The camera never lies
With the opening of the Sydney Film Festival this week, Andrew P Street pretends that he's a panel of experts and holds his own private Music In Film Awards. You're invited to fill up the cheap seats.
Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight... Nigel Tufnel - lead guitar
Most film awards are endless litanies of achievement, patting people on the back for their brave choices and unique artistic vision whilst also giving them a welcome opportunity to give shout-outs to their peeps. Fortunately rock films offer many alternative opportunities, such as showing why musicians are so often better heard than seen, as the following categories reveal.
Most Uncomfortably Revealing Rockumentary:
Dig! (2004)
The Pixies could have easily taken this category with 2006's loudQUIETloud, except that they more or less kept Kim Deal out of camera range thereby preventing her from reflecting too deeply on the fierce relationship between herself and Charles "Black Francis" Thompson. But that said, they'd have to had an on-camera knife fight to beat the comprehensive self-destruction on display in Ondi Timoner's doco Dig!: watch as the Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe kicks a punter in the face during a solo show, sacks his band midway through a label showcase and generally sabotages his entire career, while friends-turned-bitter-enemies The Dandy Warhols go from strength to strength in the background.
Most Career-Slaughtering Ego-Trip:
Cool As Ice (1991)
Well, 2002's 8 Mile falls at the first hurdle, since Eminem did a perfectly decent job playing... um, himself. In case you think that's an easy task, it's worth noting that 50 Cent had huge trouble capturing the subtleties of his character, a chap known as "50 Cent", in 2005's Get Rich Or Die Trying. Mariah Carey managed to crawl out from beneath the wreckage of 2001's Glitter, to the surprise of just about everyone on the planet, but the winner is definitely the powerful story of one man's journey from the mean streets to the depths of Hicksville - showing a range of fly threads every step of the way, including a particularly fly jacket embroidered with phrases like "Sex me up" and "danger deep". Ah, Vanilla Ice: never has one man's exhortation to "drop the zero and get with the hero" sounded so powerful. Odd how his career took a nosedive immediately thereafter.
Most Quotable Music Comedy Film:
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
A hard-fought category, this. 2003's A Mighty Wind took an early tumble, as did The Comic Strip's Bad News Tour (1983) and More Bad News (1988), both of which are eliminated on a technicality since they were for television. Honorable mention should go to the massively underrated 1994 hip hop mockumentary Fear Of A Black Hat ("The black man was sensitive long before Alan Alda"), but it finally came down to two contenders. The runner up is Eric Idle's still-hilarious 1978 Beatles parody The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (although that film's genius had a lot to do with the bang-on pastiches composed by former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band leader Neil Innes), but let's face it: only one film gave us "These go to eleven," "None more black" and "You can't really dust for vomit."
Best documdrama featuring people pretending to be members of Joy Division:
It's a tie! Control (2007)/24 Hour Party People (2002)
In the hotly-contested field of pretending to be Joy Division, two films stand tall: the Ian Curtis biopic Control (which gets bonus nods for the actors actually learning how to play their instruments for the live sequences) and the rather more knockabout 24 Hour Party People, the playful biopic of the life and times of Factory Records' supremo Tony Wilson - which focussed less on Joy Division and more on Steve Coogan being awesome in the Wilson role. Peter Hook turned up in the background of a scene featuring his dramatic doppelganger too, which gets bonus points for postmodernism.
Most Freakishly Baffling Piece Of Musical Art Wank:
Arena: An Absurd Notion (1985)
While there is no shortage of music films that are exercises in complete wank (the 1974 rock'n'roll update of Phantom Of The Opera that is Brian de Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise, Ken Russell's insane 1975 effort Lisztomania with The Who's Roger Daltrey as the composer Franz Liszt, the 1980 Rocky Horror-wannabe The Apple, last year's multi-storied Bob Dylan-inspired fever dream I'm Not There) - the winner is Duran Duran's vanity project. It's a vague sequel to Barberella with Milo O'Shea reprising his role as Dr Duran Duran, brought to earth by the power of the so-named band, and manages to drag despite running for a scant 58 minutes. John Taylor looks absolutely superb, though. Oh, those cheekbones...
Best attempt to destroy the rich legacy of The Beatles:
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
Every so often someone gets it in their head to bring The Beatles down a peg or two, whether it's by stringing a terrible, terrible plot around a series of characters from the songs (2007's Across The Universe), getting some bad actors with implausible facial hair to play a bunch of Beatles songs (1981's Beatlemania) or transforming the story of two strong and highly-flawed personalities into a saccharine soap opera (the lame-duck 1985 telemovie John & Yoko: A Love Story). But 1978's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - starring, naturally, The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton as Beatles-substitutes The Hendersons (geddit?) and Billy Shears (no, really, geddit?) - is universally recognised not simply as one of the worst uses of The Beatles' music, not just one of the worst films ever, but also one of the worst things created by humans. And that's an achievement worth recognising in itself.