Buffronioc One of the wrost movies I have ever seen

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

ShootingShark A documentary about the rise and fall of the most notorious punk rock band of all time; The Sex Pistols.When I was a kid I was hypnotised by Johnny Rotten / John Lydon, and to some extent I still am. He looked and sounded so different from anybody else, particular the musicians who were on TV a lot, like Abba and David Cassidy. He was scary, unique, funny, and behind his penetrating stare there was an almost ruthless, questioning intelligence. I never bought for a second what the authorities said about how The Sex Pistols would create a corrupt society. I thought a corrupt society had created The Sex Pistols, and I thought their music - and the music of the many bands they influenced - was brilliant. This thought-provoking documentary is a companion piece to Temple's 1980 cult classic The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. But whereas that was the brainchild of their egocentric impresario manager Malcolm McLaren, this is their story in the band's own words. It deals with the social upheavals of seventies Britain which gave rise to them, and then does an excellent job of charting their progress from alternative music club heroes to national pariahs to chart topping music icons, to disillusioned and ripped-off losers, without pulling any punches. Typical Sex Pistols day; internal band punch up in limo, sign prestigious contract in front of Buckingham Palace, get wasted and trash record company offices, record a number one hit single (God Save The Queen, which was subsequently banned) and get fired by your new label. If anyone has the right to call themselves anarchists, it's them. Some of the footage in this film comes from Swindle and other familiar sources, but there is also lots of new stuff, particularly some intimate pieces with Vicious, which make his pathetic, tragic fate all the more sobering. It's also packed full of tub-thumpingly great music and performances from a terrific band who compressed so much energy into their short-lived career. A must for all punk fans and for anybody interested in one of the most influential musical movements of all time. The title comes from a tabloid newspaper headline the day after their infamous Bill Grundy TV interview. For more detailed insights into Lydon and the heady years of the late seventies, read his excellent book No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.

Woodyanders Julien Temple's slick mock rock doc "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle" was a delightfully irreverent, but extremely embellished and thus less than accurate depiction of the Sex Pistols' 26 legendary months of unmitigated excess, success, pandemonium and inevitable failure. This far more scruffy and honest down-to-earth documentary sets the record straight sans huckster impresario Malcom McLaren's gross self-serving distortions of the truth. The surviving band -- angry, fiercely snide and abrasive working class anti-star front-man Johnny Rotten, fellow surly band Steve Jones and Paul Cook, token happy average guy out Glen Matlock -- are all interviewed, saying in their own shockingly candid, open, often profane and hilariously spiky words their savagely upfront thoughts and feelings about the whole bloody two year fracas that was the band's abrupt and chaotic, yet still glorious and influential reign.We learn about the individual band ' sad, crappy childhoods, the gray, decaying, trash-littered rot and social upheaval of mid 70's London, the group's musical influences (glam rock and heavy metal!), how the punk movement initially encouraged raw displays of individualism and equalized the sexes, the Sex Pistols' primitively rattling three-chord sonic assault was purposefully ugly, sludgy, tuneless and egalitarian, the Pistols' infamous (and truly riotous) foul-mouthed interview on an insipid morning TV chatshow, the band's disastrous record contract with EMI, the Thames River party, how the song "God Save the Queen" put Rotten's life in considerable jeopardy, Sid Vicious beating up punk journalist Nick Kent, punk's unfortunate downslide into trendy chic mainstream nullity, Nancy Spungen's fatal hold on Sid (the other band vehemently abhorred her), the abortive feature film "Who Killed Bambi?" (with Sting in his film debut!), Sid's tragic untimely death from a heroin overdose, and the Sex Pistols' horrendously unsuccessful final nail-in-the-coffin American tour (the frightfully hostile yank audiences expected a freakshow). Moreover, we find out that Sid popularized pogoing at punk clubs, McLaren never paid the band a dime, and that a '77 Christmas benefit gig was probably the Sex Pistols' best ever show.The grainy, gritty, usually ratty and washed-out mostly color, sometimes black and white unpolished archival footage of the band at its supremely rowdy and astonishingly outrageous peak possesses an irresistibly grungy and oddly intimate appeal while the crude blaring music -- such killer classic numbers as "Anarchy in the U.K.," "God Save the Queen," "Pretty Vacant," and "Holidays in the Sun" among 'em -- roars away with a furiously brutal abandon. Johnny Rotten sagely comments at the very end that the Sex Pistols were probably too good for their own good to last very long, but luckily this first-rate picture vividly immortalizes their notorious exploits and substantial legacy for posterity's sake.

