THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN FullyLoadedDVDreviewedByGregKlymkiwAsBruntonPapputsPunkDocSlavetosMyDick

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THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - See this history of Toronto Punk or DIE, motherfucker!

THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN is a thrilling epic journey into Toronto's legendary punk rock scene. It's a Joseph-Conrad-like boat ride into some kind of Hell that always feels like a Heaven as imagined by Anton LaVey. Directors Colin Brunton and Kire Papputs are the two halves of Willard on a mission that seems to have no real end. And if there is a heart of darkness on display, a Kurtz, if you will, it feels like every Status Quo fuck-wad that ignored this exciting scene. "The Last Pogo Jumps Again" is playing theatrically in Toronto at the Big Picture Cinema, 1035 Gerrard St East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4M 1Z6, Tel. 416 466 3636. Friday November 1 through Wednesday November 6 at 7:30 pm. Matinees on Sunday November 3 and Thursday November 6 at 3:30. (NB: No 7:30 pm show the evening of November 7.) Tickets are $10.00; Thursday November 7 matinee at 3:30 is $5.00 for students and the unemployed. The fuck else you doing this week anyway? Jerking off? Thumbing your asshole? Or sticking your dick through a glory hole to get some chump to slaveto the fuck out of it? Just see the fuckin' movie!!!

The Last Pogo Jumps Again (2012) ****
Dir. Colin Brunton, Kire Papputs

Review By Greg Klymkiw

PREAMBLE - Winnipeg's Punk Scene

So, like, some dude who works on the docks, his name is Réjean, corners you in a stall at Jilly's and says: "Suck my dick". We've all been there before. Right? Both parties are too skint to hit the V.I.P. room for some private dancing and before you can say, "Gimme summa lovin'", you're greedily gobbling the knob of this bearded, seven-footer with a plaid shirt and hoping for a nice reach-around. We've all been there. Right? So, okay, what if the same dude traps you in the shitter and growls, "Slaveto my dick!" - you're going to be, like, "The fuck, Réjean? You want me to WHAT?" From the late 70s until I can't remember when, the aforementioned conversation played out in my mind whenever I drove by an old garment district building in the Market Square area of Winnipeg that featured this spray-painted graffiti prominently displayed on its grey cement wall:

 SLAVETO

 MY DICK

Moments after I first read those words (in double-take, mind you) I knew the graffiti was that great song "SLAVE TO MY DICK" by Vancouver punk band, The Subhumans. Some moron with a can of spray paint was shit-facedly inspired to splooge the words via aerosol in a prominent location. The bonehead placed the words "slave" and "to" too fucking close together. This might not be true, but I remember the graffiti remained for decades after it first appeared - a beacon at the entranceway to this 7 or 8 square blocks in downtown Winnipeg that had become the stomping grounds of artists, actors, filmmakers, junkies, drunks, hookers and, of course, punks. It was a scene, know what I mean? And for about four years, the punk scene fuelled the crazy alternative film making scene at the Winnipeg Film Group. I can't think of a single person in their mid-40s-50s from the 'Peg who makes movies and WASN'T part of that scene. Great 'Peg punk and new wave bands - and I mean GREAT bands - belted out the coolest sounds imaginable. Bars like the Royal Albert or, my favourite, the "Chuckles" (or to malcontent veterans, the St. Charles Hotel) featured gig upon gig with local Winnipeg Punk/NewWavers like the Popular Mechanix, Personality Crisis, Dub Rifles, Lowlife, The Stretch Marks, Discharge, The Psychiatrists, The Bristow Hoppers - the list goes on and on - and bookers (often Winnipeg band members themselves) peppered the local acts with whatever punks from Toronto, Vancouver or the USA who could get their shit together enough to play the 'Peg. I was running a West-End movie theatre that played mostly cult films, sometimes sprinkled with live acts ("Nash the Slash VS. Eraserhead" read one of the immortal handbills). The "Scene" would come see a movie or two, blast down to the garment district, catch a punk band, then head to Walter and Megan's Lithium Cafe to belt back joe with tired hookers and their hopped-up pimps. This happened pretty much every night for many moons.

