Synopsis
From Sunrise Pictures, the long awaited Adam Ant documentary film, directed by Jack Bond. Featuring Charlotte Rampling, Mark Ronson, Jamie Reynolds, Allen Jones, John Robb.
From Sunrise Pictures, the long awaited Adam Ant documentary film, directed by Jack Bond. Featuring Charlotte Rampling, Mark Ronson, Jamie Reynolds, Allen Jones, John Robb.
Adam is special.
But now he’s s a fallen angel. It’s basically a home video where he’s desperately trying to be relevant, wild and dangerous. Out of tune guitars and out of time drummers, beer midday and chain-smoking, irresistible shallowness and narcissism, swearing and spitting.
Interesting and sad in the same time.
That being said I still like the guy and feel for him.
I read about this some time back and have been wanting to catch up with it as the trailer gave a really promising premise of how Ant at the hight of his career dropped off the map due to mental health issues and other trouble... Now his time had come to resurface and claim his place.
But it's just a tedious piece of boredom that never discusses anything of what happened or gives any insight into the story or what so ever or the golden nugget of how Ant became a victim of hos own mental health problems... Its basically a fly on the wall, following Adam Ant around as he poses his way, ironically as a second bit Johnny Depp, even through he originated the look, through his "comeback" tour.
Only really good bits are when he meets Charlotte Rampling and artist Allen Jones, and that's nowhere near enough to hang a film off.
Full disclosure: I am and have been an avid Adam Ant fan for over a decade. Taking a chance on 'The Essential Adam Ant' after viewing Derek Jarman's JUBILEE (1978) in or around 2004 made an enormous impression on me, although I did not expect that at the time. Though I worked backward from that greatest hits album - or partially as a result of it - I haven't followed his music beyond 2005. Even as a fan, this was one of the absolute worst, most thoughtlessly-constructed movies - especially of the nonfiction subgenre - that I've ever seen.
Not unfoundedly, I expected this to be an essay film about the resurrection of the titular dandy highwayman and a heartwarming…
Although the introduction suggests that this is a documentary about Adam Ant's journey back into the music industry following his troubles with mental illness, the reality is nothing of the sort. Instead, what we get is a series of fly-on-the-wall scenes in which Ant simply goes about doing his thing. Sometimes his thing is performing on stage. More often, it's chatting with people. And these conversations are presented without context, and largely without editing, whether they're interesting or not. And usually, they're not. Even when Ant is shown talking with people like Charlotte Rampling, John Robb and Mark Ronson, it's seriously boring stuff. Almost everything feels like it should've been left on the cutting room floor, as if director Jack…