Hard Core Logo Blu-ray Review
This isn't Spinal Tap, eh?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 13, 2012
Note: This film is currently available only in this set:
Hard Core Logo/Hard Core Logo 2.
The end of the year is frequently filled with holiday gatherings, family reunions, and, for young ones, visions of sugar
plums (and perhaps costlier items) dancing in their heads. It's also the time that all different kinds of
Ten Best lists. Film lovers are used to seeing not only these
annual lists from all sorts of sources, but other lists from such vaunted organizations as The American Film Institute
which has given us everything from The Greatest Movies of All Time to, well, The Greatest Movie
Quotes of All
Time. What those of us in the United States probably don't think about very often is that other nations have their own
"best of" traditions, and in fact there are actual lists devoted to the best films of any given country, as incredible as that
may sound to the more chauvinistic (in the true sense of the term) among us. A lot of film fans who probably consider
themselves at least relatively well versed in the history of the art form have probably never even heard of
Hard
Core Logo (despite the fact that none other than Quentin Tarantino helped distribute it around the world), and yet
this 1996 Canadian film is routinely listed among the best films that country has ever offered
the world, at least if those lists are being compiled by
Canadians.
Hard Core Logo might be thought of
as a distant Canadian cousin to the iconic mockumentary
This is Spinal Tap, but large swaths of
Hard Core Logo are not only not funny on
their face, but seemingly intentionally skewed more toward elegy and even melancholy, a perhaps fitting epitaph to the
punk era the film's (fictional) titular band was supposedly a legendary part of. Few will probably find much to laugh at in
Hard Core Logo, despite the assertion of the filmmakers and many critics that
Hard Core Logo is indeed
a comedy. And some curmudgeons may even question if this slight but weirdly effective piece has any business being
on any "all time greatest" list at all.
This is Spinal Tap was such an exhilaratingly hilarious experience because it so completely skewed the over the
top lifestyle of the arena rock musician. But trying to do the same in the somewhat less, well,
awesome world
of
punk is kind of like trying to craft a comedy about a disabled person, with the uneasy feeling of urging the audience to
laugh at someone's infirmities. The original source novel that
Hard Core Logo was adapted from was itself a
kind
of melancholic affair, at least as concerned with what happens to some musicians once they're past their prime as it
was
specifically about punk, and that's certainly a subtext here, though the waning punk movement is front and center in
terms
of how the film goes about making its kind of sad little points.
The main character in the film is the self-named Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon), a once "nearly famous" punk rocker who has
fallen on harder times as he's arrived at something close to middle age (at least for punkers, who sometimes tended to
die young). His crowning achievement, Hard Core Logo, fell apart years previously due largely in part to some
injudicious behavior on Dick's part, behavior which may have prevented the band from being signed to a supposedly
major deal by Sire Records. However, a reunion may be in the cards,
if Joe can convince former lead guitarist
Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie) to return to the fold, forsaking a probably much more lucrative and high profile gig
with a more mainstream band called Jenifur.
The other members of Hard Core logo are Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson), the kind of "go along to get along" drummer of
the group, and John Oxenberger (John Pyper-Ferguson), a schizophrenic who manages to scribble out a journal about
the band's road tour despite having lost his lithium. Dick has managed to pull his erstwhile buddies together again
despite a paltry budget of some six thousand dollars because he has found out that his personal mentor, legendary
punk artist Bucky Haight (Julian Richings) has been shot in a John Lennon type assassination attempt, one which
happily failed but which left the musician paralyzed and with two amputated legs, and Dick's hope is to give a huge
benefit concert to help out the now disabled man. As with so much else about
Hard Core Logo, what turns out
to actually be the case is a far cry from what is advertised.
Hard Core Logo is a rather dour outing, which is not say that there's not a sly sense of incredibly black humor
running just beneath the surface. As band unity begins to fray on the road tour, especially between Dick and Tallent,
there are several telling interchanges that have both the bite of verisimilitude as well as a very sardonic flair. One brief
respite finds the guys in a roadside diner (every place they stop seems to have "Where You Going, Billy?" playing on the
Muzak system), where Dick launches into a cutting diatribe analyzing all of the other customers there. The subtext is
that that same cutting analytical power has been turned on the band members themselves at various times, as indeed
is mentioned discursively in some of the
faux confessionals that dot the film.
One of the oddest elements about the relationship between Dick and Tallent is a rather strongly hinted whiff of
homoeroticism. There are several moments when Dick seems
just about to lean in and plant a wet on Tallent's
fulsome lips, but it never comes to pass. It would have been a really interesting path to take, and the film
seems to be hinting at it rather strongly without ever actually getting there.
Hard Core Logo may simply be too
realistic to be laugh out loud funny. These guys are all obviously
washouts to one degree or another, and the film is so relentlessly aggressive about showing their personal
peccadilloes that there isn't the outright cartoonish quality that made
Spinal Tap such a delight. I'm actually
kind of surprised that some fans find this film at least amusing, if not downright hysterical. For me it was kind a slow
sad dance evoking the end of an era. As a
mockumentary, this film may leave something to be desired, at least
for those expecting a
Spinal Tap rout of an idiom. As a
documentary,
Hard Core Logo is
surprisingly effective and visceral.
