grittier, gutsier film set stunts through side-by-side comparison.  The volatile combination of those two acts is exciting in a way that directly appeals to the audience’s lizard-brain instincts, to the point where there’s simply no way to describe Stunt Rock without sounding like a 13-year-old dweeb; “It’s like if Quentin Tarantino directed an episode of Jackass . . . on acid!!!”  It’s a great showcase for Grant Page, though, who really did have a peculiar, one-of-a-kind talent for getting into car accidents and setting himself on fire.

-Brandon Ledet

The Exiles (1961)

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Every movie is documentary.  Whether or not the scene-to-scene narrative of a picture is a record of True Events (manipulated, as they all are, by the filmmakers’ selective curation), the picture itself is a record, a document of the past.  This becomes more apparent the older the picture has aged, as its performers, locations, and cultural context are cyclically replaced in the real world but remain intact onscreen.  That’s why it’s best not to get too hung up on genre boundaries when watching a picture like 1961’s The Exiles, which is presented as a documentary but is obviously driven by a semi-scripted narrative.  Documenting one drunken night in the lives of the Indigenous rock n roll greasers of 1950s Los Angeles, it’s a record of a time, a place, a people, and a moment in pop culture that have since been replaced and would otherwise be forgotten.  Which elements of the film qualify as documentary by definition of artistic medium are up for interpretation, but over time that distinction has mattered less & less.

Personally, I mostly receive the films’ clothes, locations, and voiceover narration as purely documentary in the genre sense.  Everything else onscreen plays as a recognition of and participation in the inherent artifice of cinema.  I believe the performers in the film are actual residents of the since-gentrified-into-oblivion neighborhood of Bunker Hill where they’re shown drinking, dancing, shouting, fighting, and just generally cutting up.  They appear to typify a genuine subculture of Indigenous youth who left the rural isolation of their government-assigned reservations to live out a hedonistic rock ‘n roll fantasy lifestyle in the big city, passing around the same little scraps of money amongst themselves for shared swigs of booze.  Their voiceover confessions about the never-ending cycle of getting drunk every single night with no particular plan or purpose feel bleakly sincere, while the onscreen illustration of that hedonism often feels more like reenactment in pantomime.  It has a very similar approach to narrative as its recent docufiction successor Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, except it’s shot as if it were a high-style Poverty Row noir.

The Exiles is factual but not exactly educational.  Its aimless, loosely scripted drunkenness might read as a kind of road-to-ruin moral lesson about alcoholism, but there’s no clear momentum or consequence to drive that point home.  Mostly, it’s just a slice-of-life document of one very specific community living out the Boomer rock ‘n roller fantasy of American Graffiti in real time, which to the sober eye can appear fashionably cool or hideously grotesque depending on the momentary vibes of the nonstop party.  I most appreciated it as a low-budget D.I.Y. project that couldn’t afford luxuries like color film or on-set sync sound recordings but still had a keen eye for aesthetic & cultural detail, most strikingly in scenes where the Native American stereotypes of the Westerns playing on background TV & movie screens clashed with the matter-of-fact representation of the real-life youth centered here.  At the same time, the way British filmmaker Kent Mackenzie opens the picture with historical photographs of Indigenous elders and never thinks to include mention of any specific tribe or nation now feels just as dusty as those Westerns did then.  It’s very much a picture of its time, as all pictures are.

Confession: I periodically fell asleep during a recent theatrical screening of this film, and I had to rewatch the final 20 minutes at home to piece together what I had missed during a few long blinks.  I’m not proud of this response to such a unique work.  I’m only mentioning it to note that as cool as the cultural documentation & vintage rock ‘n roll aesthetics are, the presentation can be a little dry.  I would usually apologize to anyone else who happened to be in that theater in case I snored during those mid-film disco naps, but I feel like after that guy got arrested for jacking it & nodding off during Love Lies Bleeding, the bar has been lowered enough for me to get away with it; at least I didn’t wake up with my peener out.  There are ways in which The Exiles‘s hands-off aimlessness decreases its value as filmic entertainment, but that approach is also exactly what makes it useful as an archival document, so I’m noting its patience-testing dryness less as a complaint than as an honest acknowledgement.