winner55 The real story of punk rock will, apparently, never be told. I suppose that's because most of the surviving participants have too much ego invested; or because, as the years fade, and the original social context disappears, the meaning of Punk - at its inception - becomes harder to decipher and easier to forget.I was in NYC in '76, when it was first breaking for the national press, and I hung around CBGBs under a number of pseudonyms, trying to write reviews and articles on bands that nobody ever heard of, many of them breaking up before I could dot the last "i" in the last paragraph. And I tried out a couple bands of my own, weird blends of Iggy and the Velvet Underground. But I was really an outsider (coming from upstate); and when the London scene started shipping singles over, I knew that, for whatever reason, my heart was really more into "Anarchy" and "White Riot" than the metal-surf-music of the Ramones or early Blondie. But this disjunction of 'right time wrong place' or whatever, allowed me to see the development of Punk in a way others seem content to ignore.The fundamental problem that Punk never resolved (and current neo-punks are still struggling with it), is, whether Punk was to be a continuance of the "counter culture" of the '60s in different guise, or just another pop-music for sexually frustrated young people. This sounds like an empty theoretical issue, but it has one all-important concrete aspect to it no one can ignore - money. Did (do) punks make music to make music - or to make money? That question was never answered; or, perhaps, every punk answered (answers) it in his/ her own way. Yet once we begin adding up all the individual answers, most of them sure come out sounding like "money". Yet the memory of Punk survives largely because it seemed to be about anything other than money; so the dilemma continues.That dilemma surfaces again in this film, especially in the discovery of the wretched rip-off Pistols manager Malcom McLaren pulled, not only on the audience, but on the Pistols themselves. The brief moments from the (thankfully unfinished) "Who Shot Bambi?" make it very clear that McLaren had not the slightest clue as to who the Pistols were, or what they represented. Yet he not only continued to guide their career after their break-up, but is warmly mentioned in Griel Marcus' scholarly history of Punk, "Lipstick Traces", which will probably bear influence on punk histories, long after the last "photo-album" paperback turns to dust. Yet it is clear that from the get-go McLaren's only interest was the profit.The Pistols were right, and are right, to ignore questions concerning their "materialism" or "selling out", since they were never part of the hippies' 'anti-materialism' ideal to begin with, and because they never denied a desire for some paycheck (which they almost never got from McLaren). But also plain is their desire to make the music of the UK working-class slums from whence they came.All of this comes to a head in the brief yet unforgettable tragedy of Sid Vicious - for whom music meant freedom, and money meant - heroin. But junky 'rockstars' don't play at commercial venues to make music. He ended up in NYC, which by then had a punk scene swarming with record-co.-exec vermin dealing dope and poseur sycophants trying to score. Eventually all that was left was the heroin, and it killed him.This film won't resolve any of these issues; but it may help raise them, and place them in a proper light. I can't agree that it is a well-made film - the editing, which is very flashy, is also somewhat vapid, and goes out of control too often. But there's adequate reminder of the era of the Pistols here, and why it was many of us thought, at the time (and still believe) that the Pistols were the most important rock band in history.The segment from the final performance at Winterland is worth the price of the film: same-old same-old music concerts are "no fun" and Jones and Rotten (knowing they've been betrayed by McLaren into performing for the corporate music world they hated) rub our noses in it until they've had enough and stalk off. If you can see this - and know what it's about - and still pay $200 to see Mick Jagger pull his wrinkled pud at you at the age of 65, you don't need a movie review, you need a psychiatrist.

