Dig! (2004)

Sadly Over-hyped

Absolutely the worst movie.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

The fickle nature of the music industry is well known. Most bands will try and flounder with a whimper; true visionaries will fail to find an audience or be deemed as too great a risk by the corporate machine; and the pretty but talent-free will strike it rich with one instantly forgettable tune after another. It's been documented in film before, but never in such brutal, in-your-face detail as Ondi Timoner's documentary Dig!. The cameras followed bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre for seven years, covering their friendship during the bright-eyed, let's-change-the-world beginnings to the bitter rivalry that formed between them as one made it big and the other struggled in infamy.Both bands wanted to start a music revolution - one that would see artists take back control from the industry heads who ultimately lacked vision - by refusing to sell out. The Dandy Warhols' professionalism and willingness to bend as long as it avoided breaking meant that their star rose with increasing speed, before Bohemian Like You was snapped up by a mobile phone company and they became an overnight sensation, particularly here in the UK. This savviness is mistaken for bending over by BJM frontman Anton Newcombe, and soon Dandy lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor is receiving strange packages containing shotgun cartridges. Meanwhile, Newcombe's increasingly threatening behaviour towards everyone around him sees his band often struggle to make it through a set without brawling on stage. BJM were descending quickly from the next big thing to a circus sideshow.Despite the chaos on screen, Timoner never loses sight of Newcombe's raw talent. His actions can be blamed on mental illness, egomania or copious amount of heroin, but he is the real deal, pouring everything into his work and banging out records at a miraculous rate (they released three albums in 1996 alone). The genius and madness meld together to create an image of a man worn down by his philosophy, someone who preached love but only ever gave any to himself. His descent is both tragic and funny, and every fight, argument and storm-out is captured by Timoner's ever-present camera. For a film ultimately echoing Newcombe's views on a corporate mechanism more interested in money than artistry, Dig! somehow forgets the music itself. The odd bar or snippet can be heard here and there, but it's usually interrupted by some act of self-destruction or other. Ultimately however, Dig! is a fascinating study of the idea of selling-out and a must-see for music fans, serving as a cautionary tale for anyone considering starting a band.

At first I thought someone had pulled a "I'm Still Here"/"This Is Spinal Tap" on me, laughing at the amazingly over-the-top pretense of the Brian Jonestown Massacre's front flame-out Anton Newcombe (not to mention the antics of the rest of the band), and the dead-pan enthusiastically reverent BJ that all of their hipster critics gave the BJM throughout the film (yeah, that means you too, Courtney-Courtney)... Then it got sad with poor Anton's family BIOGRAPHY, and then got a little better with the revelation that Anton is STILL (as of '04) kicking ass-- despite his history of treating his band mates like fertilizer; and yet the ever wonderful Portland, Oregon's Indie darlings The Dandy Warhols just keep chugging along, charming the world. Overall review? Meh. Brian Jonestown Massacre are/were a retro piece of merde, wanna-be psyche band (newsflash-- THE GAL-DERN SIXTIES ARE O-VER)... meanwhile, I still kinda dig the Dandys (hey, I'm from Portland-- and have gotta support the home team even tho' they do not decimate PDX venues).

Shot into car from through the windscreen, someone is playing someone else their latest song, someone else didn't react, according to the voice-over. I just wonder how that came to be made. There were too many scenes in this movie that I wondered about how come a camera was there. If the scenes shot where the Warhols descended on a BJM post-party are true then that was inexcusable exploitation to the max, if not, then it was a total fabrication, either way it made me uncomfortable, if that was the purpose? All the way thru this movie I kept wondering how the footage came about. Taken at face value, a nice portrait of the (tortured) genius we all believe ourselves to be.

The filmmakers started out on their project by wanting to cover various underground bands and how they survive in the music industry. They settled on The Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. The BJM are a band whose stubborn idealism and integrity (and lack of commercial accessibility) keeps them in the underground, and The DWs are a band who sell out what potential they had in order to assimilate into the pop, easy-to-market, vacuous-MTV-wannabe-hip world of super-adoration and fame. The film mostly focuses on The BJM's leader, Anton Newcombe, who is Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, Klaus Kinski and Anton Artaud all wrapped in one. Of course a colorful, often frightening figure like that is going to make for some cool footage, but the film is extremely unbalanced in the way they present the artists and the world they inhabit. The entire film gets stuck into either exploiting every single conflict that ensues or in including endless clichéd footage of partying-down scenes. These could be any bands, but the filmmakers DID choose these particular bands so… why not show us why? It's hard for me to fathom how those who aren't familiar with The BJM's music will be able to grasp how great the band is simply from the intermittent snippets of songs that we get to see and hear. If we didn't constantly have people telling us how great Anton and The BJM are, it would be difficult for us to know. The first rule in making a documentary is to SHOW why the subject you are documenting is worth documenting (and not simply inviting a bunch of pundits to tell us why). Is it too much to ask that a documentary about musicians actually show the bands performing at least a few songs uninterrupted? Are audiences attention spans really so limited these days? Perhaps I have a chip on my shoulder because like Anton, all I care about is the music. I don't care how cool someone's hair looks or if they are "post-modern retro whatever". I don't watch music videos or even notice album covers. But this whole film is stylized to fit the sort of disheveled "I just woke up with a hangover and I'm too f**ked up to care" look (in other words this will certainly be a hit on MTV). It's so consumed in its anti-style and sensationalism (oh good, it's another fight scene!), that it completely forgot about what counts: the music. I think I'd be afraid to meet Anton Newcombe in real life, but I certainly embrace his musical spirit. I hope he continues making great music and that one day, some filmmakers will give his genius a chance to speak for itself.