Wednesday night I went to see the Ramones movie, “End of the Century”, on the last night of its two-week run in the Nation’s Capital (nice to see more than the usual token small handful of punters in attendance at Electric Shadows, too). It was, of course, a terrific film. Given the subject matter, it could hardly not be.
What I walked out with was a nagging feeling that it was reminding me of something else. At 5.55 this morning I realised: it was like a Wes Anderson movie - a bunch of oddball characters in ridiculous and frequently hilarious set-ups; except that all the characters are either doomed, or sad, or tragic, or cast adrift in some way, so that it is fundamentally not a comedy (making one’s own laughter increasingly uncomfortable). And, of course, unlike a Wes Anderson movie, it is all a true story.
And, it turns out that Johnny was the most screwed up of them all. It's alway the quiet ones.
