Rocktober: 'Hard Core Logo' (1996)

Often touted as the punk-rock answer to This Is Spinal Tap, Bruce McDonald's mockumentary Hard Core Logo is a lot darker and more serious than Rob Reiner's heavy metal satire, and its mix of goofy humor and bleak character study doesn't always fit together smoothly. There aren't a whole lot of full-on laughs in the story of an influential but forgotten Canadian punk band getting together for a short reunion tour, but the low-key humor can be satisfying, especially when it's pointing out, as Spinal Tap did effectively, the disconnect between the band members' conception of their own importance and the reality.

It's easy to laugh at the delusional self-conceptions of Hard Core Logo frontman Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon) and guitarist Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie), both of whom fancy themselves the main creative force behind the band and important musicians in their own right. But it's harder to buy into the deeper emotions that McDonald tries to sell, the pathos of these aging rockers whose potential windows of stardom have passed them by. The mockumentary format precludes showing the most raw, intimate moments, so when Joe takes drastic, violent action at the end of the movie, it seems to come out of nowhere just to provide a shock moment for the movie to end on.

The other two band members are even goofier than Joe and Billy, which makes their serious moments even less convincing. It can be fun to watch the antics of spacey bassist John Oxenberger (John Pyper-Ferguson) and dim-witted drummer Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson), but their subplots don't fit in as well with the overall narrative. John in particular ends up in such a dark place that his earlier comic-relief moments are sort of soured. The characters overall seem to hit rock bottom as the movie ends, kind of knocking the wind out of the comedy, although the final title cards bring things back to a more lighthearted place. It leaves things on a puzzling, unresolved note, which is strangely fitting for this odd little movie.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Thirteen' (2003)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Okay, to be perfectly honest I've been pretty busy putting together all these Rocktober posts and kind of ran out of time to write up a new Triskaidekaphilia entry for this month. But fear not! I've had this piece in reserve for just such an occasion. Since the Las Vegas Weekly online archives now only go back to late 2003, my original review of Thirteen is no longer available online. So here's my take on the movie that ran in print in Las Vegas Weekly on September 18, 2003, now reproduced for online posterity:

Any movie that arrives in theaters with the kind of crushing hype that’s behind Thirteen is bound to have some backlash. For Thirteen -- the supposedly “shockingly realistic” tale of drug use, petty crime and illicit sex among junior high girls -- both praise and criticism can appear to have an ulterior motive, as critics of the film may be accused of being hopelessly out of touch, and its supporters of being taken in by a desire to appear youthful and edgy.

The question of whether Thirteen is a wake-up call to parents, or teens, or whomever it’s intended to be a wake-up call for, is an easy one to answer: It’s only a wake-up call if you were never a teenager, never met a teenager, and perhaps have never heard of teenagers, no matter how old you are. It’s no more a wake-up call than anything starring a Beverly Hills, 90210 alum that you might find on Lifetime. It’s moralistic, broad and over-simplified, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie.

The premise is as basic as any made-for-TV drama: Good girl Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) meets bad girl Evie (Nikki Reed). Evie introduces Tracy to drugs, alcohol, shoplifting and sexual experimentation, alienating her from her wholesome friends and her hard-working hairdresser single mother (Holly Hunter). It’s a standard cautionary tale, albeit one with striking performances and a gritty, jittery style courtesy of director and co-writer Catherine Hardwicke. The other writer on the film is co-star Reed, now 15, but only the titular age when she concocted the story, reportedly based on events in her own life.

For all the credibility Reed’s influence lends, there isn’t a whole lot of new ground covered here. The evil Evie (geddit?) is the precise opposite of “shockingly realistic,” a cold, manipulative cypher who’s more like the villain in a horror movie, seducing Tracy to the dark side (which takes, like, two seconds), than an actual person. There are disturbing implications, too, to the fact that Tracy’s transformation into a “bad girl” leads her to lesbianism and interracial sex, silently equated with the drugs and the crime. Wood (last seen as the blindingly pure heroine of family flick Little Secrets) is wonderful as Tracy, despite having to cycle through every possible teenage malady (we get self-mutilation and an eating disorder thrown in, too, for kicks) in the space of 90 minutes. Reed’s performance is better than her script, and the film is ultimately watchable and admirably raw, if not the profound revelation it’s been hyped as.

