End of the Century (2004)
Directors: Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields
By Don Jacobson
With their 2004 punk rock documentary End of the Century, filmmakers Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields were able shed some light on the essential conflict of rock ‘n’ roll – that of romance vs. commerce, as personified by the bitter antagonism between Joey and Johnny Ramone, the yin and yang of one of the most influential rock bands ever, the Ramones. Their sad but fascinating personal feud reflects the eternal clash of money and art in the music marketplace.
Gramaglia and Fields’ work is not so much a documentary of the mid-’70s New York punk rock scene that spawned the Ramones (although it is that as well) as a much more interesting dissection of the lives and histories of singer Joey (Jeff Hyman), guitarist Johnny (John Cummings) and bassist Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin) Ramone, whose long slide into dysfunction is distressingly spelled out by all three of them as well as such key witnesses as Arturo Vega, the band’s longtime art director; producer and one-time drummer Tommy (Ramone) Erdelyi; tour manager Monte Melnick; and many, many other credible sources.
Several long interviews with band mastermind Johnny Ramone, who died of cancer in 2004 shortly after seeing the film, were especially enlightening. Johnny had long been known as a pretty unfriendly guy and a stern disciplinarian totally dedicated to making as much money as was humanly possible from the Ramones phenomenon. The level of honesty from Johnny – who before his death disputed his unflattering portrayal in the film - seemed debatable to me. He gives clipped and borderline defensive answers when Gramaglia and Fields quiz him about his feud with Joey, which began with Joey’s wanting to stray from Johnny’s hardcore signature buzzsaw sound and got much more personal when he won Joey’s girlfriend away from him. (Johnny remained married to Linda Cummings until his death; Joey died in 2001, also of cancer; the truly screwed-up Dee Dee died of a drug overdose the very next year). Much as he might not have liked it, I get the feeling we see the real Johnny Ramone here: first and foremost a businessman, and a hard one at that.
That revelation sheds considerable light on how the Ramones were able to so revolutionize the rock world even though they never had a chart-topping hit: Johnny Ramone’s determination to keep on touring year after year, in spite of the personal toll it was taking on Joey, Dee Dee and their various drummers, kept the band’s legend alive long enough to inspire the great alternative rock wave of the ‘90s. As New York punk rock journalist Legs McNeil says in the film, “They saved rock ‘n’ roll," and for that we owe Johnny big. But if that’s true, then Joey Ramone is a real rock martyr: He clearly gave his life and health to keep rock alive as a vital art form, battling with Johnny all the way – and for that we owe him even more.
End of the Century is ultimately an engrossing study in how opposites attract in the most tragic and beautiful ways. Through interviews with Joey's mother and their childhood friends and others, we see the emergence of two very different people: nerdy, tall, obsessive-compulsive Jeff Hyman and one-time budding teen criminal John Cummings. Their love of the early punk band the Stooges brought them together in Queens in the early 1970s, and soon they were executing a musical vision that Johnny and drummer/producer Erdelyi had for a variant of the Stooges’ sound: A wall of distorted guitar, a powerful, exceedingly stripped-down blast that both made love to and gleefully destroyed the same sweet, early pop sound of the ‘50s and ‘60s that the Beatles had once more gently used to launch their own revolution. Advances in amplifier technology made the chest-thumping racket possible, and mastering it demanded militaristic on-stage adherence to a deafening formula. But it was so loud, so different, so raw, that its effect was thrilling.
The band immediately became the “next big thing," among the first stars of an emerging independent American recording industry. They were worshipped right off in England, where their first two records inspired a powerful punk culture phenomenon there. One of the best parts of End of the Century is Gramaglia and Field’s interview with Joe Strummer of the Clash, which turned out to be the last interview Strummer gave before his own untimely death from natural causes in 2002. Fittingly, he spent it describing his awe at first hearing the Ramones’ sonic assault live in 1976 and of how it sounded the death knell for the “safe" sort of then-popular rock he sneeringly called “phony Beatlemania." It was the Ramones’ swaggering rejection of the comfortable compromises made in the ‘70s – in music, politics and life in general – that so excited the pissed-off, directionless British youth.
