Documentary time once again and today’s effort is...well…
Sound Of The Future
Dir. Matt Hulse / Dur. 102 mins
Strand:- Debate
In A Nutshell:- A film about childhood, making films, punk and, well, mostly Matt Hulse.
The Good:- This definitely fits into that “quirky” bracket that I like to find at the Festival. It’s ostensibly about the director’s pre-teenage punk band that he formed with his siblings but it’s also about the difficulties he had in trying to make a film out of it while simultaneously being about the artificial nature of documentary and just “art” in general. The band (The Hippies) are a slice of “so bad they’re good fun” juvenilia (in a way, they put me slightly in mind of toe-curlingly-bad-but-weirdly-appealing band The Shaggs) and the kids that they draft in to play (with multiple kids doubling up as each member of the band at various points) are clearly enjoying themselves. It somehow manages to be fairly egotistical but self-deprecating at the same time and somehow manages to get away with it. It propels you along for the running time without really necessarily having much of a defined point to make.
The Bad:- Well, as I just indicated there, I’m not really sure what the film is actually about. There are some musings on the difficulties of family, especially families that are made more complicated by divorce and step parents but I didn't really feel like any of the points it seemed to make were what the documentary was ultimately about. Maybe, though, that neatly encapsulates the spirit of 70s punk which is attempting to evoke and rekindle.
The Verdict:- I enjoyed it ultimately. I’m not sure that the film succeeds in making the points that it wants to make but I’m not sure that it even knows what those points are itself. It’s more about the ride than the destination.
No comments:
Post a Comment