It's funny now, how many film or media people frolicked about the punk scene. John Paizs directed the quaintly perverse cinematic equivalent to 'Peg Punk with his brilliant short film The Obsession of Billy Botski and, years later he used the great Popular Mechanix song "IceBox City" during a joyous dance sequence in his immortal feature length cult classic Crime Wave. Guy Maddin blew his inheritance from Aunt Lil (her beauty parlour became the studio set for Tales from the Gimli Hospital) on 78 recordings of fruity 20s/30s tenors from this amazing store in Minneapolis, but also collected the most amazing number of punk albums which he purchased from Winnipeg's immortal Pyramid Records. Guy would gather everyone round to his place, quaintly adorned with his late Aunt Lil's doilies, and spin Richard Crooks singing Stephen Foster's "Old Black Joe", then switching from 78 to 33rpm, he'd announce something a bit more "challenging" was on its way - code for: this is some good shit I got from Pyramid Records and it's going to blow you the fuck away. In delicious contrast to "Old Black Joe", the needle gently found its groove and the room swelled with the aural explosion of Feederz crooning "Jesus Entering From The Rear". Radio producer John Copsey (he wears suits now) led a punk band that devoted themselves to worshipping the survivalist movement as preached on Winnipeg's community cable station TV show "Survival" featuring yours truly and Guy Maddin as apocalypse-welcoming rednecks. Lead singer of several great Winnipeg punk bands was none other than heartthrob Kyle McCulloch who starred in virtually every early John Paizs and Guy Maddin film and eventually became a head writer on TV's South Park. And lest we forget, Canada's highly esteemed journalist and political pundit in all media, Mr. Andrew Coyne, took to the stage with several other burgeoning writers from the University of Manitoba newspaper and in punk tradition, nary a one of them could actually play, but they gave their all as The Nimrods.

Happy times for many. Times that led to even happier times - for some. All were ultimately inspired by Winnipeg's punk scene, but most of all, the brilliant local artists - the musicians who made you soar higher than a kite with kickass punk/new wave music were the big motivators who instilled a more anarchic, freewheeling, devil-may-care spirit in so many of us to push the limits of our own lives and artistic pursuits. The music, unlike the arts inspired by it, had NO outlets of support to take the music and musicians to the next natural level. There were a few limited tapes or EPs cut, a handful of extremely indie albums, but this genuinely brilliant period of Winnipeg music - post The Guess Who and pre The Crash Test Dummies - lives in the minds, memories and movies of all those who loved it deeply and were fuelled by seeing it LIVE - night after night after blessedly blasphemous night.

THE MEAT & CORNMEAL OF THE POGO STICK CALLED TORONTO PUNK: YEAH, NOW YOU GET YOUR FUCKING FILM REVIEW OF

THE COLIN BRUNTON & KIRE PAPPUTS EPIC DOC

It took about 30 seconds of screen time for me to feel a surge of the old excitement I used to get in my late teens and early 20s in the aforementioned Winnipeg Scene. Here I was, watching The Last Pogo Jumps Again, the alternately thrilling and depressing but ultimately powerful story of the Toronto Scene de la PUNK and it mattered not that it was Toronto. Hell, I kind of felt like I was back in Winnipeg all over again.

I embraced the crazy, scrappy, downright dangerous insanity of this terrific documentary and fully accepted its body, its blood - like an unholy sacrement drained and scourged from the everlasting soul of Sid Vicious himself who died, NOT for OUR sins, but for his own and for the rest of us who were willing to commit our own - no matter how heinous or benign. This downright wonderful picture by Brunton and Papputs is a sacrament and I accept its fuck-you-filmmaking-moxie as much as I allow its people, places and music into my very soul as if they were my very own.

On the surface - this is a movie that shouldn't work - at least not by the standards of many un-cool fuck-wads who make cultural decisions in this country at both the public and private sectors - propped up comfortably on the nests they feather atop the podiums they take their dumps-a-plenty from as if they were showering the Great Unwashed with gold. It shouldn't work, but it does. Some might say it is solely about a subject only 100 or so people might get into. They'd be wrong. Others will complain (usually without seeing it) that the movie is too long - 3 hours and 20 minutes PLUS an intermission. Again - WRONG. I saw a much longer version and then this shorter version and frankly, I wish the filmmakers stuck to the original length. In fact, they could have made it even longer for some extra-sweet fuck-you cherries on the ice cream sundae.

Some might say the movie is a mess. Yeah, it is - sort of, but brilliantly and subversively it's a documentary equivalent to the punk scene itself and that's one of the many things I admire about it.

Here's the deal, when legendary Canadian film producer Colin Brunton was a teenager, he worked as an usher at the Roxy Theatre in Toronto - a deliciously fucked joint on the East End that combined 99-cent double features of art films and art sleaze with a kick-ass music scene. This temple of all things anti-peace-love-and-prebyterianism-a-la-Toronto was the jumping off point for so many who would contribute to one of the most thrilling music in the country.

Eventually the Scene moved further west in the otherwise Presbyterian pole-up-the-ass city. Pockets of fuck-you exploded at the New Yorker Theatre, along Spadina, in Kensington and, of course, Queen Street West when it wasn't full of fuck-wit rich people pretending to be poor. And the biggest fuck you explosion in Toronto was the exciting punk rock new wave scene.

