THE FILTH AND THE FURY

2000

JULIEN TEMPLE

Ptuuui! Eat my spit, wanker! Goodnight, shite-heads!

And more like that. Temple's "insider" documentary--which includes archive interviews with Sid Vicious and new interviews with Sid's fellow Sex Pistols John Lydon and Paul Cook--offers plenty of punk 'tude and not much narrative organization. The background footage on the band's early days is sometimes interesting, but Temple's intercutting of all the interviews and footage with random pop culture tidbits from punk-era commercials and movies is more distracting than meaningful. Band impresario Malcolm McLaren chips in a goofy interview in which he's hermetically sealed in a latex bondage outfit, to little effect. And Temple's decision to shoot the recent interviews with Johnny Rotten and the other surviving band members with their faces totally shadowed, like whistle-blowing poultry-pluckers on 60 Minutes, seems intended to hide the fact that these worthies are now wrinkled old farts themselves. Fans of the band won't be bored, but on the whole Temple's few variations from the VH-1 Behind-the-Music format hurt more than they help, and Rotten's sneering "Do you ever feel like you've been cheat-ed?" will sting anew. For a real punk documentary, watch Crumb again.