Rocktober: 'Gimme Shelter' (1970)

Directed by brothers Albert and David Maysles along with Charlotte Zwerin, Gimme Shelter is known as the documentary about the tragedy at the Rolling Stones' free concert at the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco in 1969, an event that was perceived as the end of the innocence for the free love/flower child era, the dark counterpoint to the hippie exuberance of Woodstock. The movie is very much about that event and those themes, but it's also a pretty electrifying look at the Rolling Stones' live show, since it started merely as a document of their 1969 concert tour, not a deliberate look into the seedy underbelly of the counterculture.

The movie's first performances are taken from the Stones' concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and they're completely captivating, with the band at the height of its musical prowess and showmanship. Zwerin and the Maysles frame the movie with scenes of the Stones members watching the earlier footage, and one of the first scenes has Mick Jagger listening to a radio program discussing the aftermath of Altamont, so the specter of that disaster hangs over the entire film. But the filmmakers allow for some straight-up rock n' roll exuberance to get things going, and it's thrilling to watch even with the awareness of what's to come later.

That awareness casts a sort of ominous dread over the scenes of the Stones' handlers trying to negotiate a location for the concert, as well as the early parts of the day, when things are already clearly going wrong during the acts leading up to the Stones' headline performance. The filmmakers don't provide any broader context, and they don't offer any judgment, instead just showing in a direct, unvarnished way how things progressed from amiable chaos to dark anarchy. The Stones themselves seem oblivious to how things could have gone so wrong, and even as they're watching the footage later, they seem almost in shock. The movie doesn't exactly blame them for what went wrong, but the final freeze frame of Jagger does seem to indict them at least for being naive. In the end Gimme Shelter isn't about providing answers, merely showing one band at two extremes, captivating and transporting an audience at the beginning, and totally losing control of another audience by the end.

Rocktober: 'A Hard Day's Night' (1964)

For a movie created to cash in on a hot pop-music phenomenon, A Hard Day's Night has proved surprisingly enduring and influential; it's hard to imagine people caring about something like Justin Bieber: Never Say Never or the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads 40 years from now except as an object of kitsch or ridicule. But Richard Lester's goofy, energetic movie about a day in the life of The Beatles has become a genuine classic, appreciated by critics and scholars as much as it is treasured by Beatles fans. For me, though, it was one of those movies that is more admirable than enjoyable, and while I can understand the way that Lester presaged caper comedies and music videos with his techniques here, it felt a little like watching a time capsule whose relevance has faded.

Although none of them ever went on to significant acting careers, all of the Beatles are perfectly effective here playing themselves, or at least movie-friendly versions thereof. The bare-bones plot features nothing more than the band members traveling to a TV studio and preparing to tape a live appearance, and is mostly just an excuse to string together slapstick set pieces and a whole lot of musical numbers that indeed resemble what would later become the dominant music-video form. Audiences in 1964 were probably just happy to see The Beatles doing anything at all onscreen, and the scenes of the four lads sitting around and goofing off have a fun, relaxed feel that sells them as lighthearted regular guys (even if that wasn't an entirely accurate portrayal).

But there's so little structure, and so much of the appeal is based on the four musicians simply showing up, that the whole thing felt a little too tossed-off to me. There are inside jokes that were probably very satisfying to moviegoers of the time but were completely lost on me, and while all the music is excellent, the performance segments often add very little to its presentation. I was honestly itching for the fast-forward button at times during those portions of the movie. The comedy bits are mildly amusing, but the only scene that really made me laugh was the quick montage of the band members answering inane questions from the press, which effectively satirizes both celebrity journalism and the evasive non-answers that celebrities tend to give to journalists.