Brunton and Papputs focus on a two year window - beginning at the Roxy and New Yorker Theatre gigs and ending with the famous Last Pogo when the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen decided to flush punk off its stages forever and a legendary concert that eventually culminated with a visit from Toronto's Finest Porkers with their night sticks and guns to boot the bands off the stage and patrons out onto the street. In reality, the window of this history is probably a wee bit larger, but what happens within the period the filmmakers choose to focus on is pretty much the trajectory that occurred not only in Toronto, but Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal - anywhere in Canada that had a vibrant punk scene, lots of devoted fans and absolutely no support from most of the mainstream media and a total fucking from the music business (like, what else is new?). The music business - virtually non-existent in Canada anyway - chose to ignore the Scene and for the one or two bands they took a passing fancy to, they basically sucked them RAW and DRY.

Uh, and like, what else is new?

NO REACH-AROUND!!!

Brunton was fully enmeshed in the whole Scene and chose to document the Last Pogo concert at the Horseshoe with a 16mm camera ('natch). This resulted in a scrappy little movie called ... come on, give it a guess ... come on, you can do it - Yesiree-Bob!!! You win the fuckin' Kewpie Doll - it was called The Last Pogo.

That was then - this is now and during the past six years the filmmakers embarked on an odyssey to interview as many members of the Scene as possible and create a document that would serve as an artistic and living testimony to a slice of Canadian popular culture that many would prefer to forget and/or even refuse to acknowledge it even (or ever) existed.

And The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a joy - a real joy. Blending new and archival interviews and footage with all the onstage and behind the scenes players, the movie tells a tale as inspiring as it is sad - but what keeps the whole thing buoyant is the mad genius on view in both the words and performances of the likes of D.O.A., The Viletones, Teenage Head and all the rest of this Scene of gloriously talented purveyors of fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-fucking-rode-in-on. Some of those interviewed keep playing, others have morphed their love of music into other areas of the music business while some have chosen to grow up and get real jobs - and it's a testament to the obsessive qualities of the filmmaking itself that it's simply impossible to NOT like anyone in the picture.

Some of the interview highlights for me were poignant moments with the late Frankie Venom of Teenage Head, the brilliant, erudite Andy Paterson of The Government and without question, the vitriol-and-venom spewing Steve Leckie from the Viletones - a poet, an artist, a gentleman curmudgeon of the highest order.

The Last Pogo Rides Again definitely feels like a Joseph-Conrad-like boat ride into some kind of Hell that always feels like a Heaven as imagined by Anton LaVey. Brunton and Papputs are the two halves of Willard on a mission that seems to have no real end. And if there is a heart of darkness on display, a Kurtz, if you will, it feels like every Status Quo fuck-wad that ignored this exciting scene.

And it's an important film. So much of Canada's truly vibrant culture has been squashed or ignored. Here's a film that holds up a slice of it that not only created great work in and of itself, but was an inspiration and seed for so much that followed in a variety of artistic mediums.

Never mind the cornucopia of great artists, filmmakers, writers, playwrights, actors and other truly gifted iconoclasts who sprouted from Toronto's Punk Scene - they're out there, doing their thing - they know who they are and so do we. But a word about the visionary Colin Brunton: he might well be the true soul and pulse of indie filmmaking in the Toronto Scene and even to this day, one feels his visionary influence upon the first two great rock pictures directed by Bruce McDonald. Roadkill and Highway 61 feel very much like they're as much Brunton's sensibilities as they are McDonald's. What sets Brunto apart from most producers in this country is that he doesn't come from some bullshit rarified place - he's the real thing. He's been there. He's done that. And all his collaborations feel like they're moulded and charged by his love for film, his knowledge of ALL the rules - artistically AND practically - so he can motherfucking break them when necessary and finally, his genuine life experience which he injects into every project he undertakes.

He's all over The Last Pogo Jumps Again, but he clearly has a collaborator in Paputts that shares this crazy-ass vision. They clearly make a great team because they've made a great movie.

See it. Or die, motherfucker!

"The Last Pogo Jumps Again" is playing theatrically in Toronto at the Big Picture Cinema, 1035 Gerrard St East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4M 1Z6, Tel. 416 466 3636. Friday November 1 through Wednesday November 6 at 7:30 pm. Matinees on Sunday November 3 and Thursday November 6 at 3:30. (NB: No 7:30 pm show the evening of November 7.) Tickets are $10.00; Thursday November 7 matinee at 3:30 is $5.00 for students and the unemployed.

The fuck else you doing this week anyway? Jerking off? Thumbing your asshole? Or sticking your dick through a glory hole to get some chump to slaveto the fuck out of it? Just see the fuckin' movie!!!

