Phil Nugent's Favorites:
DiG! (2004)
The director Ondi Timoner worked on this project for seven years, hanging in there with it long past the point where a less committed or desperate person would have started thinking about law school. Her prize at the end of the rainbow turned out to be an amazing, high energy film dissertation on just how crazed the pop scene and music business got in the 1990s, as well as one of the definitive examinations of that never-ending discussion topic, the "authenticity" question. The movie stars Courtney Taylor-Taylor, front man for the Dandy Warhols, and Anton Newcombe, who is ostensibly the front man for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, though Anton comes across here as a malfunctioning one man band who surrounds himself with putative collaborators so he'll have somebody to fight with after he's broken all the mirrors in the house. Starting out as nobodies and mutual admiration societies in 1996, the bands become more and more combative as the Dandys begin to forge themselves a career. Meanwhile, Anton issues manifestos, starts fights, sabotages his band's big chances, and makes ever more ambitious displays of his fecund creativity to ever-diminishing returns. Based on the evidence here, the Dandys deserve their success and Anton should be modeling a straight jacket, but it feels indicative of something widespread and eternal that Taylor-Taylor, who must know these things to be true, also seems to feel kind of guilty about them. Meanwhile, Newcombe magnetizes the camera as only a good-looking guy set on perpetual auto-destruct really can.
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