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Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

A Jonathan Demme-penned bit of mildly condescending anti-commercialism about a worryingly young-looking Diane ‘Rumblefish’ Lane and pals (including Laura Dern) forming a hopeless band and rising to stratospheric fame levels, then inevitably pissing it up the wall, it sits squarely in the rather broad middleground somewhere between This Is Spinal Tap, Jubilee and Pop Pirates. Good things – Lane’s proto-Bow-Wow-Wow haircut (achieved entirely with wigs, it says here), Fee ‘Tubes’ Waybill’s stoked-up Gene Simmonsalike ‘old fart’, and Ray Winstone’s decidedly Shane Ritchie countenance. Bad things – a half-arsed Rastafarian bus driver character and a climactic gig finale which obviously blew all the remaining budget, resulting in one of the hastiest endings to any film this side of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Still, the sludgy, biscuitty, found-on-Quentin-Crisp’s-floor quality of the print helped add a different kind of grit when the script ran out of the dramatic variety. Professional!

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  1. Matt Patton

    August 3, 2010 at 7:36 pm

    Everything Jonathan Demme pens is mildly condescending — Jonathan Demme is mild condescension made flesh and blood

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