I, for one, can hardly wait for some kind of deluxe Blu-Ray - a numbered limited edition Box-set with the full version of the movie I originally saw - maybe even a LONGER one, tons of the good shit that hit the cutting room floor, commentaries galore and, for good measure a two-by-four-across-the-teeth soundtrack. I expect someone like Kino-Smith or Indie-Can to do this. If they don't, I assume Brunton will do it himself anyway. Better that, actually. He and Papputs can divvy up the profits without a middleman.

THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Epic Documentary on the history of Punk Rock in Toronto will speak to anyone and everyone who lived in a place and time where an iconoclastic music scene was the tie to bind all those who were mad as hell and couldn't take the boring Status Quo anymore!!!

The Last Pogo Jumps Again (2012) ****
Dir. Colin Brunton, Kire Papputs

Review By Greg Klymkiw

PREAMBLE - Winnipeg's Punk Scene

So, like, some dude who works on the docks, his name is Réjean, corners you in a stall at Jilly's and says: "Suck my dick". We've all been there before. Right? Both parties are too skint to hit the V.I.P. room for some private dancing and before you can say, "Gimme summa lovin'", you're greedily gobbling the knob of this bearded, seven-footer with a plaid shirt and hoping for a nice reach-around. We've all been there. Right? So, okay, what if the same dude traps you in the shitter and growls, "Slaveto my dick!" - you're going to be, like, "The fuck, Réjean? You want me to WHAT?" From the late 70s until I can't remember when, the aforementioned conversation played out in my mind whenever I drove by an old garment district building in the Market Square area of Winnipeg that featured this spray-painted graffiti prominently displayed on its grey cement wall:

 SLAVETO

 MY DICK

Moments after I first read those words (in double-take, mind you) I knew the graffiti was that great song "SLAVE TO MY DICK" by Vancouver punk band, The Subhumans. Some moron with a can of spray paint was shit-facedly inspired to splooge the words via aerosol in a prominent location. The bonehead placed the words "slave" and "to" too fucking close together. This might not be true, but I remember the graffiti remained for decades after it first appeared - a beacon at the entranceway to this 7 or 8 square blocks in downtown Winnipeg that had become the stomping grounds of artists, actors, filmmakers, junkies, drunks, hookers and, of course, punks. It was a scene, know what I mean? And for about four years, the punk scene fuelled the crazy alternative film making scene at the Winnipeg Film Group. I can't think of a single person in their mid-40s-50s from the 'Peg who makes movies and WASN'T part of that scene. Great 'Peg punk and new wave bands - and I mean GREAT bands - belted out the coolest sounds imaginable. Bars like the Royal Albert or, my favourite, the "Chuckles" (or to malcontent veterans, the St. Charles Hotel) featured gig upon gig with local Winnipeg Punk/NewWavers like the Popular Mechanix, Personality Crisis, Dub Rifles, Lowlife, The Stretch Marks, Discharge, The Psychiatrists, The Bristow Hoppers - the list goes on and on - and bookers (often Winnipeg band members themselves) peppered the local acts with whatever punks from Toronto, Vancouver or the USA who could get their shit together enough to play the 'Peg. I was running a West-End movie theatre that played mostly cult films, sometimes sprinkled with live acts ("Nash the Slash VS. Eraserhead" read one of the immortal handbills). The "Scene" would come see a movie or two, blast down to the garment district, catch a punk band, then head to Walter and Megan's Lithium Cafe to belt back joe with tired hookers and their hopped-up pimps. This happened pretty much every night for many moons.

It's funny now, how many film or media people frolicked about the punk scene. John Paizs directed the quaintly perverse cinematic equivalent to 'Peg Punk with his brilliant short film The Obsession of Billy Botski and, years later he used the great Popular Mechanix song "IceBox City" during a joyous dance sequence in his immortal feature length cult classic Crime Wave. Guy Maddin blew his inheritance from Aunt Lil (her beauty parlour became the studio set for Tales from the Gimli Hospital) on 78 recordings of fruity 20s/30s tenors from this amazing store in Minneapolis, but also collected the most amazing number of punk albums which he purchased from Winnipeg's immortal Pyramid Records. Guy would gather everyone round to his place, quaintly adorned with his late Aunt Lil's doilies, and spin Richard Crooks singing Stephen Foster's "Old Black Joe", then switching from 78 to 33rpm, he'd announce something a bit more "challenging" was on its way - code for: this is some good shit I got from Pyramid Records and it's going to blow you the fuck away. In delicious contrast to "Old Black Joe", the needle gently found its groove and the room swelled with the aural explosion of Feederz crooning "Jesus Entering From The Rear". Radio producer John Copsey (he wears suits now) led a punk band that devoted themselves to worshipping the survivalist movement as preached on Winnipeg's community cable station TV show "Survival" featuring yours truly and Guy Maddin as apocalypse-welcoming rednecks. Lead singer of several great Winnipeg punk bands was none other than heartthrob Kyle McCulloch who starred in virtually every early John Paizs and Guy Maddin film and eventually became a head writer on TV's South Park. And lest we forget, Canada's highly esteemed journalist and political pundit in all media, Mr. Andrew Coyne, took to the stage with several other burgeoning writers from the University of Manitoba newspaper and in punk tradition, nary a one of them could actually play, but they gave their all as The Nimrods.

