Product: Filth to Fury [VHS]
Rating: 5.0
The Band That Broke The Laws Of Physics...
"What you've seen in any documentary about any band before or since is how great and wonderful everything is. Its not the truth of it; its hell, its hard, its horrible, its enjoyable to a small degree, but if you know what you're doing it for, you'll tolerate all that. Because the work, at the end of the day, is what matters. We managed to offend all the people we were f***ing fed up with"Thus intones one Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon) over a credit sequence which emulates the opening of the legendary film version of Oliver's "Richard III" - and Lydon knows of which he speaks because as the teenage front-man of "The Sex Pistols", probably the singularly most reviled and misunderstood band of all time, he certainly had it harder than most.To my mind, there's no two ways about it - "The Sex Pistols" are THE band that broke a fundamental law of physics by literally creating something out of the nothing of economic, social and cultural poverty that was England in the mid-seventies. And in this film, which remains probably the best music documentary ever made (and my personal favourite of all time), you get to hear, in their own words, how they charted a notorious course from being four disparate, penniless teenagers hanging around a rubber-ware shop on the King's Road to being banned from playing in the UK and pursued around the US by the CIA and FBI because they were considered such a threat to the establishment.Listening to Lydon, Cook, Jones, Matlock and Vicious (in absentia) recounting their tale in silhouette over a wealth of material cobbled together from the films "DOA" and "The Great Rock And Rock Swindle", as well as hours of never before seen archive footage, gives you a devastatingly honest insight into not only the times and circumstances that formed them, but also the morass of scumbags, groupies, hangers-on and imbeciles that populate the gristle-mill of the music industry to this day.One gets the impression that Julien Temple, who previously directed the Malcolm MacLaren propaganda exercise, "The Great Rock And Roll Swindle", is almost undertaking an act of atonement with this film and he wisely chooses to forego overt directorial flourishes in favour of just letting the parties involved speak for themselves.Alternately hysterically funny, genuinely touching and occasionally chilling (Vicious' final words to camera are haunting), as a film it is never anything less than fascinating. And as strange as it may sound, I personally find it to be one of the most energizing and positive pieces of cinema that I've ever seen. I watch my copy regularly and would recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone despairing at the state of their lives - because if four council estate kids with nothing but a shed-load of anger (which really `is' an energy, when properly channeled) can change the world in their own shambolic way, then you can learn a lot from their example, whatever your age.