But the Ramones’ shot at the brass ring in their own country fell apart in 1980, when producer Phil Spector was summoned in a last-ditch attempt to make a hit record for them. The accounts from Johnny and especially co-producer Ed Stasium painted a picture of havoc during the making of the album End of the Century, in which Spector bullied, ranted and raved constantly and made the notoriously restless band do take after take of seemingly perfect parts. And in a particularly prescient segment, Stasium describes Spector holding the band hostage in his fenced-in mansion/studio at gunpoint. It wasn’t the first time Phil had displayed his firearms during the session. The stress of making the album contributed to the growing differences between Joey and Johnny: Spector was one of a precious few who heard potential in Joey’s barked singing style and became convinced it held hidden emotional depths. Joey agreed; Johnny didn’t. His take on Spector was skeptical. He says despite the producer’s status as the inventor of “the Wall of Sound" and his work with Beatles both before and after their break-up, he thought Spector was washed up. “Producers are nothing," he says. “So he did some good stuff in the 1960s. Big deal. What has he done lately? The guy hasn’t had a hit in 15 years."
Spector, the film notes, for all the trouble he caused, finally gave the preternaturally shy Joey the confidence he had long needed to develop his vocal style, something which shone through in the band’s later output when Joey’s real range became much more apparent. But Johnny was also right. End of the Century tanked, and no one in the band but Joey much liked it. In the 1980’s, the band, now thoroughly embittered with each other, slogged on through a combination of Johnny’s never-ending work ethic and the others’ dependence on him, with the only real payoff being the thrill of becoming the Ramones on stage every night. Even with the emergence of the Ramones-inspired alternative rock wave of the ‘90s, they couldn’t get a break-out hit. That’s when even Johnny decided enough was enough, and the band, after a farewell tour, hung it up for good in 1996, 22 years after they first got noticed.
Gramaglia and Fields assembled the film on a shoestring budget over a six-year period, and went through many legal hurdles to get the documentary shown. It’s quite an accomplishment. It benefited greatly from the timing of the Ramones’ deaths – something that as fans must have caused the pair great sadness. The fact that three of the band members died either during or shortly after the filming adds an element of pathos and inevitability to what was already essentially a dark story of suffering for art and ideals. It also lends quite a bit to the feeling that this film is an important cultural examination of the end of an era, or, if you will, a century. It has a sweep that only the best music documentaries can achieve and, like the Ramones’ brutally honest brand of rock itself, was clearly a labor of love. l
Contact: don@beachwoodreporter.com
warrior, expects himself to become a exemplar of democracy. Instead, he’s barely keeping his mind together as he roams the city, driven by insomnia, dogged with an inability to relate. His smirk for the man who hires him for the taxi company (Joe Spinell, a signal ’70s character actor) reflects his unhinged, amused contempt for the work-a-day world. He gobbles candy, a cinema staple since Psycho for suggesting the rot of arrested development. His desires—to find a woman, to accomplish fine and brave things—are mostly at odds with his impulses, which are basically to rage, kick, insult, defile, debase, and destroy. The tension between these two opposing states keeps him, for the first two acts of the film, in a muted, awkward, semi-normal stasis. As The Clash would succinctly describe it, Bickle is one of “those who see ghettology as an urban Vietnam." Taxi Driver is the first true Vietnam film in that it deals with its social, intellectual, and emotional fall-out in the terms of the conflict’s experience. 