-Brandon Ledet

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

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The consensus opinion on 1979’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is that it’s a mediocre document of a magnificent concert.  Even its recent re-release was timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 London concert captured on film by D.A. Pennebaker, not the anniversary of the documentary.  The newly expanded and remastered version of the film cleans up Pennebaker’s footage in digital 4K resolution and includes additional backstage & onstage tidbits “lost” in the original, 90min cut (including brief appearances from Jeff Beck and Ringo Starr).  It was alternately referred to as Bowie ’73 in its original theatrical run, again stressing the importance of the event filmed rather than the film itself.  By ’79, Bowie had evolved past the Ziggy Stardust glam rocker persona, moving onto more depressive, cerebral projects like his Low collaboration with Brian Eno and his Iggy Pop collab The Idiot.  The Ziggy Stardust project was already a satellite broadcast from a distant past, and this 1973 concert was billed as the farewell to the persona and to David Bowie as the public knew him, with announcements on the PA declaring “For the last time, David Bowie . . .”  So, the logic goes that it’s worth suffering through this shabby, low-lighting footage just so there was some remnant of the Ziggy Stardust band on the record before Bowie transformed into something else altogether. 

I personally found the film much more substantial than that, at least in its new theatrical presentation.  All of the imperfections audiences have cited over the years are still present—if not expanded—in this restoration.  The 4:3 framing is frustratingly tight for a performer known for his galactic-scale glamour.  The dim lighting of the venue makes the crowd shots borderline incompressible, which undercuts the pleasure of scanning the faces & fashions of the audience.  The camera swings wildly around the room, finding a point of interest halfway into a shot instead of starting with a detail worth documenting.  Some shots go entirely black, the audio reel continuing to record while the film cartridges are switched out.  Maybe it’s my decades of being brainwashed by D.I.Y. punk aesthetics, but I found those grimy human fingerprints on Bowie’s pristine visual art to be a feature, not a distraction.  Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a raw document of an immaculate art project, pulling great tension out of the disparate qualities of Bowie’s perfectionist songwriting and Pennebaker’s imperfect imagery.  The live arrangements of the Ziggy Stardust songbook work the same way, with guitarist Mick Ronson unraveling tight, familiar pop tunes into abstract, psychedelic noise.  The sweaty, sped-up performances of Bowie’s early bangers map out a solid bridge from glam to punk, which couldn’t be more direct by the time the band covers “White Light, White Heat” in raucous encore.

I suspect I had that rapturous, energizing experience with the Ziggy Stardust movie because of the newly restored sound mix.  Listening to a digitally cleaned-up, surround sound presentation of this concert in a modern movie theater is easily the best sound quality I’ve ever heard in a David Bowie recording, which certainly elevated the images captured by Pennebaker’s cameras.  This is the clearest case of “The work speaks for itself” that I can recall, given that a few minutes of Ziggy’s band performing “Moonage Daydream” in this shaky, cramped frame packs in more mystique & meaning than the entirety of the recent Brett Morgen documentary of the same name.  You do not need to dress Bowie up in iTunes visualizer kaleidoscopes to make his words & sounds intriguing to a modern audience.  He already dressed himself up in a slutty little kimono and put on a full show, so all Pennebaker had to do was show up with professional recording equipment, sit back, and gaze.  The low lighting of the venue and the chaotic movements of the camera evoke UFO conspiracy footage, desperate to catch a glimpse of this glam rock clown from outer space before he disappears back into the night sky.  Bowie often appears in orange monotone lighting against a black void, glowing as a strange visual object that just happens to produce beautiful music.  The sight of him is arresting, and so long-familiar tracks like “Changes” & “Space Oddity” are captivating in a way they haven’t been since I first heard their proper studio recordings on my sub-par headphones in high school.

My only lingering disappointment with this film is that I couldn’t get a better look at the crowd.  There’s enough strobe & disco ball lighting to catch glimpses of the queer nerds swooning in ecstasy over Bowie’s presence, but not enough to fully document their presence in the room.  Bowie’s sassy, talkative performances of “Changes” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” slow the momentum of Ronson’s guitar licks down to draw attention to the lyrics, which celebrate the eternal passion & progression of Youth Culture in a way I found genuinely touching.  So many of his early songs dwell on time, death, and impermanence that he comes across as a real Gloomy Gus, but he does take obvious solace in how those “changes” are a positive influence on the world from the perspective of youth.  So, I found myself scanning the youth in the crowd for their real-time reactions to his art – whether they were gently moshing to manic performances of “Hang Onto Yourself” & “Suffragette City” or they were awestruck by his genderless supermodel posing in various Space Age onesies.  It would’ve been nice to fully see those faces before the impermanence of time changed them into something unrecognizable, but there’s no way to fully go back and correct that mistake.  What this restoration was able to excavate & accentuate in Pennebaker’s documentary is well worth experiencing big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd of fellow Bowie obsessives.  Maybe the form doesn’t fully live up to the content, but in this case it’s difficult to imagine that any one movie ever could.

-Brandon Ledet