Not bad...not great either

Rating: Null/10 (8 March 2000)

I just finished watching "Detroit Rock City". First of all, I must say it was better than I expected. I didn't know it was going to rely so much on physical comedy. At first this bothered me, then I got used to it. It reminded me a lot of "Rock & Roll High School" in that aspect (although it is far inferior to the Ramones MASTERPIECE...that's right...MASTERPIECE!!!! LONG LIVE ROGER CORMAN!!). Both movies meld Rock n' Roll fantasy and reality together. Initially I was expecting a "Dazed and Confused" rip-off, but luckinly the only obvious lift was the Trip character who was pretty much a copy of Slater from the Linkletter film. I'm not quite sure where all the Catholic bashing came from, I thought it was very extremely misdirected. The whole Mother character was rather stupid also. The other three leads more than made up for the lack of a coherent script and some rather silly plot devices. The kid who played Jam was very enjoyable and I really wanted to get to know his character more. Edward Norton and the other guy showed a lot of enthusiasm. They looked like they had a lot of fun making this movie. The whole ticket search part of this movie reminded me Zemickis' wonderful "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" which chronicles five kid's looking for Beatles tickets in Feb. '64 for the Ed Sullivan show.
The biggest surprise was seeing Melanie Lynskey as Beth. I absolutely fell in love with her in "Heavenly Creatures" and had no idea she was in this movie. Hopefully she will show up in more movies in the future.
Anyway, if you have nothing better to do and want to see a pretty good Rock Comedy, you could do worse than this movie. On the other hand if you haven't seen the other movies I mention earlier, see them first.