Fred Goodman's new book, TCM: Rock On Film: The Movies That Rocked the Big Screen, is a reminder of this because unlike most books in TCM's genre-specific series, it doesn't wink out in the seventies with the end of what many consider to be cinema's golden age. Rock On Film boogies on right into the twenty-first century, with its copious bio-pics (Get On Up, Ray), proper docs (Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, Standing in the Shadows of Motown), and fictionalized accounts of the business (8 Mile, Laurel Canyon, Almost Famous).
While Goodman's selections keep things pretty well balanced in terms of the rock film's various sub-genres, they tend to underrepresent the key to the main genre. At its truest, the rock and roll movie reflects that music's innate joy, electricity, wildness, and sincerity, though of the author's fifty picks, only A Hard Day's Night, The T.A.M.I. Show, Stop Making Sense, and Hairspray fully accomplish that. Rock On Film often presents rock on film as a more cynical, serious, or contrived thing, which could have been remedied by moving some items like The Kids Are Alright and The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus from the sidebars to the main features. Surely you'd be hard pressed to find two movies that better sum up rock and roll's joy, electricity, wildness, and sincerity.
Other essentials like Head and Yellow Submarine could have been added to expand the subgenres, since the book is mostly devoid of avant garde rock pics and completely lacking in animation. But in all fairness, the author is up front about the fact that his choices are very personal. The way he lauds Cameron Crowe's cheesily sentimental and inauthentic Almost Famous ("...one of the best American films of the past fifty years." Huh?) or praises several by-the-books biopics, such as the ones about The Runaways and Ian Dury, while seeming suspicious of the atypically artful and moving Love & Mercy, the only rock bio-pic worth a damn as far as I'm concerned, means his personal tastes often don't line up with mine, but it would probably be unfair to hold that against him.
Most of the major rock and roll movies are represented. At least you won't be screaming, "Where the hell is This Is Spinal Tap, The Harder They Come, Purple Rain, Quadrophenia, Rock and Roll High School, The Girl Can't Help It, and Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll?" Plus his entries are reasonably informative, insightful (his assessments of Purple Rain and Hail! Hail! are spot on), and written in the spirit of his funky subject. His supplementary interviews with filmmakers are a very cool addition too. Penelope Spheeris radiates the punk attitude her films do (well, maybe not The Little Rascals), Taylor Hackford is fascinatingly candid about working with the mercurial Chuck Berry, and John Waters, well, I could read his word-for-word transcription of the want ads and be delighted.