Lester deserves credit for bringing inventive filmmaking to what could have been a disposable product akin to a Beatles lunch box, and the band members deserve credit for trusting a real filmmaker to shepherd their screen debut. There's a clear French New Wave influence in the way that Lester has cheeky youths run amok amid staid cultural gatekeepers, and an awareness of the significance of the band that shows remarkable foresight. In hindsight, however, a lot of that stuff is pretty obvious and dated, and while I'm glad that A Hard Day's Night paved the way for future innovations, on its own it's now mostly underwhelming.

Rocktober: 'Hype!' (1996)

It takes 35 minutes of Doug Pray's grunge documentary Hype! before Nirvana makes an appearance, and that's not a flaw: Pray diligently lays out the history of the Seattle music scene before diving into the grunge frenzy of the early '90s brought on by Nirvana, and indeed the hype of the title is less important to him than the genuine community in the city's music scene that existed before the manufactured attention. Hype! was made while grunge was still near the height of its popularity, so Pray doesn't really get a chance to reflect back on what it meant over the long term, even though some of his interview subjects are already lamenting a sort of lost innocence. Instead he shows clearly how the music scene in Seattle was stranger and more diverse than the mainstream media gave it credit for, and how its initial underdog status contributed to the creative freedom that allowed it to become an international sensation.

Pray interviews Eddie Vedder and Soundgarden's Matt Cameron and Kim Thayil, but many of the most high-profile players in the grunge movement don't show up except in performance footage (no one from Nirvana or Alice in Chains speaks on camera). While that might seem like a shortcoming at first, it allows Pray to open up his movie to the beloved Seattle bands that never achieved huge success, or the ones that were swept up in a major-label signing bonanza only to be unceremoniously tossed aside. There's some pretty great performance footage of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Nirvana, but it's just as fascinating to see performances from all the obscure Seattle bands you may have never heard of, which give a great sense of the camaraderie within the scene.

Given the time frame in which it was made, Hype! could easily have been a quickie grunge cash-in of the type that Pray mocks in the movie (the story of how a Sub Pop employee made up a whole set of grunge "slang" for a New York Times reporter is great). Instead the movie exhibits a genuine love for the Seattle music scene almost in spite of how big it got, and a healthy skepticism about the grunge phenomenon that never turns into cynicism. Even though much of it is outdated now, Hype! is still one of the definitive accounts of the alt-rock of the '90s.

Rocktober: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains' (1981)

Here we have sort of the flip side of Rock 'n' Roll High School: While that movie was all about the giddy abandon of punk rock, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is more about its dark side, about the way that unfocused rebellion can easily be co-opted into cheap marketing, and how the naive teenagers doing the rebelling can end up jaded and used. A famous failure in its initial release, Stains barely made it into a handful of theaters and was never released on video, instead building up a cult following via late-night cable airings and occasional midnight engagements in the '80s and '90s. It was released on DVD a couple of years ago, and it's one of those movies that was probably cooler when it was really hard to see.

Still, there's a lot to be said for the way that Stains anticipates the explosion of female rock/pop artists in the '80s, and its value as a rallying cry for women in rock is important. Diane Lane (all of 15 at the time) is excellent as sullen teenager Corinne Burns, who turns her undefined rage at the world into a fashion statement and a musical movement, only to have it all fall apart remarkably quickly. The movie's opening scene, which just focuses on Lane's face as Corinne lays out her nihilistic worldview to a TV reporter, is mesmerizing, but the rest of the movie is too much of a mess to live up to it.

The Stains, which include Corinne, her sister and her cousin (played by a young Laura Dern), have no musical talent and no clue about how showbusiness works, but they stumble into opening for a has-been glam rocker and then an angry punk band, whose genuine anti-establishment message they casually co-opt. The group goes from being booed off stage because they can't play to being adored by thousands of fans to being booed off stage because they've become sellouts in the course of what seems like about a week, and the movie's story feels very rushed and poorly planned. Yet there's excitement in watching the Stains evolve onstage, especially in Corinne's angry monologue about the expectations placed on teenage girls. Stains is a better historical curiosity than it is a movie, but that doesn't mean it isn't occasionally powerful.