Happy times for many. Times that led to even happier times - for some. All were ultimately inspired by Winnipeg's punk scene, but most of all, the brilliant local artists - the musicians who made you soar higher than a kite with kickass punk/new wave music were the big motivators who instilled a more anarchic, freewheeling, devil-may-care spirit in so many of us to push the limits of our own lives and artistic pursuits. The music, unlike the arts inspired by it, had NO outlets of support to take the music and musicians to the next natural level. There were a few limited tapes or EPs cut, a handful of extremely indie albums, but this genuinely brilliant period of Winnipeg music - post The Guess Who and pre The Crash Test Dummies - lives in the minds, memories and movies of all those who loved it deeply and were fuelled by seeing it LIVE - night after night after blessedly blasphemous night.

THE MEAT & CORNMEAL OF THE POGO STICK CALLED TORONTO PUNK: YEAH, NOW YOU GET YOUR FUCKING FILM REVIEW OF

THE COLIN BRUNTON & KIRE PAPPUTS EPIC DOC

It took about 30 seconds of screen time for me to feel a surge of the old excitement I used to get in my late teens and early 20s in the aforementioned Winnipeg Scene. Here I was, watching The Last Pogo Jumps Again, the alternately thrilling and depressing but ultimately powerful story of the Toronto Scene de la PUNK and it mattered not that it was Toronto. Hell, I kind of felt like I was back in Winnipeg all over again.

I embraced the crazy, scrappy, downright dangerous insanity of this terrific documentary and fully accepted its body, its blood - like an unholy sacrement drained and scourged from the everlasting soul of Sid Vicious himself who died, NOT for OUR sins, but for his own and for the rest of us who were willing to commit our own - no matter how heinous or benign. This downright wonderful picture by Brunton and Papputs is a sacrament and I accept its fuck-you-filmmaking-moxie as much as I allow its people, places and music into my very soul as if they were my very own.

On the surface - this is a movie that shouldn't work - at least not by the standards of many un-cool fuck-wads who make cultural decisions in this country at both the public and private sectors - propped up comfortably on the nests they feather atop the podiums they take their dumps-a-plenty from as if they were showering the Great Unwashed with gold. It shouldn't work, but it does. Some might say it is solely about a subject only 100 or so people might get into. They'd be wrong. Others will complain (usually without seeing it) that the movie is too long - 3 hours and 20 minutes PLUS an intermission. Again - WRONG. I saw a much longer version and then this shorter version and frankly, I wish the filmmakers stuck to the original length. In fact, they could have made it even longer for some extra-sweet fuck-you cherries on the ice cream sundae.

Some might say the movie is a mess. Yeah, it is - sort of, but brilliantly and subversively it's a documentary equivalent to the punk scene itself and that's one of the many things I admire about it.

Here's the deal, when legendary Canadian film producer Colin Brunton was a teenager, he worked as an usher at the Roxy Theatre in Toronto - a deliciously fucked joint on the East End that combined 99-cent double features of art films and art sleaze with a kick-ass music scene. This temple of all things anti-peace-love-and-prebyterianism-a-la-Toronto was the jumping off point for so many who would contribute to one of the most thrilling music in the country.

Eventually the Scene moved further west in the otherwise Presbyterian pole-up-the-ass city. Pockets of fuck-you exploded at the New Yorker Theatre, along Spadina, in Kensington and, of course, Queen Street West when it wasn't full of fuck-wit rich people pretending to be poor. And the biggest fuck you explosion in Toronto was the exciting punk rock new wave scene.

Brunton and Papputs focus on a two year window - beginning at the Roxy and New Yorker Theatre gigs and ending with the famous Last Pogo when the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen decided to flush punk off its stages forever and a legendary concert that eventually culminated with a visit from Toronto's Finest Porkers with their night sticks and guns to boot the bands off the stage and patrons out onto the street. In reality, the window of this history is probably a wee bit larger, but what happens within the period the filmmakers choose to focus on is pretty much the trajectory that occurred not only in Toronto, but Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal - anywhere in Canada that had a vibrant punk scene, lots of devoted fans and absolutely no support from most of the mainstream media and a total fucking from the music business (like, what else is new?). The music business - virtually non-existent in Canada anyway - chose to ignore the Scene and for the one or two bands they took a passing fancy to, they basically sucked them RAW and DRY.

