Month: May 2021

https://youtu.be/JvWcfD5cW7k

It’s Ondi Timoner’s 2004 rockumentary featuring The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Dandy Warhols, and the love-hate relationship these bands developed over a seven-year period. (2,500 hours of raw footage!) According to Wicked-pedia, it “won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, and was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art for their permanent collection.”

No big surprise, band members hated it. (SPOILERS: It makes them all look like a bunch of fucked up, pretentious morons.)

Taylor-Taylor, Newcombe and Warhols guitarist Peter Holmstrom have all criticized the film as being unfair in its portrayal of Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. On The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s official website the film was denounced as reducing several years of hard work to “at best a series of punch-ups and mishaps taken out of context, and at worst bold faced lies and misrepresentation of fact.” Courtney Taylor-Taylor said in an interview: “It’s a movie, not a documentary […] She worked her ass off and forged a plot when there was no plot. She crafted the thing to swell and ebb by taking eight years of us and a year and a half of the Brian Jonestown Massacre”. Holmstrom was generally displeased with the film initially, citing Timoner’s use of footage that he claims “was not to be used” as a reason, but has maintained that “it’s still a good film”, though one “I would have done differently”. Dandy Warhols drummer Brent DeBoer noted the film could have easily been a “feel-good story”, but instead a few rare moments were specifically chosen to give the film a “Jerry Springer”-type storyline.