Rocktober: 'Rock 'N' Roll High School' (1979)

There's a sense of fun to Rock 'N' Roll High School that is a hallmark of the best teen movies, showing the exuberance of adolescence, when everything seems so meaningful and important, and every experience is new and exciting, even though it's been experienced millions of times by millions of other people. Not that this movie has anything serious on its mind, but its relentless goofiness does capture something real about being a teenager and being in high school, and it's remarkably respectful of teen lives and teen interests, without a hint of the condescension that so often shows up in movies about "youth culture" made by clueless adult filmmakers. Director and co-writer Allan Arkush really just thought the Ramones were awesome, and decided it would be awesome if he treated them like teen idols. That enthusiasm comes through in every moment of the film.

It helps that Arkush has a fabulous cast to support his kooky vision as well, including the wonderful P.J. Soles as rock rebel Riff Randell, who idolizes the Ramones and is absurdly in love with Joey Ramone. Her acts of rebellion are pretty tame (well, until the movie's climax), but she's so passionate about asserting her own identity that every song she blasts on the school P.A. seems like an anthem for a revolution. As great as Soles was, I was even more taken with Dey Young as Riff's nerdy best friend Karen Rambeau, with her oversized glasses and penchant for science experiments (maybe it's just that I have more of a thing for the nerd girls). I love that Arkush doesn't make a big deal over the fact that the punk rocker and the science nerd are best friends, or that the nerd has a huge crush on the star football player, or that the football player in turn is crushing on the punk rocker. His version of high school is all about the kids versus the adults, not the kids versus each other, and while cliques of course do exist, I think there's a lot more fluidity than most teen movies acknowledge, and this movie navigates that effortlessly.

And on the adult side, the movie has Mary Woronov, wonderfully devilish as the evil school principal. Her vast experience in campy horror movies makes her the perfect candidate to play this sadistic taskmaster, and she's every bit as entertaining as the teenagers are. Arkush also makes room for a teacher who isn't an insufferable hardass, and Paul Bartel has loads of fun as the stuffy music teacher who opens up to the joys of the Ramones.

As for the Ramones: They are amusingly awkward in how terrible they are as actors and even as pantomimes (half the time the lip-syncing and instrument-playing barely matches up with the music). But they are also perfect objects of fascination in this sort of alternate universe, and the songs in the movie are just as fun and exciting to listen to now as they were in 1979. It's great that the movie didn't latch onto some awful bubblegum fad act that would end up seeming dated; the integrity of the band reinforces the integrity of the characters. Also, the perpetuation of the illusion that the Ramones could read music thoroughly amused me. This movie may have seemed like just another Roger Corman assembly-line product in 1979, but it's stood the test of time as one of the best teen comedies ever made.

Rocktober: 'Heavy Metal in Baghdad' (2007)

Rock movies often try to convey the idea that music is so vital that it can be literally the only thing that some people have to live for, the only thing in their lives that has meaning. That's usually because they've got some emotional trauma or because their family members and peers, like, totally don't understand them, but rarely is there the sense that music really is a life-and-death thing, that it's the only thing keeping people from death or annihilation. The one thing that the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad does well is convey just how vital the music of Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda is to its members' lives.

Unfortunately, that's about the only thing this disjointed, clumsy documentary does well, and it's too bad, because the story of Acrassicauda is fascinating, and it's one that I was looking forward to learning more about. The self-proclaimed only metal band in Iraq started during the Saddam Hussein regime and struggled for respect and tolerance even then, but after the American invasion and subsequent chaos, the band members literally had nothing else to hold on to. Eventually their music became the means to save their lives, to publicize their plight and get them out of the country and to relative comfort and safety (since the movie was released, they've relocated to the U.S. and recorded an EP).

Directors Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi (a co-founder of Vice magazine and the movie's omnipresent narrator and host) spend way too much time on their own plight, their difficulties getting to Baghdad and navigating around the city, their half-formed observations about the cost of the U.S. occupation and the crisis of Iraqi refugees. They highlight important issues but in a very haphazard, superficial way, and fare much better when focusing on the individual struggles of the four band members. There are far too many scenes showing Alvi waiting around or being driven somewhere or pontificating about the terrible consequences of U.S. military presence in Iraq. It may simply be that there wasn't enough Acrassicauda footage for a whole feature film, but in that case they should have just made a TV special instead.