Betsy’s (Cybill Shepherd) faux-intellectual quotation of Kris Kristofferson, the pseudo-advice of Wizard (Peter Boyle), through to bathing in the sublime idiocy of The Young and The Restless, soft rock on American Bandstand, and combating Iris’s (Jodie Foster) idea that her lifestyle is in some fashion “hip," that is, self-liberating. No wonder his training regimen has an aspect of Buddhist self-abnegation. Travis wants to strip himself down to a concept of pure force, and remove himself from this realm of gibberish entirely. 
uncannily like the tripe that would soon gain Ronald Reagan the White House. Betsy’s engaged in a go-nowhere romance with witty but so-not-butch co-worker Tom (Albert Brooks). Tom is everything Travis isn’t—easy, witty, safely asexual. In Schrader’s script, he was a standard, whitebread, pretty boy, a dully easy match for Betsy. By casting Brooks, Tom becomes the nebbishy kind of guy who makes a career out whining about not getting the girls, thus getting all the girls. 
Two missions appeal to Travis: assassinating Palantine and rescuing 12-year-old prostitute Ivy from her pimp, “Sport" Matthew (Harvey Keitel). Travis first met Iris when she tried to escape from Sport in Travis’ taxi. Sport bought his inaction with a crumpled bill made by some act of alchemy to resemble a soiled condom. Travis keeps it as a marker for some future rite of vengeance. Both scenarios offer electric transcendence, and the instant fame of the assassination trumps. But Palantine’s secret service goons spot him, so Travis instead goes off to kill Sport and the timekeeper (Murray Mosten) in their tenement block base. 
curiously heroic example of the sort of sociopath who’s good to have on our side (Wyatt Earp). By mimicking the varmint-plugging structure of a John Wayne film, Taxi Driver retains its driving quality. De Niro, in his improvised “You talkin’ to me?" scenes, is quoting Shane, and Travis reminds us how much heroism can be divorced from moral sensibility, as he blows the concierge’s hand off, shoots Sport in the stomach without giving him a chance to arm himself, and riddles one of Iris’s johns with holes. Much like those Wild West titans, Travis is lauded for his actions by the popular press purely for being, for converting thought and impulse into action. 
Michael Chapman working his butt off), bending perspective through the gravity of Travis’ perception, and only finding clear-eyed calm when Travis converses with Betsy and Iris in mirroring scenes. Taxi Driver reveals Scorsese’s potent capacity to charge objects with totemic, fetishist import; for example, when Travis cavorts with his guns and weapons, it is as chillingly clear as the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey handling bones and realizing potential. Both scenes that have become iconic for masturbatory latent violence. Scorsese’s previous heroes are lost in maelstroms of ethical and physical confusion. Travis Bickle is the first to emerge from the other side. 
Some time later, a nice summer day finds many people picnicking near the Han. At a grocery stand lays our hero Gang-du Park (Kang-ho Song), a dyed-blond hulk of a man sound asleep at the counter. His father Hie-bong Park (Hie-bong Byeon) comes up to him, lifts Gang-du’s head up and scrapes off the coins that have clung to his cheek. He tells Gang-du to grill three squid for the people sitting on mat 4. The sleepy son grabs some dried squid from a box and takes them to the grill, breaking off one of the tentacles to chew on himself. 
enormous creature obviously inspired by Predator leaps onto land and starts grabbing people in its enormous maw. A pandemonium of fleeing people, an idiotically courageous American, a trailer-load of sitting ducks, and of course, Gang-du and Hyun-seo, have their close encounters. When Gang-du and Hyun-seo lose contact, the creature manages to wrap its tail around the girl and flee back to the river. For the rest of the film, the Park family will have to elude both the creature and the authorities that are attempting to quarantine them as they make superhuman efforts to rescue Hyun-seo.
