Excellent, a Must See

Am I Missing Something?

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

The Filth and the Fury (2000): Dir: Julien Temple / Featuring: Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, Glen Matlock, John Lydon: Documentary about the Sex Pistols regarding their lifestyle and the relationship with fans and critics. Director Julien Temple highlights their short music career as they cause mass hysteria in the media. They formed in 1975 under the manager Malcolm McLaren then they fell apart after with the drug overdose of base guitarist Sid Vicious. He had met Nancy Spungen, which led to her stabbing death in a hotel. With Sid up on conviction he died of an overdose in 1979. It isn't a pretty picture but Temple does an effective job with its documentary style. This is quite different from his comedy Earth Girls Are Easy, but here he goes for documentary appeal without the glamour and succeeds in displaying an image of the Sex Pistols that is less than pretty. Johnny Rotten makes an appearance with statements regarding a former manager. Glen Matlock also appears within the madness and carefree life of fame and drugs. Fans or music historians will witness the conflicts both on the road and within personal boundaries. The musical numbers are explosive and chime in with many of their biggest hits. Despite its graphic showcase of drugs and extreme behaviour, it portray the destruction of talent through drugs and fame. Score: 9 / 10

This is the Sex Pistols in their own four-letter words, probably a better way to review punk rock than in Malcolm McLaren's self-regarding version of the story, filmed by the same director twenty years earlier.It is hard to know who could be shocked by this outpouring of meaningless blasphemy and violent rebellion against nothing very much. Yet many people were deeply outraged by the first of the punk rockers. A Welsh town tried to ban them. The giant record company EMI felt obliged to fire them. And the veteran TV presenter Bill Grundy wrecked his career by failing to restrain their foul language on a chat-show.All of this was music to the ears of McLaren, who had been casting around for a new brand of youth-protest to replace the fading hippie culture in which he himself had been so immersed a few years earlier. Something harsher was needed, something with spikes and swastikas, laced with heroin.The answer was Punk, perhaps the most effective four-letter word of them all, literally impossible to utter without anger and hate. The band itself is awash with hate, and self-hate, at its most unmistakable in the Sid Vicious interview, where he says he wishes he was underground. (A few months later, he was.) Julien Temple's treatment has been praised for its subtle interleaving of newsreel to provide the social background that was supposed to justify the excesses of Punk. Personally, I can't see what's so subtle about it, though the apparently irrelevant clips from Olivier's Richard III may be putting out a message too subtle for most of us.Still, the authorised (socialist) version of 70's England is the main theme - an oppressed working class, ripe for revolution. Johnny Rotten probably didn't realize he was revealing the flaw in the argument when he says "We don't know who 'working class' means any more." Indeed not. It used to mean manual workers and their families. By the 70's, it had swung round to mean almost everything other than this - a rentamob of full-time anarchists, unemployables, illegal immigrants and striking students and professors. (Johnny and Sid first met in higher education.) In the end, the sheer nihilism of the subject makes it monotonous, and it doesn't help that all four of the band are actually named John, so we often don't know who is describing whom. Like all revolutionaries, they disagree about everything, except their intense loathing for Sid's girlfriend Nancy Spungen. ("Never felt such negative energy"). Still, there is a nice touch, arriving at JFK, where the customs are determined to do a full drug-search... until they take a look at Sid's underwear, and mysteriously decide to wave them through after all.

i never saw a documentary that so well reflects the artistic values of its subject. so well merging history and art into a very tasty presentation.back in the late seventies, the sEx pIstOLs caused a true pop revolution in england as well as in Europe. in those days the WHirLwinDs of the sixties had slowed down, while the industry kept on GoiNg. It all resulted in pop music mostly lacking FIrE.we all know that sEx pisToLs' music carried lots of fire. what Americans may not appreciate, is that this fire comes from a strong social undertone. the group really represented ENglAnd's lowest educated, socially backward youngsters, with almost no prospect for a proper job + a decent futUrE.that's what the sEx pIsToLs sing about -- love + sex hardly make a topic with them. their image and outfit are quite in line - we all know their torn-up clothing, their safety pins, and their FoUl language. called P U N K. It's all there in this gReAt documentary.

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.