The band's story is far from finished, of course, and the movie ends somewhat abruptly, with even its closing title cards not telling the full story of what happened next (and is still happening). As a narrative, Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a frustrating failure, and it isn't even a great showcase for Acrassicauda's (decent but unexceptional) music. At times, though, it captures that all-consuming power of music. Watching young Iraqi fans moshing and headbanging at one of the only concerts Acrassicauda was ever able to play in Iraq, you get a real and immediate sense of the deep meaning of the music. It's too bad that the rest of the movie is so uninspired.

Rocktober: 'Brothers of the Head' (2006)

Mockumentaries tend to be comedic for obvious reasons, because the disconnect between what we expect out of "reality" and what can be created in a movie is ripe for humor; the same goes for horror, probably the second most popular mockumentary genre. The point is to contrast realism with something patently fake, whether it's an absurd comedic situation or some sort of supernatural phenomenon. So a mockumentary that tries strenuously to seem actually real seems almost beside the point, but Brothers of the Head does a perfect job of demonstrating that, in the right hands, the format can make for compelling, affecting drama.

Actual documentarians Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) meticulously re-create the look and pacing of a music documentary in their account of fictional short-lived 1970s rock band The Bang Bang, notable for being fronted by a pair of conjoined twins (played impressively by real-life non-conjoined twins Luke and Harry Treadaway). They mix "present-day" talking-head interviews with "vintage" footage of the band's early rehearsals, recording sessions and club gigs, after the twins have been plucked from obscurity by a ruthless impresario and basically pressed into rock-music slavery.

The narrative arc of the film (based on a novel by science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss) features a lot of standard Behind the Music stuff, including the brothers' indulgences in drugs and groupies, but the conjoined-twins element adds an extra twinge of tragedy, and the mockumentary format creates an air of mystery that wouldn't necessarily exist in a more conventional film. The group's music (played live by the actors) sounds authentically of its time (1975, just as punk was about to emerge), and the visual style is remarkably accurate to the look of period filmmaking. There are times when it looks a little too inappropriately modern, but overall the effect is remarkably convincing, drawing you in to the story and allowing for imagination to fill in the gaps (which look less like shortcomings and more like natural constraints of having limited firsthand footage).

Fulton and Pepe can't resist throwing in a few arty touches that look a little out of place in the documentary format, and their ending is more ambiguous than a real documentary, with years of hindsight to draw on, would likely be. But so much else about the movie is eerily convincing, so much so that the little details that actually have a grain of truth (like a 1930s conjoined-twin sister act whose song The Bang Bang ironically covers) fit seamlessly into the fictional framework.

Rocktober: 'The Wall' (1982)

More a feature-length music video than a movie (and no doubt better appreciated in an altered state), Pink Floyd's The Wall, directed by Alan Parker, can be extremely frustrating if you look to it for narrative coherence or well-defined characters or a plot that you can follow. But if you just get lost in the surreal images, appreciating the excellent, nonstop Pink Floyd soundtrack and the vivid, evocative visuals, it's easy to enjoy the movie for what it is, not what people might have expected it to be before it came out.

And The Wall isn't a musical, or a rock opera, but it isn't a concert or performance film, either. Unlike most music videos, The Wall never features Pink Floyd appearing on camera at all (in the early phases of its development, it was intended to utilize concert footage, but that footage was never used). It's a sort of abstract illustration of the music and the lyrics of Roger Waters, revealing that while the album The Wall (released in 1979) may be generally thought of as a "concept album," its concept is a lot more, er, conceptual than narrative.