Uh, and like, what else is new?

NO REACH-AROUND!!!

Brunton was fully enmeshed in the whole Scene and chose to document the Last Pogo concert at the Horseshoe with a 16mm camera ('natch). This resulted in a scrappy little movie called ... come on, give it a guess ... come on, you can do it - Yesiree-Bob!!! You win the fuckin' Kewpie Doll - it was called The Last Pogo.

That was then - this is now and during the past six years the filmmakers embarked on an odyssey to interview as many members of the Scene as possible and create a document that would serve as an artistic and living testimony to a slice of Canadian popular culture that many would prefer to forget and/or even refuse to acknowledge it even (or ever) existed.

And The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a joy - a real joy. Blending new and archival interviews and footage with all the onstage and behind the scenes players, the movie tells a tale as inspiring as it is sad - but what keeps the whole thing buoyant is the mad genius on view in both the words and performances of the likes of D.O.A., The Viletones, Teenage Head and all the rest of this Scene of gloriously talented purveyors of fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-fucking-rode-in-on. Some of those interviewed keep playing, others have morphed their love of music into other areas of the music business while some have chosen to grow up and get real jobs - and it's a testament to the obsessive qualities of the filmmaking itself that it's simply impossible to NOT like anyone in the picture.

Some of the interview highlights for me were poignant moments with the late Frankie Venom of Teenage Head, the brilliant, erudite Andy Paterson of The Government and without question, the vitriol-and-venom spewing Steve Leckie from the Viletones - a poet, an artist, a gentleman curmudgeon of the highest order.

The Last Pogo Rides Again definitely feels like a Joseph-Conrad-like boat ride into some kind of Hell that always feels like a Heaven as imagined by Anton LaVey. Brunton and Papputs are the two halves of Willard on a mission that seems to have no real end. And if there is a heart of darkness on display, a Kurtz, if you will, it feels like every Status Quo fuck-wad that ignored this exciting scene.

And it's an important film. So much of Canada's truly vibrant culture has been squashed or ignored. Here's a film that holds up a slice of it that not only created great work in and of itself, but was an inspiration and seed for so much that followed in a variety of artistic mediums.

Never mind the cornucopia of great artists, filmmakers, writers, playwrights, actors and other truly gifted iconoclasts who sprouted from Toronto's Punk Scene - they're out there, doing their thing - they know who they are and so do we. But a word about the visionary Colin Brunton: he might well be the true soul and pulse of indie filmmaking in the Toronto Scene and even to this day, one feels his visionary influence upon the first two great rock pictures directed by Bruce McDonald. Roadkill and Highway 61 feel very much like they're as much Brunton's sensibilities as they are McDonald's. What sets Brunto apart from most producers in this country is that he doesn't come from some bullshit rarified place - he's the real thing. He's been there. He's done that. And all his collaborations feel like they're moulded and charged by his love for film, his knowledge of ALL the rules - artistically AND practically - so he can motherfucking break them when necessary and finally, his genuine life experience which he injects into every project he undertakes.

He's all over The Last Pogo Rides Again, but he clearly has a collaborator in Paputts that shares this crazy-ass vision. They clearly make a great team because they've made a great movie.

See it. Or die, motherfucker!

"The Last Pogo Rides Again" has its World Premiere in Toronto as part of Canadian Music Week at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on March 23rd at 1:00pm. CMW is a grand event and ultimately the ideal venue to launch this film.

That said, I expected a larger profile film-related launch - like say the upcoming Hot Docs Film Festival. However, Colin Brunton is one savvy fucker and no doubt chose CMW over Hot Docs. The Hot Docs folks are, no doubt, thoroughly pissed off that they're not launching this great film. They'd have filled every seat in the house over the course of their festival. Good for Brunton and Paputts, though. They'll have all those seats in their pockets and then some if they choose a theatrical launch. That said, I can hardly wait for some kind of deluxe Blu-Ray - a numbered limited edition Box-set with the full version of the movie I originally saw - maybe even a LONGER one, tons of the good shit that hit the cutting room floor, commentaries galore and, for good measure a two-by-four-across-the-teeth soundtrack. Tickets for the World Premiere can be had for only !0 FUCKING BUCKS - is that a DEAL or what, fuckers? You can even order Tix by clicking the handy-dandy link HERE. So Do IT. The fuck else you doing on Saturday? Jerking off? Thumbing your asshole? Or sticking your dick through a glory hole to get some chump to slaveto the fuck out of it? Just see the fuckin' movie!!!

