"Will you try to fucking wake up please?" Nancy nags as Sid murmurs incomprehensibly. "We wanna give him a good interview."
October 20, 2006 (Press Release) --
Deep into Lech Kowalski's canonical punk rock mid-mortem document D.O.A. (1980), the director sets his 16mm sights backstage on Nancy Spungen, whose nasal accent slurs partway from upper eastern seaboard to London's East End, and Sid Vicious, nodding off in sunglasses and swastika T-shirt. "Will you try to fucking wake up please?" Nancy nags as Sid murmurs incomprehensibly. "We wanna give him a good interview." The drawn-out moment pushes past the calculated finger-flipping transgressions of the Sex Pistols fan base chronicled earlier in the film: Spungen and Vicious aren't just anti-cool; they're painfully pathetic.
Other directors might have moved on to bigger concert pics after D.O.A. (which includes stunning live sets by the Pistols, X-Ray Spex, and others, many filmed on the sly), but Kowalski's Gringo (1987) expands this uncomfortable essence of drugged-up wretchedness into a semi-fictionalized picaresque of heroin addicts in an apocalyptic Alphabet City. Shot on real streets with non- actors but nonetheless looking like something out of The Warriors, Gringo contains vit?scenes nearly too gruesome to suffer an audience: needles stuck repeatedly into scrawny limbs, cascades of vomit hurling into a toilet, shithole apartments filled with grubby punks groping toward their next fix. Despite the stiffly hip synth soundtrack, this Jacob Riis like peep into an East Village past is enough to deglamorize the '80s forever.
Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by Ed Halter
Other directors might have moved on to bigger concert pics after D.O.A. (which includes stunning live sets by the Pistols, X-Ray Spex, and others, many filmed on the sly), but Kowalski's Gringo (1987) expands this uncomfortable essence of drugged-up wretchedness into a semi-fictionalized picaresque of heroin addicts in an apocalyptic Alphabet City. Shot on real streets with non- actors but nonetheless looking like something out of The Warriors, Gringo contains vit?scenes nearly too gruesome to suffer an audience: needles stuck repeatedly into scrawny limbs, cascades of vomit hurling into a toilet, shithole apartments filled with grubby punks groping toward their next fix. Despite the stiffly hip synth soundtrack, this Jacob Riis like peep into an East Village past is enough to deglamorize the '80s forever.
Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by Ed Halter
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