The most comically bizarre moments are reserved for Americans. The story has gotten around that the monster is the host of a deadly virus. An American commander who came in contact with the monster apparently has died of some plague-like disease, weeping buboes covering his face like bee stings. The Parks initially escape quarantine to search for Hyun-seo, but Gang-du is recaptured. He is approached by a Korean doctor (Brian Rhee) and a cross-eyed American doctor (Paul Lazar) who appear initially sympathetic to his pleas. After the Korean attendants are sent away, the American doctor confides that there were no traces of a virus in the American commander. He looks at Gang-du and taps the front of his skull. “It’s here. It’s in there. I’m going to find that virus." Gang-du is prepared for brain surgery. When he escapes yet again, he runs through a supposedly secure area where the American troops are drinking beer and barbecuing steaks as though they were in the largest Green Zone in the world.
danger Hyun-seo is in, trapped in a sewer that is periodically visited by the monster who regurgitates human bones and then goes looking for more to eat. A scene where she attempts to escape by climbing up the back of the apparently sleeping monster is one of the most perfectly pitched I’ve ever seen, every edit and shot perfectly conceived and constructed for maximum effect. The Park family’s heroism and ingenuity are testament to the strong ties that bind them together and give audiences a reason to care deeply about what happens to them. 
Both a victim and benefactor of this town’s cottage industry is Arthur (Terry Camilleri), whose brother George is killed when their car and caravan are harvested by the, um, traffic lights. For reasons not entirely clear to me, The Mayor (John Meillon) declares that “we’re keeping him" and moves Arthur into his home to recover. Arthur is heartsick at the loss of his brother, who he believes would not have died if Arthur were driving. You see, Arthur ran over an old man only a couple of years before, and though he was acquitted of reckless homicide charges, he hasn’t been able to drive since.
Following this exposure to the town “mascots," Arthur, though exceedingly meek, makes several attempts to leave Paris. Each time, The Mayor cajoles him to stay, finally asking Arthur if he would like to be adopted as the son The Mayor never had. Although The Mayor and his wife Beth (Melissa Jafer) have two children, “They aren’t ours. They’re orphans." Wonder how that happened. So, Arthur settles, if somewhat uneasily, into Paris. To cement Arthur’s place of honor and carry on in the grand tradition of politicians everywhere, The Mayor appoints Arthur the parking supervisor of Paris, and gives him a fancy armband to wear. While it doesn’t appear that Paris has a parking problem, Arthur, nonetheless, patrols the streets. He comes across some young blokes whose cars look like fugitives from a Mad Max movie. When he asks one of them to move his car, it appears a confrontation might occur. Instead, the lad says, "Sure. Anything to oblige." In Paris, as in other cities, you don’t argue with City Hall or its son. 
Outside the hall, a growling animal is heard, then another. The town’s youth have surrounded the hall with their cars and begin smashing through the walls and chasing the fleeing guests. In a scene inspired by a hundred epic movies, one brave elder lashes out at the cars, running toward them swinging a mechanic’s tool. Unlike these epic films, in which the hero invariably rises above the fray, the elder is impaled on a porcupine car. 
Consumerism is roundly assaulted. The film itself opens with what we learn is a cigarette ad, showing an attractive young couple driving out in their sportster, buying a painting at a charming country boutique, and then smashing their car down a ravine. The Mayor’s wife tries to comfort Arthur by showing him her mink coat—second-hand, of course, and she’s not allowed to wear it outside because The Mayor doesn’t want her to look too posh; there might be a revolt over the scoliotic backbone that supports Paris’ economy. The car culture itself is shown to be perverted and as all-consuming as the movie’s title suggests. Youth rebellion, however, doesn't seem to be the hope for the future. If Arthur's trading killing for driving is any indication, the next generation won't look much better than the last, though the indefinite ending leaves room for speculation.
church, trying not to fuck with the infinite. The opening credits show all these guys when they were younger, fooling about with a Super 8 camera (Scorsese would later use the ghostly, nostalgic texture of such films to even more powerful effect in Raging Bull). They were young and friends then. They still are, but the types of men they choose to be are the subject of Mean Streets, and how making the wrong choices can put you in the shit. 
room owner, Johnny’s mouthing off (“A mook?…What’s a mook?"), his tinny truculence and adolescent attitude, precipitates an all-in brawl that sees our lads careening off walls, dancing on pool tables, swinging broken pool cues, fighting three-to-one, until the clash is busted up by cops who accept taxi fare to Philadelphia to go away. Johnny even blows the resulting truce, and he and his pals flee in a flurry of index fingers and insults. 