HARD CORE LOGO II - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Forging the personal w/artists & their art

BRUCE McDONALD
CARE FAILURE

Hard Core Logo II (2011) ****
dir. Bruce McDonald
Starring: Bruce McDonald, Care Failure, Julian Richings, Shannon Jardine, Peter Moore

Review By Greg Klymkiw

THE PREAMBLE: Part of my favourable response to Hard Core Logo II is on a personal level. My inaugural dive into director Bruce McDonald's canon was Roadkill, his mad, manic rock and road odyssey through Northwestern Ontario.

It was the fall of 1989 and the last year I'd be writing about films for a very long time. And I really did love writing about movies. I'd been doing so since the late 70s, but I was about to turn a corner in my life and this part of it would be ending a few months later. At the time I was attending the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and in addition to doing some marketing work on behalf of the film co-operative The Winnipeg Film Group, I was moonlighting as a writer for the now-defunct "Cinema Canada" magazine and was presented with the task of reviewing McDonald's movie. It wasn't hard work at all. It was a terrific picture and my delight with it poured from my soul and through my fingertips and into my word processor like shit through the proverbial Canadian Goose.

At the time it reminded me of both David Lynch's Eraserhead and Allan Arkush's Rock n' Roll High School - hypnotic, dream-like, gloriously black and white, energetic, madly nutty,laugh-out-loud funny and pure rock and roll joy.

I've seen it a few times since and I stand by this assessment.

And goddamn! Roadkill was as Canadian as a fucking beaver pelt adorning Norman Jewison's pate. Every surreal moment from my punk years in Winnipeg seemed to spring miraculously to life. Endless nights in dark, now-defunct watering-holes like the "Native Club", "The Royal Albert Arms" and the basement of the "St. Charles Hotel" (AKA "The Chuckles") - seeing everyone who passed through (early XTC, the Popular Mechanix, the notorious rape-rockers The Mentors) to insane seven-hour drives to Thunder Bay to listen to heavy metal bands (often of the local variety) at the Inn-Towner - that miraculous dive where every chick had hair permed-out like Medusa which, under black light glowed with an almost radioactive "buy-me-some-fuckin-beer-and-maybe-we-can-fuck-eh" come-hither-with-a-stubby quality.

I felt as if I had died and gone to Heaven.

From here I followed Bruce's films passionately. Most of them I loved, some of them I liked and a number of them had me scratching my head with a kind of what-in-the-fuck-are-you-doing-you-psycho response. In 1996, when I saw his Hard Core Logo, which I loved, I remember being swept away by this road movie involving the crazy punker Joe Dick and his band on a comeback tour through the western prairies of Canada and was convinced McDonald would never top the film.

I was wrong, of course. Throughout the years he delivered one terrific picture after another - most notably his brilliant zombie picture set entirely in a rural radio station Pontypool and his truly whacked adaptation of Maureen Medved's novel The Tracy Fragments. The only film of his I didn't see was the notorious Picture Claire. At TIFF it was screening while 9/11 was happening. No matter on my end. Every director I love has one or two elusive "Holy Grail" pictures that I hope to see someday.

So let's fast forward to the present and how seeing Hard Core Logo II hit me where all the best movies should - on a personal level. Firstly, I bring you back to my own personal full-circle coincidence of HCL II being the first McDonald movie I've seen to write about since I stopped writing about movies. And yeah, here I am, 23 years later, back to the future, so to speak - again writing about movies. I have to admit to a certain sentimental attachment going in to seeing HCL II on this level.

Beyond that though, is the personal relationship one forges with certain artists and their art. Bruce was born about a month after me in the same year. He was born in Kingston and grew up in Scarborough. I was conceived in Detroit and born/raised in Winnipeg. Same difference, really. For many years, without knowing each other in any way, shape or form, we grew up with similar interests and experiences. On that level alone, he's a filmmaker who spoke to me as a contemporary and I've lived through 23 years of his work, connecting aesthetically, but also personally. His films are umbilically connected to my very being.

THE FILM: Hard Core Logo II is NOT a retread or reboot. It IS, a sequel. HCL I, a clever mock-doc wherein the lead character blew his brains out on-camera at the end seemed pretty much sequel-proof. What McDonald does, however, is turn the next phase of the tale into a semi-personal and quasi-fictional mock-doc - focusing on the character he himself played, "Bruce" the filmmaker.

And here, 23-years later, "Bruce" is working successfully in American television. He's the creator and director of "The Pilgrim", a ridiculously popular Christian western aimed squarely (and somewhat cynically on the part of the fictional/actual filmmaker) at the moronic religious right. When the star of the series Rufus Melon (a brilliantly scuzzy and hilarious Adrien Dorval) is caught in a horrendous sexual scandal, the show is immediately cancelled and Bruce is without a job.

