“TURN IT AROUND: THE STORY OF EAST BAY PUNK” My rating C+ (Opens Aug. 12 at Screenland Tapcade)
155 minutes | No MPAA rating
Exhausting but nevertheless energetic, “Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk” contains more information than most of us will never need to know about the rise of punk music in the San Franscisco area.
Corbett Redford and Anthony Machitiello’s polished documentary is clearly an act of love. They bring to the table an encyclopedic knowledge of the scene, the bands and players who made the music, the promoters who gave them places to perform, the underground media types who chronicled and promoted the movement.
Narrated by none other than the great Iggy Pop, this massive opus (2 hours, 35 minutes) mixes clever animation, talking heads, old performance footage and vintage graphics to lay out the tale.
Over in posh San Francisco the fading hippie movement was still wallowing in its own musical decline (in this telling Fillmore Ballroom promoter Bill Graham comes off as a hopeless tool of the establishment). But across the bay in Berkeley and in a host of nondescript working-class cities the kids were creating their own sound, inspired by the British punk movement but with its own indelible American stamp.
The music was driving and relentless (guitar solos were sneered at) and the lyrics embraced teen angst and fierce opposition to the system. Any system.
The film does capture the us-vs.-them attitude that prevailed among young punk purveyors and fans, and there’s just enough of the music on the soundtrack to give you a sense of the chaotic, liberating scene.
Drawbacks? Well there are maybe three dozen interviewees, ranging from minor players to major figures (Jello Biafra, Billy Joe Armstrong), and while it’s amusing to witness the plump middle age into which so many of these snarling rebels have slid, most of them are limited to, like, two sentences of on-camera talk before something else fills the screen.
The audience for “Turn It Around” mostly will be limited to hard-core punk fans. But they will not be disappointed.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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