You can construct a plot of sorts from The Wall if you try hard enough, although it's not really necessary. Bob Geldof plays the main character, a self-destructive rock star haunted by his past, specifically the death of his father in World War II. The movie mixes scenes from his childhood with a depiction of his mental breakdown as an adult, telling the story in an indirect way. Trying to connect the dots of the plot is extremely unsatisfying, though, and the movie is much better experienced as a series of visceral, immersive moments (there's virtually no dialogue). Each song on the soundtrack gets its own mini-movie, and while Waters' lyrics sometimes match up fairly literally with what's happening onscreen, more often there's just a general mood that's shared between the music and the visuals, and if you get in tune with it, the viewing experience can be very rewarding. Plus, the animated sequences by Gerald Scarfe contain plenty of iconic images on their own, and could easily be enjoyed divorced entirely from the movie as a whole.

Maybe I'm just more forgiving here because I really like Pink Floyd's music (especially The Wall), but I think that despite its excesses and indulgences, The Wall is a striking and inventive film. It's not an approach that would work for just any band or any piece of music, but for an album as epic and weird as The Wall itself, the movie ends up being the perfect match.

Rocktober: 'Stop Making Sense' (1984)

Frequently cited as one of the best concert films ever made, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense is just that: a concert film. There's no backstage footage, no supplemental interviews, no look at life on the road or the creation or recording of the music played onstage. It's a pretty straight run-through of the Talking Heads' 1984 live show, culled from three nights at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles. The question, then, is what makes this a great movie and not merely an entertaining souvenir for Talking Heads fans?

Honestly, at times while I was watching the movie, I couldn't really say. Obviously Demme has a great deal of filmmaking skill, and he's essentially pursued parallel careers as a director of narrative films, including a number of serious Hollywood prestige films (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Beloved), and as a documentarian, including several concert films (among them collaborations with Neil Young and Robyn Hitchcock). So he's doing more here than just plopping some cameras down and letting the band play. From the moment the movie opens with a close-up on the feet of Heads frontman David Byrne as he walks onstage, you can tell that Demme is taking care with how he frames the performance, and Byrne, who designed the stage show, is also clearly conscious of how everything looks on camera.

So we get an elaborate, protracted opening, with each of the band's four core members successively appearing on the first four songs, then joined by several supplemental musicians. The stage, too, is being set up as the band plays, with stagehands bringing out the instruments at the same time as the musicians emerge. Later as video projections and lighting design come into play, Demme maximizes their potential as cinematic elements (he presents almost all of "Once in a Lifetime" in one unbroken shot of Byrne, his face eerily illuminated from below). Demme also refrains from showing all but the most indistinct blur of the audience until the very last song, making it a sort of catharsis to finally see the exuberant fans dancing in the aisles.

At the same time, much of the movie really is just watching the band play, and while I mostly enjoyed it (I'm not a huge Talking Heads fan, but they're clearly talented), I didn't quite see it as the cinematic revelation it was made out to be upon its initial release. Maybe there are just too many undistinguished concert "movies" clogging DVD shelves these days, or maybe the music didn't grab me enough. Either way, while Stop Making Sense may be a cut above your average live-show keepsake, I don't think it quite qualifies as a great movie.

Rocktober: 'Performance' (1970)

No one knew what to make of Performance in 1970 (or in 1968, when it was made and then shelved by Warner Bros.), and although it's since become a beloved cult classic, I can't say I really know what to make of it now. It's unmistakably a Nicolas Roeg film (it was Roeg's directorial debut, co-directed with painter/screenwriter Donald Cammell): Within the first minute you get explicit sex, arty montage editing and off-putting sound design. There's a plot, but it's subordinate to the barrage of surreal images and the philosophical rambling and the (very good) music. I can't say that I much liked Performance, but it was always interesting to watch.

This is a rock movie because it stars The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger, and because apparently the studio expected a light romp capitalizing on a rock star's fame. When Roeg and Cammell turned in this baffling, aggressive, explicit art project, the studio freaked out and held it back for two years, only to release it to terrible reviews. It's not hard to see why, since Performance is deliberately obtuse and alienating, with characters who are inscrutable and often annoying. The story is ostensibly about a gangster (James Fox) on the run who hides out by renting a room from a reclusive, washed-up rock star (Jagger) and his two live-in lovers. Over time, he gets sucked into their hedonistic world, but even before that the movie engages in obtuse stylistic diversions, and gangster Chas is just as mysterious a character as Turner and his ladies, behaving petulantly in front of his superiors and engaging in inexplicable whimsical behavior. Once he shacks up with Turner, he really lets himself cut loose.

