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Worst and best band movies

Started by steveh, July 29, 2017, 11:36:38 AM

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Shit Good Nose

Quote from: thecuriousorange on July 31, 2017, 11:34:08 AM
Simultaneously best and worst:
The Song Remains the Same

"What's your fantasy, Bonzo?"
"Be a brickie and have a pint of mild in the pub with my OAP mates."
"..........any chance you can juice it up a little bit?"
"..........okay, drag racing as well."

neveragain

Green Room's a pretty good band movie (and also a gruesome horror with Patrick Stewart).

What was that 90's Brit-com one with Timothy Spall and possibly Bill Nighy? Still Crazy. That was quite naff. I had a uni friend who watched that thinking it was Spinal Tap.

Attila

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on August 01, 2017, 11:36:10 AM


Not sure if Gonks Go Beat fits. I used to really like it although it was mainly watched whilst on acid. Ace Lulu title song though.


Plus it features Elaine Thompson and her twin brother,  the fellow who'd go on to be Charlie in Casualty for roughly 315 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-JxrMNpFv4

kngen

Quote from: steveh on July 29, 2017, 11:36:38 AM
Somehow I ended up watching the 1988 Run DMC vehicle Tougher Than Leather last night. It's one of the most terrible band movies I've seen in a long time.

Because this was such a bomb, it meant Def Jam wouldn't fund the Beastie Boys movie (an Abbot and Costello-style monster romp called The Beastie Boys Get Scared Shitless, IIRC). A shame, as I'd imagine it would be juvenile in the extreme, and a source of eternal shame to them for the rest of their career. (And that comes from a fan!)

EDIT: But apparently Universal would, but Rick Rubin wouldn't allow them to put any of their music in film. Ha!


steveh

While skimming through new stuff on Amazon I found a new contender for the worst band (well, multiple bands) film ever: Never Too Young To Rock.

In an alternative 1970s pop music has been banned from TV so Peter Denyer and Freddie Jones tour the country in an ice cream van that's been converted into a pop band detector, which seems to involve looking into one of those multiple lens CCTV cameras that supermarkets of the era used to have. Basically it's an excuse to include tracks from artists on the GTO label who made it; the likes of Mud, The Glitter Band, The Rubettes and others. It seems to have been filmed on the dreariest wet winter days which makes even the brightest glam fashions look drab.

The best bit is The Rubettes miming one of their hits on the back of a lorry as it drives through the suburbs somewhere to the complete indifference of all the pedestrians and cars going past. It ends with a concert featuring all the bands they have assembled, except when the camera pans round it looks like the auditorium is completely empty, though in one shot there's an old woman incongruously sitting on a chair at the side in front of the stage.

That got me onto finding Side By Side, an earlier GTO production directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Terry Thomas, Barrie Humphries and Stephanie De Sykes in which two rival nightclubs next door to each other have to compete to stay open because of a local bylaw that prevents more than two clubs in the same town. None of it makes much sense. Stephanie De Sykes is harassed by one of the club owners who thinks she will get them pop acts from the agency she works at but then in a second goes from running away from him to taking him back to her flat. Once there, however, all she wants to do is show off her new-fangled video recorder to play Fox's Imagine Me Imagine You video. There's old Laurel and Hardy routines thrown in for no real reason, Barrie Humphries in blackface and an out-of-place Desmond Dekker performance.

GTO also produced Gary Glitter's Remember Me This Way, which is surprisingly on Amazon Prime and sounds so dire I don't think I'd want to watch even without all the other reasons for avoiding him. After those GTO stopped making their own films (perhaps connected with the death of producer Ron Inkpen who also produced Bob Godfrey's features) and became a distributor for an odd collection of films including That Sinking Feeling, Polyester, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Caligula. The British film industry in the seventies was weird.

Noodle Lizard

Cradle of Fear is kind of Cradle of Filth: The Movie, directed by soft-porn horror auteur (and friend of our own Daniel F. "The Dogs (2015)" Phythian) Alex Chandon.  It is absolute dick, hilariously so at times, but at least it's a seemingly sincere attempt at an Amicus style horror anthology rather than a sequence of the band members getting into wacky antics.  The final segment about a man finding a red room on the internet is a surprisingly decent concept, and ahead of its time in some ways.  It also features one of the poorest-quality car chases in film and TV history.

It's on YouTube if you fancy it:  https://youtu.be/Nwaa1-BhCOg

Bobby Treetops

Der Fan early 80s German film about a teenage girl who gets obsessed with a Gary Numan type-pop star.

Here's the NSFW trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOqxrnCOrhk

Without giving too much away, this has a pretty fucked up last 15 minutes.

NoSleep

Quote from: Sin Agog on July 29, 2017, 11:35:07 PM
Rude Boy's the one with Burning Spear?  Love that, and Babylon and Harder They Come.

No, the one with Burning Spear is Rockers (1978) which is excellent. Rude Boy (also very good) features the Clash (excellent live footage) but is focussed about a fictional roadie they employ (amongst other things; there's actual footage of National Front demonstrations and a parallel sub plot about the arrest of a black guy, who may be the rude boy of the title rather than the central reactionary drunken roadie).

BeardFaceMan

I have a real soft spot for CB4,  but for a really great band film my go to is Hard Core Logo. Fictional band again but a quality punk rock mockumentary with great performances and a good soundtrack too.

NoSleep

My two favourite "band" movies are The Great Rock And Roll Swindle and Peter Watkins' Privilege, both being very cynical takes on the whole rock and roll business. Privilege is also a precursor to the rockumentary style of This Is Spinal Tap (also one of my favourite films but more because of the comedy).
Tim Robbins' Bob Roberts is also another Privilege-inspired rockumentary about a reactionary musician turned politician ("The Times They Are a Changin' Back" is one of his songs).

