Share
Trite Rabbit: Predictable Psychotronic Pseudo-Biopic
Jessica Winter
Tuesday, March 14th 2006
-
photo: Kerry Brown
Animated waxworks: Monet Mazur and Gregory
Details:
Directed by Stephen Woolley
Screen Media, opens March 24, Landmark Sunshine
Construction foreman Frank Thorogood allegedly admitted on his deathbed to the murder of Rolling Stones founding fop Brian Jones, and Stoned, the first feature directed by veteran British producer Stephen Woolley, takes this confession at face value, portraying the passive-aggressive relationship between the smug, infantile dandy Jones (Leo Gregory) and the uptight, working-class bloke Thorogood (Paddy Considine) as a "death by misadventure" waiting to happen. Stoned stumbles upon any number of possible themes—songwriting, performance, fame, addiction, class conflict—and toddles distractedly away from all of them, its smothering style an amalgam of the standardized pretensions of a turn-of-the-'70s head movie (free-associative editing, an LSD trip scored to "White Rabbit") and the stultifying conventions of the biopic (a BBC report explains Jones's influence, Jones himself is prone to reciting autobiographical flashback cues, etc.). The pointlessly jumbled chronology suggests a film assembled at random, and the parade of miming look-alikes (Mick & Keith, Anita Pallenberg) and dutifully restaged anecdotes resembles an animated waxworks—the period upholstery is a death shroud, while the lysergic flow of lurid color acts as embalming fluid. The rock hero starts out dead and so does the movie.
Recent Articles
More by Jessica Winter
FEVA Dream
The East Village's Howl festival collapses amid mudslinging, debt, and broken promises
Secrets and Guys
Spring awakenings lead to immature flashbacks
Minor Threat
Does 'The Daily Show' really make college students apathetic?
Built to Spill
Chapter two in the solitary woman trilogy
Blade Runner
Frothy fight scenes and anti-military bitch slaps
Site Search «
Most Popular
-
The Strangest Landlord-Tenant Relationship In Town? Stacked up in cubicles for decades, immigrants living in a Bowery tenement may have a very unusual situation.
-
The Pet-Death Business All dogs go to heaven. Yours will probably get there in an urn.
- We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?
- On Michael Jackson's Mercifully Goofy, Cheerful This Is It
-
The Secret Life of Girls On the latest blog-rock sensation's improbable, somewhat verifiable backstory
| buy, sell, trade 10,294 | musician 3,561 |
| rentals 13,069 | jobs 2,289 |
| adult entertainment 35,227 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|