Sunday, November 11, 2007
Julian's Temple to Joe
Joe Strummer: The The Future is Unwritten is unwavering in its tone and presentation for nearly two hours. Two or three groups of unidentified folks sitting around campfires, mostly in urban settings. It is a good and noble film that Julian Temple has built, but the center does not hold as we keep going back to the campfires and for my sensibilties, we don't get enough Joe. Almost everytime that Strummer opened his mouth in Dick Rude's "Let's Rock Again" a film released a year or two prior about his tour on the Mesacaleros, one got a sense of something significant, something pithy and inteligent. Those moments are less frequent in the Temple film. It turns way too much into hagiography, especially when reocognizable celeberties like Bono, John Cusack, and Johnny Depp babble on about Strummer. And only by context and those who know the story from the inside already can identify most of the players. The saving grace of Listen Up, The Life and Times of Quincy Jones was that each of the participants introduced themselves. I loved seeing this in the balcony of the Cinema 21, but I can't tell you how many times I wanted to toggle the subtitle button of my remote to see if they would identify the speaker.
But the use of the celebrities was not a total waste. Bono's comment about the immediacy and danger of a Clash show were true of my experience, especially in the Fall of 79 at the Paramount in Seattle where he came out with a fire axe during the Armagedeon Time encore. And that the saddest part of the Clash story for him is that they were still not together. U2 showed how you can play in the court of being the biggest band in the world with longevity and integrity. It makes you wonder if...
The thematic use of the campfires is not totally capricious. It is the campfires at Glastonbury, camping at the festival with his family, that helped bring him back actively as musician and artist with the underrated Mescelaro era. And Joe's christmas card was a festive felt tip colored picture of islands with campfires on them. An image his wife says could be thought of as Joe's view of heaven. Another bridge for the film are shots of the campfires where follks are listening airchecks of the Strummer BBC World radio broadcasts dejaying music that matters to him and therefore, to us all.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:03 PM
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