Simply Perfect

Just perfect...

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

In this well paced, very affectionate doco, Joe Strummer comes across as a very intelligent, spirited, charismatic man who wasn't perfect but had an impact on many people around the world. He very much made the most of his life, and was tough as nails yet artistic and generous. From a quite alienating childhood in boarding school, and periods in his 20s living in squats and drifting somewhat, he carved out his own path for others to follow. He was mentally strong, whereas his brother, from the same background, was not, and took his own life. Strummer realised he would have to make things happen because no one else would. Having started in dirty, sweaty pubs,the doco shows how very strange and hard to handle it was when Strummer and his bandmates won fame and fortune and played the huge stadiums. Unlike the Stones, they seemed to have an ethos that didn't adjust well to the popular scene. Srummer wasn't conventional in his instrumental or vocal or songwriting style, yet people loved him because he conveyed it with passion. As one interviewee said, he might have grown up fairly well off as the son of a diplomat, but he he wasn't a phoney. The format of interviewing friends and relatives around campfires -- combined with historical concert footage and interviews, montages and even cartoons -- works very well. Criticisms include that his girlfriends tend to appear and disappear with no explanation: one minute he's with the Bolivian girl, the next with a string of British blondes. Also, why no subtitles giving the names of all those people interviewed around the campfire? I guess we're supposed to be cool enough to just know them.

The Clash were one of the greatest bands in music history. No they weren't the Beatles or Stones or Zeppelin but they continued on the tradition of revoloutionizing the music and style of their times. Later they became true recording artists on Sandinista and Combat Rock. As it turns out fame got to them, just as it had the previous bands mentioned. Julien Temple's bio of Joe Strummer will not disappoint , as it portrays a man who definitely expressed the spirit of the band's anarchistic take no prisoners nature. Also as a movie it has great style , pace, and the intermingling of actual home film, with concert footage, and reminisces by colleagues works very well. The sound track would be nice to get.

I love the music of the Clash and I love the music of Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros. I went to this movie hoping to learn about the man behind most of that. But I came out of the theatre not knowing much more about Joe than I already did after reading the entry on Wikipedia. The movie never really gets through to the person, his thoughts and feelings. What they did was to collect the little material that they had, shaky blurry videos and to interview some people about Joe Strummer at a camp fire. It turns out that most of these people knew him very little or not at all, and that the director just wanted them in the movie in order to have some more celebrities say, "Oh, he was such an inspiration to all of us". Like Bono or Johnny Depp (whom they seemingly asked to keep his pirate costume on to benefit from his current success in Pirates of the Caribbean). It seems that the director could not even wait until the body was cold before he jumped in to sell his version of "the greatest punk rocker and hippie at heart" that ever lived, sanctifying the person without really knowing enough about him.Sure, being a fan i enjoyed seeing the images of the band, hearing the anecdotes behind the songs and such, but in the end I felt like what remained as the portrait of Joe Strummer could have easily been told in 60-90 minutes.Go see the movie if you are a fan, otherwise better listen to some music of the Clash or even better the undeservedly unknown Mescaleros, where Joe Strummer reached the peak of his musical development before his death, melting all his rich influences together to one amazing sound.

Wow, I was blown away by this film. Despite having been born in 1990, and not having got into punk 'til 1 1/2 years after Joe's death (something I'm constantly kicking myself for), this film made me feel involved in his life + the '70s punk scene, as though I actually lived it. That's the sign of a pretty feckin' good film, if you ask me.I found the format to be fantastically original (everything from having Joe 'narrate' through his radio show, to the use of his cartoons and the campfire interviews), the content was thorough but not overly concerned with trivial details, and it was just generally a warm, involving + insightful portrayal of Joe's life and the British punk scene.Fantastic. See it.