Hard Core Logo 2 Blu-ray Review
Sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 13, 2012
Note: This film is currently available only in this set:
Hard Core Logo/Hard Core Logo 2.
Bruce McDonald's odd little quasi-
verité mockumentary
Hard Core Logo has been something of a cult sensation since its release in 1996,
with its appeal helped immeasurably once Quentin Tarantino stepped into the fray and helped distribute the film
internationally. It took McDonald years (fifteen, but who's counting?) to revisit the conceit of his early film, and on paper
at least,
Hard Core Logo 2 would have seemed to have perhaps even more material ripe for the skewering than
"merely" punk rock music. McDonald's second
Hard Core Logo film bites off a good deal more than it can easily
chew, taking on everything from overnight Hollywood success (namely McDonald's, supposedly anyway) to ridiculous
cable television dramas to sex scandals involving young boys to psychic phenomena (including possession) to, finally,
punk rock music. The result is a sometimes fitfully amusing mishmash that doesn't ever really rise to the level of the
original
Hard Core Logo in terms of investing the characters with enough reality to make the audience care
about them. That's ironic on a couple of levels, since the lead character in
Hard Core Logo 2 is
named
Care, though her surname is Failure, which is perhaps too on the nose for its own good, and just as ironically, Ms.
Failure is indeed a real life musician from Canada playing a
faux version of herself in this film.
Part of the weird "charm" (for want of a better term) of
Hard Core Logo is how unassuming it all was, but
there's a
decidedly arch "meta" quality to
Hard Core Logo 2 that is
meant to be compelling but which in fact ends
up
distancing the audience from the events in the film. First of all, the entire film is narrated by McDonald (with a supposed
"twist" at the end that is pointless and really doesn't even make a whole lot of sense if you think long enough about it).
Second of all, McDonald and his "crew" figure much more prominently in this film than they did in the first
Hard Core
Logo. It's like watching
The Making of The Making of 'Hard Core Logo 2' in a way, and it robs the film of
what
could have been a more visceral experience.
The major conceit of
Hard Core Logo 2 is that Care Failure is insisting she's been possessed by the spirit of Joe
Dick, the punk rock icon who was the focus of the first
Hard Core Logo. Failure's "people" have reached out to
McDonald for help, wanting to document their charge's trials with the poltergeist. McDonald initially isn't interested as
he's been successfully helming a cheesy series called
The Pilgrim for the Home Bible Network. But when the star
of that series is caught in an overseas child prostitution scandal, suddenly he's
persona non grata in La-La
Land, and he has a ton of bills to pay as well since he's been living the high life there without really having the income
to support it. So suddenly a new documentary tying into his long ago work seems like a good idea and he sets off with
a psychic investigator named Liz (Shannon Jardine) to see what they can see. When they arrive at a backwoods resort
that evidently has a long history of its own (think of the setting of this season's
American Horror Story), they're
surprised to find none other than Bucky Haight (Julian Richings) there as Care's erstwhile producer. (Haight was
another major character in the first
Hard Core Logo.)
This second
Hard Core Logo would seem to be perfectly set up to be a much more outright funny film than the
first, a film which was fascinating but hardly laugh out loud hysterical (at least to this reviewer). And yet something is
undeniably off in this outing, which may simply boil down to everyone being too self-aware for their own good. Humor
works best when it's unforced, but there's such a mirror held up to everyone and everything here that the entire film
seems like a film school exercise rather than an organic creation. It's kind of surprising, actually, because the concept is
okay (if not fantastic), the performances tend to be acceptable at least, and McDonald's filmcraft is substantially more
polished than it was in the first
Hard Core Logo.
The film ends on a rather melancholic note, much like the first
Hard Core Logo, with a patently ridiculous conceit
that puts everything that's gone before into a supposedly new light. McDonald would have done much better to have
simply played this second
Hard Core Logo straight, which ironically probably would have delivered more
powerful laughs.
