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Punk film

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List of punk movies

Suburbia (1984) - Penelope Spheeris

Suburbia (1984) - Penelope Spheeris [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Suburbia is a movie written and directed by Penelope Spheeris (The Decline of Western Civilization) about suburban punks who run away from home. The kids take up a minimalist, punk rock lifestyle by squatting in abandoned suburban tract homes.

Released in 1984, Suburbia is also known as Rebel Streets and The Wild Side. Red Hot Chilli Peppers' bassist Flea makes a cameo appearance as "Razzle (Mike B. The Flea)". It gives Spheeris' vision of early 1980's punk rock sub culture and an opinion on what drove the youths to become "Punks". Although completely misguided into the punk rock opinions of rape and drug use, it does score right on the money with its comparisons to the hippies of the 60's and the discrimination that many punk rockers faced from others because of the way that they chose to look and the music that they loved. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburbia_(movie) [Oct 2004]

Jubilee (1977) - Derek Jarman

Jubilee (1977) - Derek Jarman [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Amazon.com
Avant-garde spirit and punk-rock attitude combine with iconoclastic results in Derek Jarman's defiantly uncommercial Jubilee. Filmed in 1977--the silver jubilee year of England's Queen Elizabeth II--this fascinating hodgepodge of political dissent and audiovisual experimentation now stands as a vibrant document of its time, both immediate and enduring in its bold rejection of all things conventional. (Compared to this, the quasi-punk Repo Man and angst-ridden Sid & Nancy seem positively tame.) Jarman's film deserved its mixed reviews; like the films of Andy Warhol, it's a slapdash affair, cobbled together by Jarman and his fringe-dwelling friends, ostensibly designed as a kaleidoscopic glimpse of London's future, infused with apocalyptic nihilism and populated by proto-punks (including Adam Ant and Rocky Horror's Little Nell) in an anarchic orgy of gay and straight sex, music, violence, and (in retrospect) astonishingly accurate pop-cultural prophesy. It's the pioneering, angry/funny work of a genuine artist, as essential to punk film as the Sex Pistols were to music in the dreadful days of disco. --Jeff Shannon

Description
When Queen Elizabeth I asks her court alchemist to show her England in the future, she’s transported 400 years to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of roving girl gangs, an all-powerful media mogul, fascistic police, scattered filth, and twisted sex. With Jubilee, legendary British filmmaker Derek Jarman channeled political dissent and artistic daring into a revolutionary blend of history and fantasy, musical and cinematic experimentation, satire and anger, fashion and philosophy. With its uninhibited punk petulance and sloganeering, Jubilee, brings together many cultural and musical icons of the time, including Jordan, Toyah Willcox, Little Nell, Wayne County, Adam Ant, and Brian Eno (with his first original film score), to create a genuinely unique, unforgettable vision. Ahead of its time and often frighteningly accurate in its predictions, it is a fascinating historical document and a gorgeous work of film art.

Jubilee is a 1977 cult film directed by Derek Jarman and starring Jenny Runacre, Nell Campbell (Little Nell), Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Jordan (the Malcolm McLaren protege), and Hermine Demoriane.

In the film Queen Elizabeth I is transported forward in time by John Dee through the spirit guide Ariel to the shattered Britain ruled by Elizabeth II. The 1970s queen is dead, killed in an arbitrary mugging, and the historical queen moves through the social and physical decay of the city observing the activites of a group of sporadic nihilists called Amyl Nitrate, Bod, Chaos, Crabs, Mad and similar.

The film is clearly Jarman's but is heavily influenced by the 1970s punk ethic in its style. Shot in grainy colour the film is largely plotless, episodic, untidy, confrontational, often incoherent and noisily anti-establishment and anti-royalty - Buckingham Palace is a recording studio run by a man named Borgia Ginz. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28film%29 [Oct 2004]

Repo Man (1984) - Alex Cox

  1. Repo Man (1984) - Alex Cox [Amazon US]
    A volatile, toxic potion of satire and nihilism, road movie and science fiction, violence and comedy, the unclassifiable sensibility of Alex Cox's Repo Man is the model and inspiration for a potent strain of post-punk American comedy that includes not only Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), but also early Coen brothers (Raising Arizona, in particular), Men in Black, and even (in a weird way) The X-Files. Otto, a baby-face punk played by Emilio Estevez, becomes an apprentice to Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a coke-snorting, veteran repo-man-of-honor prowling the streets of a Los Angeles wasteland populated by hoods, wackos, burnouts, conspiracy theorists, and aliens of every stripe. It may seem chaotic at first glance, but there's a "latticework of coincidence" (as Tracey Walter puts it) underlying everything. Repo Man is a key American movie of the 1980s--just as Taxi Driver, Nashville, and Chinatown are key American movies of the '70s. With a scorching soundtrack that features Iggy Pop, Fear, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, --Jim Emerson

Sid & Nancy (1986) - Alex Cox

  • Sid & Nancy (1986) - Alex Cox [Amazon.com]
    After the cultish success of Repo Man, maverick director Alex Cox made the film that remains his masterpiece--a loud, brash, abrasive, painful, funny, and utterly brilliant screen biography of British punk rocker Sid Vicious and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen. As played to perfection by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb, Sid and Nancy are made for each other, serving their mutual strengths and weaknesses and rising with the punk-rock fame of Sid's group, the Sex Pistols, while falling into the ultimately lethal pit of drug abuse. Cox doesn't pull any punches or compromise the unsavory aspects of this passionate love story, so the film presents a harsh mix of emotional and physical anguish tempered by the very poignant and genuine love shared by its tormented central characters. Through it all, the film emerges as an intimate and yet oddly epic chronicle of punk's glory days of anarchic sex, drugs and rock & roll. It's as dynamic and confidently directed as any screen biography before or since, no less fascinating for its unpleasant aspects as for the touching emotions at its very human core. --Jeff Shannon, amazon.com

    Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) - Joe Dante, Allan Arkush

    Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) - Joe Dante, Allan Arkush [Amazon.com]
    "Do your parents know you're Ramones?" With those withering words, Miss Togar (Mary Woronov), the uptight neofascist principal of Vince Lombardi High School, addresses the four mop-haired, leather-jacketed members of America's first and most famous punk band. And you know it won't be long before the Ramones's jackhammer riffs are blaring through the public address system at maximum volume, the kids are running--not walking--wild in the hallways (without passes!), and Miss Togar's gulag is re-christened "Rock 'n' Roll High School." Then, in keeping with the outrageously nihilistic animus of punk, the high school students and the Ramones just blow the place to smithereens. It's a crowd- pleasing, fantasy-fulfillment climax that combines the apocalyptic finale of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point with the explosive conclusion of Alice Cooper's "School's Out." Rock 'n' Roll High School is a blast, a goofy and liberating salute to the rebel spirit behind the teen rock & roll movies of the 1950s, which always pitted the kids' insatiable appetite for fun against the adults' fear-based authoritarianism. The film is emblematic of the disarmingly silly, tongue-in-cheek humor of the youth-oriented B-pictures cranked out in the '50s and '60s by renowned low-budget exploitation mogul Roger Corman (who gave many a hungry young filmmaker, including the creators of this film, their start in the biz), and of the noisy, anarchic energy of '70s punk rock, as personified by the inimitable Ramones. In the words of the maestros' beach-blanket-buzz-saw title anthem, this movie is "Fun, fun, oh baby, fun, fun..." --Jim Emerson for amazon.com [...]

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