Paul McEwen: Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (2011) February 4, 2012
Posted by sjroby in Book reviews, Canadian content, Movies, Music.Tags: Bruce McDonald, Hard Core Logo, Michael Turner
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Canadian punk, Canadian literature, Canadian movies… move on if you aren’t interested in at least two of those.
Back in the 1990s, Michael Turner wrote an unconventional novel called Hard Core Logo, telling the story of a punk band reuniting and disintegrating again through letters, lyrics, notes, and other bits of writing. Turner had been in a band and knew the Canadian punk and indie scenes, so the book rang true.
Not too long afterward, Bruce McDonald made the movie Hard Core Logo. A lot of changes were made, many due to the unconventional nature of the book, some because of the different media. McDonald filmed the story as a fake documentary, a move that led to a lot of misleading comparisons to This is Spinal Tap, misleading because Hard Core Logo is emphatically not a comedy, despite a few good laughs here and there. Noel Baker, who wrote the screenplay, wrote a book called Hard Core Roadshow about the process of adapting Turner’s book for the screen.
And now Paul McEwen has written a short volume in the University of Toronto Press Canadian Cinema series on Hard Core Logo. If you’ve seen the BFI Film Classics books or the 33 1/3 album books, you can imagine pretty much what this is like. Anyway, in its relatively few pages, the book does a great job of putting the movie in context — in Bruce McDonald’s career, in the context of Canadian punk, and in the context of Michael Turner’s work, as well. Baker’s book is one of the sources, so it’s not all new if you’re already a fan. But it’s well put together and has some good observations. It even makes me curious about the sequel, which made basically zero impact when it was released.
Before reading the book I watched the movie again, for the first time in… hell, maybe a decade or more. It wasn’t easy. The VCR’s buried in the back of the basement and the DVD is out of print. Even Amazon.com is just selling freshly burned DVD-Rs. So I bought an iTunes download — no special features, pan and scan, $10, and watched it on my iPad, And it’s a damn good movie. Hugh Dillon and Callum Keith Rennie have both moved on to much bigger things, but they’re both very watchable and have solid, believable chemistry. It’s also interesting to see (as noted in the McEwan book) how the roles of the documentary crew and director become more important and more negative as the film goes on. And the ending is still shocking even when you know what’s coming.
And I haven’t even mentioned the two CDs. Maybe later; haven’t listened to them in ages. But at the very least see the movie. If you like it, you may want to read the three books as well.