The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

Best movie of this year hands down!

You won't be disappointed!

That was an excellent one.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

calling this film a 'mockumentary' or fictional is an inaccurate description. sure Malcolm McLaren might be a first class(definitely first class though)A-hole, but much of what takes place here really did happen to the 'Pistols' during their exploits. also anyone lashing out at this film entirely misses the point. it's not a film applauding Malcolm McLaren, hardly, it's a very detached and humorous film art concocted by the clever and talented Julien Temple. anyone mindlessly trashing a Julien Temple film without taking into account the director's skill and reputation is being a little child-like. Julien Temple is a great film maker who shouldn't be so easily dismissed by a few jabbing remarks.don't be so naive. this isn't McLaren's film, it's Julien Temple's. anyone who thinks this is a film by McLaren has their information all wrong.if you are a real 'Sex Pistol' fan, how can you so easily dismiss the great music number with Sid Vicious singing his cover of "My Way"? didn't you know that Julien Temple directed that for this particular film? that music cover is an important footnote in the 'Pistols' history. how can you say you love the band or Sid and then just dismiss that like it was nothing.their are many great and hilarious moments in this film (most of them real) that are due to the skill of Julien Temple as a film maker. the scene where Sid "El KaBongs" a redneck with his guitar is a hilarious example of how the boundaries of real life and cartoon violence can become blurred. there are many other great music numbers and animation in this film, plus interesting little anecdotes like the story of Johnny being attacked by thugs.anyone telling you not to watch this and that it's not a great piece of 'Sex Pistol' history, has probably become disturbingly involved in the dispute between Lydon and McLaren on a personal level. to become involved with celebrities on that level is, well, MORONIC. you don't know them personally, even though it can feel like it. people should remain detached when enjoying celebrity culture. too much personal involvement makes you miss the message of things. like the fact that this is a Julien Temple film and not an endorsement of Malcolm McLaren.

It really surprises me that anyone can say this is remotely important in the pantheon of Punk Rock. It's an incoherent abomination formulated by someone so submerged in his own world he forgot to tell a story of note. The story of The Sex Pistols has now, here in the new millennium, finally been laid down to some semblance of truth, a truth that thankfully shows the manager of the band to be the oblivious money grabber he was. When you watch director Julien Temple's brilliant documentary, The Filth And The Fury, and then come back to this mess of a picture, you wonder how in gods name it has achieved cult status.Its worth (I own it) comes down to the songs and the videos of those tunes, I mean where else are you going to get to see Sid Vicious' videos? Ones that show us he would have made a great Punk singer had he not spiralled out of control and met a foggy heroin fuelled death. The animated ending as Friggin In The Riggin plays out is enough to warrant this as a small price purchase, but please folks can we have some focus, I lived it, I still live it in fact, but it's an appalling picture, badly edited, badly told and saved purely by the music alone. Music that the band's manager had no creative input into at all, he shall forever be nameless to me, where once he proclaimed to be a puppet master, time now shows him to purely be a Muppet and most definitely not a master of anything.The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, 5/10 for the music alone.

If you ever wondered how boy bands (yes, even though the Sex Pistols are antipodes to the cosmetic-fairy image of boy bands the principle is the same) are created then this is a must see.The film has a feel of being made fast and cheap but hey its the Sex Pistols so what do you expect?? A misplaced, angry bunch of hoodlums put together to form the most extreme opposite of what the music industry was (and still is) serving as artificially produced boy bands. That's what Malcom Maclaren talks about in the film, how he took 4 guys with no future and made them (for a brief but very explosive period) the center of the music world. Like I said before, this is a must see for all inquisitive music lovers, managers, PR managers and especially music managers because what Malcom tells is sometimes ingenious - like the fact he himself send loads of anonymous hate mail to the media about his own band thus fueling a raged public and a media hype knowing that bad news travels much faster and further than good one. To quote Salvador Dali: "Its good when they talk about me even when they say good things."All in all - its not a movie with a plot but a documentary of how a band is created using Sex Pistols as a brilliant example. I give it a 10/10 not for the film quality but for the lesson.

This is basically just an attempt by Talcy Malc to claim all of the credit for the Sex Pistols. As a movie it barely hangs together. It does give a chance to see some otherwise unavailable concert footage. The bits of "Who Killed Bambi?" that are kept in look far more interesting. I believe that in addition to being scripted by Roger Ebert the direction is by sleaze-king Russ Meyer (I may be wrong there).