Although it has an undeniable artistry to it, Performance often plays like a parody of the drug-fueled excesses of the '60s, and a lot of its pseudo-profound moments are just silly. The best part of the movie is when Roeg and Cammell give up any pretense of plot or dialogue and just shoot what is essentially a proto-music video, for Jagger's excellent song "Memo From Turner." That stretch of a few minutes shows the filmmakers capturing every bit of Jagger's rock-star allure, while throwing in plenty of weird, disturbing images along the way. A full-on musical might have been more satisfying than this confounding but often striking film.

Rocktober: 'The Girl Can't Help It' (1956)

Frank Tashlin started his career as an animator, and appropriately enough he directs live action a bit like it's the zany animation of the Warner Bros. shorts he worked on. The Girl Can't Help It is an amusing if sometimes sluggish comedy about a washed-up talent manager hired by a gangster to turn his girlfriend into a pop star. Naturally, the manager and the girlfriend fall in love, and the gangster is none too happy about it. The predictable story is paper-thin, but the appeal of The Girl Can't Help It comes from Tashlin's energetic style, which includes throwing in loads of performances by popular rock musicians of the time (Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, etc.), as well as the vibrant colors and sometimes goofy set pieces that recall his animation work.

Star Jayne Mansfield is also essentially a human cartoon, one of the obvious precursors of Jessica Rabbit, and although she's known for not being an especially strong actress, she's perfect in the part of bubbly, naive Jerri Jordan, who really wants to settle down and get married instead of becoming a singing sensation. Tashlin makes good use of Mansfield's, er, assets, and her somewhat confused demeanor and little-girl voice are perfect for the part of Jerri. Tom Ewell brings more grounded emotional realism to his role as manager Tom Miller, and Tashlin stages a wonderful sequence in which Tom imagines his ex singing to him in various outfits from various rooms of his house as he plays one of her records.

The musical performances, which are often inserted almost in their entirety with little plot relevance, are seriously impressive, and show an energy and intensity to early rock n' roll. Vincent's performance of "Be-Bop-a-Lula" is particularly electrifying, and Tashlin does a very good job of capturing the excitement and newness of rock n' roll without condescending to it, even though some of his characters clearly view the music with disdain. The Girl Can't Help It takes so many elements that people would have regarded as superficial (rock music, Mansfield, the influence of animation) and weaves them into something lively and very timely.

Rocktober: '24 Hour Party People' (2002)

Michael Winterbottom never met a film genre he didn't want to take on, and oftentimes he blends unobtrusively into whatever style he's decided to adopt. For 24 Hour Party People, his biopic on Factory Records founder Tony Wilson and chronicle of the Manchester, England, music scene, Winterbottom steadfastly refuses to follow the conventions of either the biopic or the rock movie, and ends up with a much more rewarding and entertaining film for it. I feel like I never know what I'm going to get, quality-wise, when I sit down to watch a Winterbottom film, but 24 Hour Party People is one of his most entertaining and creative efforts.

You can see the excitement that Winterbottom gets from this music in every scene he shoots of musicians performing, something he does with great immediacy and style (the live musical performances were the only redeeming elements of his tedious art-porn movie 9 Songs). He captures the energy and danger of early Joy Division performances with much more exuberance than in Anton Corbijn's meticulous, deliberate Ian Curtis biopic Control, and he successfully conveys the chaos and giddiness of the Happy Mondays' live show, as an extension of the band's drug use and debauched behavior offstage.

But despite the character's protestations to the contrary, the movie is really about Tony Wilson, as played wonderfully by Steve Coogan. Coogan, who always has an air of unearned arrogance about him, is perfect for the part of the blowhard huckster who poured every ounce of himself into promoting the music and the hometown he loved, all while making virtually no money from it. Coogan frequently breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience, glossing over stock biopic elements and making Wilson and the audience into co-conspirators in the grand Manchester adventure.