Johnny talkings-to, admonitions, even slaps, but no decent sums of cash, no offers of a job to help him pay his debts. Nonetheless, Johnny, Charlie, and Theresa all love each other; before being collectively crucified for loving too much, the trio find a fraternity and catharsis for themselves. Mean Streets is a film about love, and Marty will never, after virtually eviscerating the emotion at the end of the film, be so loving again. 
Markus is off with his squad to a firefighting training in a town about and hour’s drive away. At a banquet on the first night, the beer and schnapps flow freely. Several of the men dance with the waitresses. Markus is shown dancing alone, almost in a trance, to a song in English about tragic love. When we see him next, he is rousing from a deep slumber. He is in the flat of Rose (Anett Dornbusch), one of the waitresses. He doesn’t remember what happened. Over the next few days of the training, he spends all his spare time with Rose. 
The film was made with nonactors and very little dialogue, thus giving us people we can’t recognize who aren’t very good at helping us feel what they are feeling to help us make sense of the moral dilemma. I tend to think it was the director’s intention to make this an everyman story in this way, but for a film that is only 88 minutes long, the journey is tedious and without any truly meaningful clues as to what these people are really like. It is impossible to know what choice Markus made—or was made for him by the women in his life—because we don’t really know anything about these people. The situation of sin and regret certainly is universal, but when we are left with children making the guesses, it’s obvious that this film is really just a philosophical game we’ve been led to play. I must say that I didn’t feel intrigued or challenged—only frustrated. 
the village of Estola, kills the happiest man in the county, and captures young Uru. Crude computer animation shows the German troops moving across a map of Northern Europe (encountering small animations of cattle fighting, eating, and fornicating) and then sailing aimlessly until they finally crash into the port of Lubeck. There, Uru is baptized and receives a Christian education that naturally involves repeated floggings and being locked into a box where the “dark clouds gather"—a bare butt covers a hole at the top of the box and the rest is left to our disgusted imagination. 
Germany will be kept. He has important planing to do on the lintel of his front door. Wood shavings cram his synthetic beard. He pulls one of them off, takes a bite, then offers one to Uru. When Uru says that the time for work is over, Lembitu agrees and calls for the evening singing hour. A square dance through the mud ensues. 
Some of the sight gags in this film are absolutely amazing. I was particularly taken with what happens to a French agent who eats a smuggled Estonian frog, only to discover that it contains a contagion worse than the bubonic plague. The man’s face literally melts as his panicked countrymen flounce about the room. Another side-splitting scene involves two fallen elders who talk about their funerals. One of them says he’d like to be buried. He’d bury himself if only his arms hadn’t been cut off. His comrade agrees to dig him a hole, even though it will cause him excrutiating pain. I was helpless with laughter watching him shuffle his body against the dirt while his comrade napped.
different arena. Instead, Magnuson urged Nomi to perform in the New Wave Vaudeville Show, where his ethereal rendering of “Mon coeur s’ouver a ta voix" from Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah while wearing kabuki make-up and an angular plastic tunic mesmerized the cynical insider crowd. So odd was his look and his voice that the emcee had to come out every night he performed and assure the audience that he was not lip-synching to a recording.
bit overblown. This type of imagery was part of the late 70s and 80s zeitgeist, popularized by the band Devo and the great appropriator David Bowie. Bowie, hearing about Nomi’s popularity, asked him and his bandmate Joey Arias to perform back-up for Bowie’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, during which Bowie grabbed Nomi’s style. What to Bowie was just another reinvention was the essence of Nomi. Watching that clip was like watching bluesmen being ripped off by Elvis Presley—and irony for Nomi, who loved Elvis.