gut-6 In interviews done at the time of the film's release, Julien Temple talked about the genesis of this film, and the reasoning behind some of the peculiar and novel gimmicks he used. Basically he had some out-takes that he had filmed for "The Great Rock & Roll Swindle", as well as some random British TV recordings from the 1970's that he had recorded on one of the first commercial VCR's. Temple wanted to use this material to tell the story of the Sex Pistols from their point of view, rather than Malcolm Maclaren's point of view presented in "The Great Rock & Roll Swindle". He said he included the ancillary material such as the video recordings to give a flavor of the times. The reason he gave for recording the living Pistols in witness-protection style silhouette (and Maclaren in a mask) was to hide their age and make it seem like the interviews were contemporaneous with the other footage, especially with regard to the interview of a non-silhouetted Sid Vicious in London's Hyde Park in 1978. In practice, the silhouettes are annoying and repetitive and make it hard to identify who is speaking on first viewing.This film has exactly the same flaws as Temple's original effort, "The Great Rock & Roll Swindle" - its of the Pistols' story is a biased, inaccurate, incomplete, poorly-structured mess, frequently interrupted by unnecessary, gimmicky, distracting, pretentious irrelevant inserts that have nothing to do with the main story. Only this time, instead of portraying the Sex Pistols as mindless puppets in a cynical commercial ploy by a clever manager, they are portrayed (implicitly via news footage from the 1970's) as idealists making political statements about their society, financially exploited by a useless Maclaren. Both slants are fantasy. The Pistols have repeatedly pointed out they were not political, although Rotten has in recent years started parroting some of the fantasies written about him and the punk scene by intellectuals; any quasi-political imagery foisted on the band was largely the doing of the supposedly useless Maclaren and his cronies. We see all the usual tricks of agenda-pushing documentaries, with isolated, possibly irrelevant snippets of visual interest (e.g. a fat racist squirming through a window to rant to a TV camera) edited together to imply relatedness. What's more, many of these clips appear to date from long after the Pistols formed. Likewise we see the bad guys (Maclaren and cronies) in unflattering shots and the good guys (the Pistols) in flattering or neutral shots. That's just childish, as are the sudden dramatic increases in volume every time a Pistols song starts playing.Instead of Rock & Roll Swindle's cutaways to shots of Maclaren singing, mugging and pontificating, we get Olivier playing Richard III or TV ads or weather reports or forgotten comedians. These non-sequiturs are supposedly justified on the grounds of Rotten citing his influences or as a reflection of life in the 1970's, but it goes on and on and on long after the original point (if any) was made, until the original point is lost. When Temple was asked if there was any Pistols footage left unused after "The Filth and The Fury", he said there wasn't really, apart from additional concert footage which he considered redundant. This, I suspect, is the real reason for the excessive irrelevant footage, i.e. filler to get a commercial length for a feature film. I would dearly love to have seen the "redundant" concert footage instead. It would have been infinitely more interesting, entertaining and relevant. Temple's TV archives could have interest in their own right, but they belong in a separate documentary.Ignoring the inept, pretentious directing, this film does have many priceless moments, and does reveal a number of obscure or unknown facts about the Pistols, although I was surprised at how little unused footage there really was, and how much was reused from the final cut of "Swindle". The Pistols are shown to be funny, intelligent and personable, far removed from the punk caricatures. The 3 Johns, and John's closeness to Sid, and John's crying over his dead friend are a revelation. So too, the Pistols' last concert before their American tour, a firemen's benefit with lots of young dancing children ing the band in a cream pie fight - not very punk, but oddly touching. We see footage from the Pistols' very earliest days, together with some of the bizarre early fans like Sue Catwoman highlighting the bohemian roots of the punk scene. We get to see footage of the disgusting Nancy Spungeon. In a remarkable stroke of luck, Temple captured skinny teenage punk fan Shane MacGowan, long before he was famous, doing an acapella rendition of "Anarchy in the UK" on the grounds of a council flat, and schoolteacher Sting playing a gay rapist in a scene from the abortive "Who Killed Bambi" movie. But by far the funniest scene in the film was the intro to a 1978 American TV music show, in which the Pistols were the most normal, most successful, and least ridiculous-looking band to appear on the program.In summary this film was a wasted opportunity on of the talentless director. But it's still essential for the odd gem of obscure Pistols footage, which even Temple couldn't mess up. If you want to see the definitive Pistols documentary, check out the "Never Mind The Bolloks" episode of the "Classic Albums" TV documentary series.