Review of The Filth and the Fury
Year: 2000 Reviewer: Chris Docker
I remember lying in bed one night many years back listening to John Peel on a small transistor radio with an earpiece and he said he had found a new record that was so good he was going to play it twice in a row - which he did, and then proceeded to play it a third time without a pause for any other records. The song was "Anarchy for the UK" and I thought at the time that this band was going to make quite a mark. This second quasi-documentary about the Sex Pistols from director Julien Temple attempts to show just how they went on to make that mark. The justification of the music as social phenomena is maybe a bit far-fetched in reality, but told convincingly enough. A better movie than the earlier "Sid and Nancy" or Temple's own"The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" - due in no small part to the amount of largely uninterrupted music by the band, brought together in a way that amplifies the emotional impact that raw, innovative rock and roll can have. The downside is that, at the end of the day, the characters in the Sex Pistols are neither interesting or likeable - their music seems more phenomenon than the outflowings of artistic creativity. A movie to enjoy while it's on, rather than to savour on the way home. Yet at least they will be remembered long after Julien Temple has gone. Temple only followed another's tune - whether McLaren's or the Pistols - yet he follows tunes but limply and fails to make the most of the material. Even the eternal hallowing is so counter to everything that the band supposedly stood for - the Pistols were fantastic in their time - now they are just archives. Temple, sadly, misses any opportunity to draw analogy with the present day.
Rating: 5/10
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