bodies. Esme, who could be a soccer mom in the United States, seems out of place as she weaves through the crowd, whispers in a man’s ear, and is directed to an office. There, Saran (Bogan Diklic), the club’s owner, asks her some questions about her availability for working nights and whether she has kids. No problem, Esme answers. No kid, either. “You have to be crazy to have kids these days," offers a cynical Saran. He asks her to pick a game for him to place a bet on. She unconventionally picks an away game for his team. He decides to take her advice to see if she will be lucky for him. To a man like Saran, women are mascots, sexual conveniences, and favors offered to friends. 
sounds it, this is not a standard pick-up line. He asks Esme if she ever went to post-mortem identifications. Yes. “Who are you looking for?"he asks. “I found him. My father," replies Esme. Pelda, too has been looking for his father among the corpses of recently exhumed mass graves in and around Grbavica. Once he was sure he had found his father and talked and cried to him. Suddenly, a woman came up and claimed the body was her father. She identified him the same way Pelda did—black boots and wrist watch. “You know, I got really close to that man," said Pelda. “I even went to his funeral."
Bertha’s the auburn-haired, dress-bursting peach of a daughter of a barnstorming crop duster. In the pre-title sequence, he’s sent aloft in a rickety plane by unscrupulous capitalist types. A bunch of workmen, including perpetually cop-dodging labor leader Big Bill Shelly (David Carradine, warming up for Woody Guthrie), and her pal, blues-blowing man-mountain Von Morton (Bernie Casey), watch with her in grief as Daddy crashes, and immediately start pummeling the men who have caused his death. Bertha wanders the highways and byways looking for a way to survive without becoming a prostitute. She’s in love with Bill—their unions are always sexually explosive (hello, skin)—but because he’s constantly pursued by strike breakers, they never can stay together. 
The one place Bill is safe is giving speeches. In an hilarious scene, he points out two “McIvers," aka, railroad-employed private detectives (Victor Argo and David Osterhout, who resemble a malevolent Laurel and Hardy), to his crowd of attentive strikers, ordering them to beat the pair up. “Bullshit!" the McIvers blurt before bolting. Vengeance is theirs. When the strikers are jailed by redneck cops and Von is bullied, the prisoners start fighting back. They take the cops easily, but the McIvers calmly march in with shotguns and randomly blow holes in the rioters until the jail is a sea of carnage. 
she finds Von, who has been released. He reveals Bill has escaped. Von takes her to the shack where Bill is holed up, and she finds a gray-haired wreck of a man, ponderously penning radical tracts like a down-home Trotsky. Bertha stirs Bill back to passion, and Von leaves them alone. As they leave the shack, they are set upon by the McIvers and hillbilly thugs. As a final punishment for the offending rebel, they crucify Bill on the door of a boxcar, forcing Bertha to watch. 
It’s also Scorsese’s first film to really deal in violence. When guns fire, Scorsese amplifies the sound to the point where shotguns sound like cannons and blow bloody gouges in people. When someone gets hurt, you feel it. I’ve rarely been happier to see a bunch of bad guys shot than at the end of this one, and when Von returns, takes up one of the McIvers’ shotguns, and massacres the thugs as they smugly watch Bill’s crucifixion, it’s hard not to cheer. Scorsese’s staging establishes his career’s dichotomist view of violence. He can’t really see Von’s outrage as a triumph (especially as he’s too late to save Bill) and Von, judging by his baleful final expression, finds even justified violence degrading and soul-depleting. All the ethic of violent repression practiced by the McIvers and Sartoris has accomplished is brutalizing everyone. In storyboarding the crucifixion scene, Scorsese specified the nails that pierce Bill’s hands be seen protruding from the wood, smeared with blood, visceral but avoiding a Mel Gibson horror show; he would repeat the shot later in The Last Temptation of Christ. 
