"There was nowhere else to play," they recall.īands like Television, the Talking Heads and Blondie headlined. The band wound up playing at the punk club CBGB. In the early '70s, because of hard economic times, parts of the lower east side of Manhattan were deserted. The Ramones were geeky kids from Forest Hills, Queens, who listened to the same marginalized music (the Stooges and the New York Dolls) and eventually picked up instruments and began playing. "Century" tries to provide an answer while giving viewers a look at one of the more influential bands of the punk and grunge eras. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.Halfway through the documentary "End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones," punk author Legs McNeil asks the question that anyone who tries to reconcile the Ramones' legend with their music asks: "Those songs are classic American pop. Get the latest Box Office news! Sign up for our Box Office newsletter here. “Danny Says” opens in theaters and on VOD on Friday, September 30th. That part of the equation may not be more important in the grand scheme of things, but it would have made for a much better movie. “The New York Times” once wrote “you could make a convincing case that without Danny Fields, punk rock would not have happened,” and Toller’s film does exactly that, but it fails to make a convincing case that Danny Fields would not have happened without punk rock. Even the best moments here, such as the pristine audio recording of Lou Reed enthusiastically listening to the Ramones for the first time, feel like they flatten Fields out of the history that only exists because he was there to capture it.Ī last-ditch attempt to bring “Danny Says” back to its namesake only serves to reinforce how much of a minor character he’s been in his own memoir - someone remarks that Fields “becomes overly attached to the illusion of self, so he lives with a sense of inadequacy about his life,” but Toller offers that explanation in lieu of exploring what it means. There is genuine value to being a witness, a value that several of Toller’s interview subjects implore Fields to recognize, but the director refuses to see his star as more than a repository for secondhand stories, never collates this messy collection of anecdotes into anything more than the footnotes of the film that he should have been making. Judging by the filmmaker’s only previous feature - a documentary about the death of independent record stores - it’s fair to assume that he shares Fields’ passion for music and all of its monuments, but that fandom may have blinded him to more interesting territory. If there’s any interiority to Fields, Toller isn’t interested in finding it “Danny Says” would much rather provide the umpteenth account of Andy Warhol’s social circle (to mention but one of the movie’s many asides) than dig beneath the dirt in an attempt to learn more about one of the key figures who helped shape that scene. READ MORE: In Memory Of Lou Reed, Watch His Short Film “Red Shirley” Blowing up John Lennon’s comment that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, introducing Iggy Pop to cocaine, being in the presence of Jim Morrison’s exposed penis: Fields seems to think of himself as nothing more than the sum of the things that he did, a cold and distant planet who was just happy to orbit around some of the galaxy’s brightest stars and bask in their light. He defines himself by the history he witnessed or enabled, as a crucial joint in the skeleton of popular culture. Listening to the man meander through his memories, it becomes increasingly obvious that this may have been Toller’s only feasible approach, as Fields appears to have sublimated his identity directly into the music. If Toller doesn’t dwell on the details, that’s because “Danny Says” uses Fields as less of a subject than a tour guide, leveraging his experience as a window into the golden age of rock and the yowling birth of American punk. Fields is most compelling when revisiting his formative years, telling stories about embracing his sexuality (“I was a little faggot, which everyone else knew but me,” he chortles), and growing up in a house where amphetamines were kept in a glass bowl like after-dinner mints at a Chinese restaurant.
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