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Reviews
Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)
Great rock and roll movie
***LOTS OF SPOILERS*** "Pink Floyd The Wall" is the most expensive art film ever made. It's a feature length music video (filmed in an era when those were something a bit more interesting than the video wallpaper we see today)that tells the story of Pink, a rock star who is really an amalgam of Pink Floyd's founding members Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, as well as some other rock stars Waters had met or heard about. It begins in a hotel room where Pink is thinking about his life. The first half of the movie concerns itself with a childhood that was full of regret, having lost his father in WWII (Waters lost his father in a similar way), struggling to get out from under the thumb of an overprotective mother, and a stifling school system where students are kept in line through fear and intimidation to keep them on the path to "success". It turns out we're watching Pink disintegrate before a scheduled concert that he really would rather skip. He drugs himself into a stupor and has to be roused by his manager, who drags him on stage, where he imagines himself a fascist who curses his fans (fans who, of course, mindlessly go along with the whole thing). By the end of the show, he comes to his senses, and "judges" himself during a wonderful animated sequence by Gerald Scarfe called "The Trial". This is a great rock and roll movie, but it's also something else: Waters was inspired to write "The Wall" after a disastrous show in Pink Floyd's "Animals" tour where he found himself unable to connect with the audience, and, in a moment he immediately regretted, spat in the face of one of the audience members. Faced with questions of what was happening to him, he fashioned a musical apology to this one fan, summed up with the album's final track, "Outside The Wall". The movie is about the walls we build to protect ourselves, but it's also about how, once our walls are torn down, we have to contend with the walls of others. Much of the humor Waters intended with this satire is missing in the film, which concerns itself with a very dark tone, but there's no denying the power of the imagery, or the painterly eye that Alan Parker exhibits with the camera. Gerald Scarfe deserves much of the credit also for the movie's look. There is much more going on in this film than the average review of "great movie to watch while you're stoned" would lead you to believe. One of the best rock and roll movies out there.
Troll (1986)
So awful I couldn't watch it in one sitting!
I rented this back in 1986 or so when it came out on VHS. I remember I had just gotten home from seeing David Cronenberg's "The Fly" and was blown away by it. I threw this one into the VCR in hopes it would have some minor thrills.
"Troll" was so boring, even at its modest length, that I left and came back to it no fewer than four times before seeing the whole thing. (It was back when I felt I had to watch a movie all the way through, even if it sucked, just to justify the money spent to rent it--"Troll" changed that philosophy for me).
**SPOILER** I'm not sure if this is technically a spoiler but at one point Sonny Bono turns into some kind of plant or something. **SPOILER END**
That's really all I remember from the film, except for the desire for a refund that quickly followed watching it.