Winterbottom, too, gleefully smashes through expectations with scenes like Wilson imagining God giving him advice about album releases, or the members of the Happy Mondays poisoning a bunch of pigeons, shot partially from a pigeon's perspective. This anarchic sense of invention fits perfectly with the story of the unchecked growth of the Manchester music scene, and does as much to capture the feel of the time period as the set design and wardrobe and dialogue do. Sometimes the movie sacrifices coherence for style, and as someone not all that familiar with the music I occasionally had a hard time keeping minor characters straight. But the overriding sense is one of excitement and discovery, resulting in a movie every bit as daring and fun as the music it chronicles.

Rocktober: Introduction

All across the country this month, radio stations will be rolling out their "Rocktober" branding, with concert events and "two for Tuesday" gimmicks and other cheesy promotions. Since I have no aversion to cheesy promotion, I'm also declaring Rocktober this month at Signal Bleed, with a whole month of posts about rock movies. Starting later today, I'll be posting about rock documentaries (or rockumentaries, if you prefer) and narrative films from the '50s through the '00s, with a mix of hits and album tracks (that is, classics and lesser-known films). Obviously "rock" is a loosely defined term, but in making my selections I tried to keep it to the core of the genre, which means no movies about jazz or country or hip-hop or electronic dance music. Just good old-fashioned rock n' roll, captured on film.

'Brickleberry'

I'm certainly no fan of Family Guy (or the works of Seth MacFarlane in general), but even someone who loves his particular brand of humor will probably find blatant Family Guy rip-off Brickleberry tiresome. It's every bit as aggressive and irritating as the worst of MacFarlane's work, plus it's completely lazy in the way it copies the visual style of Family Guy, as well as several of that show's character types, most notably the condescending talking animal (a bear named Malloy, voiced by Daniel Tosh, who is also one of the show's producers). Lead character Steve, a ranger at the titular national park, is reminiscent of Peter Griffin, and the rest of the characters are all one-note.

It's sort of amazing to watch the pilot for Brickleberry, which is is filled with tasteless jokes about Malloy getting raped by a stereotypical redneck, and realize that the rape jokes were actually toned down following Tosh's controversial clash with an audience member at one of his stand-up shows over a rape joke. If this represents a reduction in the amount of rape jokes, I don't even want to think about what the original version was like. Not that the rest of the jokes are any better; they're all unfunny efforts to shock the audience, based almost entirely on broad stereotypes. It's just endless empty vulgarity, not shocking so much as exhausting and pathetic. I think Seth MacFarlane's work is recycled hackery, but Brickleberry makes him look like a groundbreaking genius.

Premieres tonight at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.

'The Mob Doctor'

Two things that reliably succeed on network TV are medical dramas and crime dramas, so it was probably inevitable that some enterprising producers would combine the two in one of the most calculated, least interesting new shows of the season. The Mob Doctor is a mediocre medical drama crossed with a pretty ludicrous crime show, and the contrast between the two just highlights how untenable it all is. Star Jordana Spiro has enough charisma to make up for some of the rough spots, but even she can't entirely compensate for the terrible dialogue and heavy-handed, implausible plotting.

The idea of a young medical resident moonlighting as a back-alley doctor for criminals isn't necessarily a bad one; it could open up the typical medical procedural formula by providing two different kinds of cases to focus on. The first episode of The Mob Doctor opens that way, as Spiro's Dr. Grace Devlin deals with a criminal who's got a screwdriver wedged in his skull, and then heads over to her upscale hospital job. But the show quickly degenerates into trumped-up melodrama, as Grace clashes with a menacing mobster played by guest star Michael Rapaport, is ordered to kill one of her patients at the hospital and then makes a dangerous bargain with another mobster (William Forsythe) in order to keep her family safe.

The producers seem to think they're making the medical version of The Sopranos, but Grace's moral dilemmas are pretty laughable, and the shocking reveal at the end of the episode is obvious and lame. A simple medical procedural with mob elements might have been unexciting, but it could at least have been sort of effective. By reaching for something more grandiose, The Mob Doctor completely falls flat.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on Fox.