Where he'd previously been ignoring reports that rock singer Care Failure (played, no less, by Care Failure of "Die Mannequin" fame) has psychically channeled the spirit of the late Hard Core Logo frontman Joe Dick, "Bruce" now drops everything to make a new documentary to reclaim his former glory as an independent filmmaker.

Going the super-kamikaze filmmaking route, he leaves his wife and child home alone and brings along only one crew member - his next door neighbour, the completely bonkers New Age Wiccan video/performance artiste Liz (Shannon Jardine). She mans, as it were, the camera, while he records sound, directs and interviews. He's promised Liz a co-directing credit, but as his personal notes reveal later on, he just needs (and treats her) as a glorified schlepper.

The two of them follow Care to Saskatchewan where she will record a solo album under the guidance of Joe Dick's former mentor Bucky Haight (Julian Richings, repeating his original HCL role and astoundingly proving again why he's one of Canada's greatest character actors).

McDonald and his co-writer Dave Griffith put together a number of scenes which give a strong sense of the drudgery and boredom involved in producing an album but when things threaten to get a bit too languid, we're tossed a few phantasmagorical montage sequences (something McDonald has been obsessed with in his latter output and which are handled with aplomb by editor Duff Smith). These insane patchwork quilts of exorcism, talking animals, flashbacks to Joe Dick blowing his brains out, etc. are worthy of such 70s and 80s head films like Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain and Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky.

The dreary Saskatchewan locations also add considerable Canadian chic to the whole affair. I used to think, for example, that looking at the topography surrounding my old hometown whenever I landed in a plane at the Winnipeg International Airport was the most depressing thing in the world. Hard Core Logo II reminded me that NO - landing at the Regina Airport is far more soul-sucking.

We're guided through this oddball low-key tale, contrasting nicely and unexpectedly with HCL's raging drive, through the laid-back journal entries of filmmaker "Bruce". If anything drives the engine of this happily sputtering engine it's exploitation.

Because this is a Canadian film in a Canadian setting with Canadian characters - the exploitation is, not surprisingly, Canadian. That is, characters gently, subtly remind each other how much they're exploiting each other. McDonald's film captures this exploitation ever-so subtly.

There are the newspaper clippings accusing "Bruce" of exploiting Joe Dick from the original film. There's the implication that Care is exploiting the memory of Joe and furthermore, by possibly pretending to be possessed to get "Bruce" to make a film about her. Bucky accuses "Bruce" of exploiting Care. "Bruce" accuses Bucky of exploiting her. Care accuses both of them of exploiting her. "Bruce" and Bucky gently suggest mutual exploitation of the dead Joe Dick. "Bruce" is clearly exploiting the mad schlepper Wiccan and even the disgraced actor Rufus Melon shows up to exploit "Bruce", in order to party with Care and to get a guest spot with CBC's "Strombo" to declare his "healing".

Gentle, subtle exploitation is always the Canadian way. Canadians prefer smiling and alternately stabbing in the back - gently. They almost never look someone squarely in the eyes to gut them.

And within the context of the world McDonald creates - nobody (much like Canadians in reality) seems to want anything of any real import.

Except for one thing.

And this is the surprising, profoundly and deeply moving aspect of Hard Core Logo II. When it is determined what is truly important, a sacrifice is made - one which takes us into an afterlife and where the spirit of love and of family overtakes and overwhelms us.

I must admit to being taken completely off guard here. I should have seen it coming, since the film is strangely bookended with something so uniquely personal that it's often the element that - subtly - sneaks its way through the entire film. And when this sequence occurs, I must admit that I was touched emotionally in ways I never expected. It's both a heartbreaker and a spirit-lifter.

The movie begins, builds and ends with a humanity that's been hinted at in some of McDonald's earlier work, but explodes in ways that will, I think, especially touch a particular generation of Canadian with an equally particular series of experiences.

The movie is probably not for everyone. Those expecting a replay of McDonald's earlier successes will be denied an easy road. He delivers an offbeat journey and one that perfectly exemplifies a segment of the punk generation - that generation (especially, I think, in Canada) that sprouted at the tail-end of the baby boom and created a whole group of rebels who existed between the hippie sellouts and the Gen-X McJobbers.

The real rebels. Those who truly had to pay a price for their ideals and in so doing, continue to clutch desperately and/or longingly at those things everyone thinks they want, but for this generation, when they discover that wondrous thing, they know it's exactly what makes life worth living.

"Hard Core Logo II" is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and other select cinemas across Canada. It is being released by Alliance Films. For information of tickets, playdates and showtimes at TIFF, click HERE.

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