(Canada, 85 min.)
Dir. Bruce McDonald; Writ. Bruce McDonald, Dave Griffith
Starring: Bruce McDonald, Care Failure, Julian Richlings,
Shannon Jardine, Adrien Dorval, Paul Shull
Well, it looks as if Bruce McDonald has finally smoked that
big hunk of hash. Being under the influence is probably the only permissible
excuse for this unnecessary bastardization of McDonald’s 1996 hit Hard Core Logo. It’s appreciative that
McDonald’s opts not to follow the method of “wash, rinse, and repeat” that so
many other filmmakers use when they revisit past successes; however, this new
rockumentary bears more resemblance to Weekend
at Bernie’s 2 than to the original Hard
Core Logo.
McDonald’s mockumentary Hard
Core Logo was one of the most authentic and innovative films to have been
produced in Canada when it debuted in 1996. The film remains one of the most
vital Canadian films of all time, having found a second life and an even wider
audience after receiving DVD distribution under the banner of “Quentin
Tarantino Presents.” While Hard Core Logo
is a great film, it hardly leaves one craving more, since the ending is more
closed than open. The original Hard Core
Logo film ends with the dissolution of the band, and the final shot sees
lead singer Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon) blow his brains out in front of Bruce, the
filmmaker who is making a documentary about the band.
That filmmaker is played by McDonald himself. Bruce the
filmmaker returns in Hard Core Logo 2,
even though none of the other members of Hard Core Logo – Billy Tallent (Callum
Keith Rennie), Ox (John Pyper-Ferguson), or Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson) – make
an appearance. The only other repeat cast member is Julian Richlings as the
stuffy record producer Bucky Haight – and thankfully so, since Richlings’ dryly
humorous performance is arguably the best thing about the film. Bruce
encounters Bucky in an odd coincidence during the filming of his new documentary.
Bruce continues to be haunted by that final shot of Hard Core Logo and wonders if he
exploited the onscreen death of Joe Dick. Bruce revisits the legacy of Hard Core Logo when a filmmaker/witch
approaches with an offer to make another documentary related to Joe Dick. Rumor
has it that the ghost of Joe Dick has possessed the body of Care Failure, the
lead singer of Die Mannequin, who resembles a gothic freak show redux of Lady
Gaga and acts like the walking dead. Die Mannequin is recording a new album
with Bucky at his ranch in snowy Saskatchewan. Bruce watches the group and sees
all sorts of parallels between the performance of Care Failure and the antics
of Joe Dick. He soon believes that Joe has returned to finish his lost
recordings. It’s a preposterous scenario that McDonald uses to explore the
remnants of Hard Core Logo. It’s a self-indulgent
one, too, since HCL 2 offers little
more than the musings of a director who is unwilling to let go of his greatest
success.
The sad thing is that McDonald trivializes Hard Core Logo by exploiting its legacy
in order to sell another movie. The new film honestly has nothing to do with the
first Hard Core Logo aside from the
title and a forced premise. It all feels like an excuse to play music. It might
have worked if it simply offered Bruce the filmmaker making a new rockumentary
about Die Mannequin, but the story of Bruce and Care’s haunting by Joe Dick is
a little trite and it never really goes anywhere. It doesn’t really seem to say
much either, other than to remind audiences of the past greatness of the first
film.
The original Hard Core
Logo, though, offered a fresh story of a Canadian rock band trying to make
it big when one of their members was tempted by the greater offerings of a
career in the United States. While the film offered much of McDonald’s
appreciative insight into music and the music industry (a quality that still
remains in several key scenes of HCL 2 but
was done much more effectively in his 2010 film Trigger), Hard Core Logo
tapped in to a fundamental concern for Canadian culture: it showed a struggle
to remain authentic, a fight to remain true to oneself as an artist in a
country where success is largely given to American performers who have greater
access to industry tools and a greater ability to reach audiences. The film
itself testifies to this struggle, with its cheap grainy film stock offering
images of aimless losers goin’ down the road in search of success. While the
images of the film aligned it within the legion of previous Canuck road movies,
the documentary form took Hard Core Logo
a step further by conjuring questions of validity, reality, and objectivity
when it came to Canadians putting fellow peers before the camera.
HCL 2 never really
seems sure what to do with the documentary conventions, and what results is
largely an inconsistent mix of faux observational footage of Die Mannequin and
Care Failure spliced with snippets of the original HCL along with some new stuff depicting McDonald floating in a pool
as he ponders his film in the making. There is also a Japanese narrator and a
talking lynx. Compared to its predecessor, Hard
Core Logo 2 seems to have missed
the point. It’s just weird for the sake of being weird and meta just for the
sake of being meta. Hard Core Logo 2
is simply a disappointing encore to a great show.
Rating: ★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Hard Core Logo 2 is currently playing at The Mayfair (Bank St.)
