Well, I survived my first week back on the job, and decided to relax this weekend by watching "What We Do Is Secret", director Rodger Grossman's biopic of legendary L.A. punk band,
The Germs. Since I was present at a couple of their early gigs, most notably, the June '77 show at the Whisky where lead singer
Bobby Pyn (AKA: Darby Crash) doused the audience with
salad oil and peanut butter, I thought it might be fun to see how badly Hollywood had mangled their story. I wasn't disappointed.
Shane West's performance as Darby Crash was completely inadequate. Except for the scenes where he's onstage, he comes off as flat, whiny, boring, and something of an amateur fascist. Bijou Phillips as bassist Lorna Doom is even worse, phoning in a totally one-dimensional performance, bereft of any of Lorna's goofy charm. Rick Gonzalez does a fairly decent job portraying happy-go-lucky guitarist, Pat Smear. Of special bad-acting note, look for Ray (Darth Maul) Park in a wig playing Masque owner, Brendan Mullen, with a brogue so indecipherable, it has to be subtitled.
Apart from the generally poor performances, my biggest beef with the film was the way it plays fast and loose with the facts. For example, in one early scene, the band is shown standing in line at the Whisky, heckling Captain Sensible and Dave Vanian of The Damned , who're being interviewed by Claude Bessy (AKA Kickboy Face) of Slash Magazine. When Bessy urges them to go across the street and perform at Open Mic night at the Orpheum, Sensible and Vanian follow them into the club to watch their very first show.
There are numerous problems with this scene, not least of which is the fact that The Damned never played the Whisky in '77, their first L.A. gigs were at the Starwood in April of 1977 and are the stuff of local legend. Secondly, I have never heard anyone outside of this film, claim that The Damned were in attendance at The Germs first live gig. The movie's screenplay is based in part on Brendan Mullen's Germs biography, Lexicon Devil, so I'd be interested to know if the book makes this claim as well.
All in all, I'd have to say that this film was a major disappointment for an old punk like me who was actually there when a lot of this stuff went down. This was the Dawson's Creek version of The Germs story, totally lacking the sense most of us had of being present at the birth of something new and dangerous that was going to radically change the stale musical scene of Los Angeles forever.
As you may have noticed, I haven't been terribly inspired to post much lately. Seems like there's less and less fresh and interesting content out there on the Internets these days. An awful lot of good bloggers appear to have abandoned their sites in favor of tweeting, which I, quite frankly, have no interest in following (or doing).