Gulftastic

Purple Rain is one of the best, Graffiti Bridge one of the worst.

And Prince cancelled a gig at Blenheim Palace to do reshoots for the latter. I had tickets and it still rankles that I didn't get the booking fee back.

popcorn

Not based on a real band, but the Japanese film Linda Linda Linda is the truest, gentlest, loveliest representation of what it's like to be in a crap (great) high school band I've ever seen.


Noodle Lizard

Quote from: Bobby Treetops on December 21, 2018, 02:03:24 PM
Der Fan early 80s German film about a teenage girl who gets obsessed with a Gary Numan type-pop star.

Here's the NSFW trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOqxrnCOrhk

Without giving too much away, this has a pretty fucked up last 15 minutes.

Yeah, this film's great.  The girl is very eerily reminiscent of a fan I once knew.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: NoSleep on December 21, 2018, 02:14:17 PM
No, the one with Burning Spear is Rockers (1978) which is excellent. Rude Boy (also very good) features the Clash (excellent live footage) but is focussed about a fictional roadie they employ (amongst other things; there's actual footage of National Front demonstrations and a parallel sub plot about the arrest of a black guy, who may be the rude boy of the title rather than the central reactionary drunken roadie).

Love Rockers, especially the bungled subtitle 'yo bum cloth'.

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: Jim_MacLaine on July 30, 2017, 10:06:48 AM
Thanks

'allo david.

another vote here for 'head', 'stardust' (& 'that'll be the day'), the massively wonderful 'flame' (which is on yt in its entirety, I think) & how've we got this far without 'tap' or 'bad news' coming up? there are others I'll remember in due course.

Sin Agog

Quote from: popcorn on December 21, 2018, 02:36:46 PM
Not based on a real band, but the Japanese film Linda Linda Linda is the truest, gentlest, loveliest representation of what it's like to be in a crap (great) high school band I've ever seen.



Yeah, really love this.  Reminds me of that movie about the Swedish teen punk girls, We Are the Best!  But the funk is up with )@p&n's obsession with school clubs?  So much of their wares bang on about school clubs like they were the peak of the writers' existences.  I couldn't get off school grounds fast enough when I was a kid.

NoSleep

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on December 21, 2018, 08:00:18 PM
Love Rockers, especially the bungled subtitle 'yo bum cloth'.

That is what the term literally means (i.e. toilet paper).

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: NoSleep on December 21, 2018, 09:35:11 PM
That is what the term literally means (i.e. toilet paper).

I'm aware of that, it's an overly literal translation.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: non capisco on July 29, 2017, 06:22:23 PM
I recall 'Slade In Flame' being decent, and far more kitchen-sinky/Ken Loach-esque than you might expect. I did see it about twenty odd years ago, though. There's probably a galactic ton of stuff I thought was good when I was in my late teens that it turns out is utter dog eggs.

Slade in Flame is great. As you say, it's like a glam film directed by Ken Loach - really bleak, grimy and downbeat. It's natural to assume that a film starring Slade would be a knockabout romp, but it's anything but. Also, Noddy is pretty good in it, he's a natural in front of the camera.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Dr Syntax Head on July 30, 2017, 07:42:35 PM
I'm of the opinion that band movies are bad in general. Blues Brothers excepted

You haven't seen Head starring The Monkees then? It's one of the greatest pop 'n' rock films ever made, an uncompromisingly avant garde, psychedelic fantasia with a blatantly cynical edge. It's The Monkees striving for counterculture credibility, but not in an embarrassing way.

I don't think any other pop group has ever deconstructed their image in such a scathingly honest and, as it turned out, self-destructive way. Plus the soundtrack is fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqE8WTwkMXg

#51
Pink Floyd: The Wall is awful, bar the brief animated bits. Shame they botched the concert stuff they tried to record for it. At least then they would have been in it.

NoSleep

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on December 22, 2018, 01:52:19 PM
I'm aware of that, it's an overly literal translation.

It wasn't a translation as such; just looking for the English word represented in most cases; often the subtitles showed me how many Londoners whose families originated in Jamaica were still using the exact same phrases minus the accent, bumboclaat being one of the rare exceptions where the original had been retained in all its glory. I think it's good that they didn't assume anything about the audience's foreknowledge of patois. If they had truly translated it for the film then "asswipe" could have worked, but then we might also have lost the Jamaican turn of phrase in other places.

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on December 22, 2018, 03:11:11 PM
You haven't seen Head starring The Monkees then? It's one of the greatest pop 'n' rock films ever made, an uncompromisingly avant garde, psychedelic fantasia with a blatantly cynical edge. It's The Monkees striving for counterculture credibility, but not in an embarrassing way.

I don't think any other pop group has ever deconstructed their image in such a scathingly honest and, as it turned out, self-destructive way. Plus the soundtrack is fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqE8WTwkMXg

I'm only here because of an obsession with the flick; I discovered C&B through reading a partial dissection of it on a site called "some of the corpses are amusing"... someone here will be along in a minute to elaborate, but here's a link in the meanwhile-

http://sotcaa.org/head/index.html

also, nesmith's version of "daddy's song"-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmMxT4SYQfw

Dex Sawash

I like the doc Tribute a film about tribute bands. I never thought that there could be rivalry between Monkees tribute groups.

Neomod

Got that Bros film on in the background and it is unintentionally hilarious. Real Spinal Tap bollocks, crystals an' all.