Rating: 
Summary: Best of it's documentary I have seen!
Review: For a documentery this movie was great! The best I have ever seen, but get really the sex pistols weren't talk the where playing and singing to make a documentary of a band with out full length concert footage is a no no. This is a great rental but, if you are over your head crazy about the band buy the cd instead.
Rating: 
Summary: A slap reverberating across generations
Review: OK, watched the Sex Pistols documentary "The Filth and the Fury." A recent flick, it came out in 2000 and interviewed the surviving members of the Pistols, though they were but silhouettes residing in the comfort of midlife homes. It's an extraordinary documentary detailing the rise of punk and the brief life of the Sex Pistols. They played but for two years, banned, hated and vilified. The documentary ends appropriately enough during their final show with Sid Vicious in San Francisco, with Johnny Rotten sadly sneering to the audience, "Do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
I suppose everyone is familiar with the legend of the Sex Pistols, and if you're not, this documentary is as good a place to start as any. What I liked about "The Filth and the Fury" was how accurately it detailed the conditions in England that gave rise to punk music and fashion. Americans love to claim everything as their own, and the Ramones have certainly carried that "punk creation" torch to their graves. But "The Filth and the Fury" slaps everyone back into reality. The Sex Pistols were the first, and that LP "Never Mind the Bullocks" echoes down through generations as crystal clear as a golden coin.
After watching this documentary and listening to their album, I am amazed how contemporary the Sex Pistols are. Much of the music that followed, The Clash, The Misfits, The Circle Jerks, even U2, feels oddly dated today, a testament of the decade of the 1980s. But place the Sex Pistols on the air, and blasting from the speakers is incredible anger and energy, as profound and timeless as "A Clockwork Orange." The music has aged well, and one never blushes when listening to it.
Watching the documentary, I was amazed how modern the members of the band looked, interviewed by 70s fashion victims adorned in wide lapels, offensive plaid and flared pants. These reporters, attempting to make sense, were as befuddled as JFK assassination reporters, trying to nurture terrified audiences. The sad fact, and one which is detailed in "The Filth and the Fury," is that the band eventually became a freak show, the music forgotten or lost by the time they wearily limped on stage in San Francisco.
The footage which haunts and terrifies, is of the Sex Pistols playing their infamous 1978 tour through the southern United States. Dallas, San Antonio, Atlanta, Memphis, long-haired crowds resembling frightened Bob Seegers. Audiences threw trash on the stage, beer bottles at Sid Vicious' face, and yet the band played on, realizing that America was a scary place......"Throw what you want at me, I'm not leaving this stage!"
Can you imagine a band like the Sex Pistols playing here today? They would get lynched. American music writers wax poetic about the Sex Pistols' cruise through Texas and the south. But we see footage of the San Antonio and Dallas shows, people standing as stark as statues, terrified of what they were witnessing. The echoes of those concerts carry through to today, profound and horrifying. For the Sex Pistols to have embarked through the southern U.S. with that incredibly blatant brand of rebellion was almost suicidal. They cut a path through a dense forest of a conservative Urban Cowboy rocker wastelands. The wake splashes today.
The Sex Pistols band died young, no doubt. They have but one album, and a lot of haunting film footage. But to watch them in this documentary during their prime, fiercely screaming "Anarchy in the UK," "God Save the Queen" and "Bodies," is to see the ultimate example of what the musical form known as rock represents. They scared the establishment. They freaked it out. Working class and brutal, the Sex Pistols were the revolution that crushed the flowers of Woodstock. There are no ballads in "The Filth and the Fury." Just a slap reverberating across generations.
This is one of the greatest rock documentaries ever made.
Rating:
Summary: Being a Pistol Was No Fun
Review: "The Filth and the Fury" is not just a great rockumentary it is a great document of the social upheaval that occurred during the heyday of the Sex Pistols. The decay that was occuring in Britain in the mid 1970's mirrored that of the established music industry i.e. Rod Stewart, etc. There was anger fomenting among the masses and the Sex Pistols were the response to that. Aside from great concert footage on hand here, there are great interviews with the surviving members of the band. Rotten, Jones, Cook, Matlock let it be known that they were not mere puppets of the machinations of manager Malcolm McLaren that they had a voice in the message that they were conveying. The film is also an effective diatribe against drug addiction by relating the sad fate of late bassist Sid Vicious, a naive youth who was unprepared for the pitfalls of fame and it's inherent temptations. Definitely avoid Alex Cox's "Sid and Nancy", a glamorized depiction of Sid's downfall. If you're not interested in the history, the music on hand is still good.
Rating:
Summary: no title
Review: i know of no band so clearly tied to the social structures of its time. the sex pistols were a great outlet for britain's lowest society layer, for people neglected and forgotten by authorities -- people often making themselves impossible to anybody anyway.
alien to complexities of british society, most americans think the sex pistols no more than an outrageous rock 'n rollband. whatever they were they were great, singer johnny rotten perfectly acting out its image. predictably the band fell apart after a short time, mainly because bass player sid vicious tried to overtake rotten's leading image. behind vicious was american female nancy spungen.
this dvd effectively pictures the sex pistols' short, explosive career. their roots and meanings in & for the lowest layers of british society, their wars of independance with the british music industry, and above all: how good they were. and still are.
Rating:
Summary: WE MEAN IT MAN!
Review: The Filth and The Fury is an exemplary film about an significant period in British history - the late 1970's. It should be shown in every high school history class. Director Julien Temple gets another crack at the Sex Pistols as his subject after 1980's "The Great Rock n' Roll Swindle", but with a new twist - humanity.
This is a humourous and touching film - especially when Rotten comes to tears while speaking of Sid's demise. Who would have thought that the closest bond in the band would be between Rotten and Vicious. The narration was by each band member in silhouette - clearly illustrating their feeling that they had all been rape victims. The "rapist" himself, manager Malcolm McLaren is represented by a respiring black rubber mask - the bondage that restricted the band. Juxtaposed throughout are scenes from British comedy shows from which Rotten amassed his wide range of spectacular facial expressions, and scenes from Richard The III, in which Laurence Olivier spouts lines perfectly coinciding with the Pistols' own story. After all, they had an exceptional sense of theatrics.
Though they were hygienically and linguistically foul, the racket the Pistols made was pristine and clear in its intent. Though the lyrics were snide and bleak, they were a mad celebration of youth and rebellion. The music was actually quite melodic and uplifting, probably due to bassist Glen Matlock's love of the Beatles. The chorus of "No Future" was a glorious anti-national anthem, sung with exuberance and joy despite the fact that the message was a pessimistic one. The dirge-like "We Shall Overcome" was sung by Martin Luther King's followers with poignant sadness, yet the Pistols' "No Future" was chanted in pure hopeless reverie - against the monarchy, against youth repression, against discrimination, and against disco. Watching people in flares trodding through all the trash in London's streets during the garbage strike, Rotten saw they were clearly missing the point; "Wear the garbage bag!" The Pistols' punk fashion; ripped and pinned clothing was actually created out of poverty.
Whether floating down the Thames on a barge playing "God Save The Queen" on the day of the queen's Silver Jubilee or performing for missile-tossing rednecks in Texas, the Pistols remained resilient and allegiant to their kamikaze mission All the energy put into banning them both in the UK and the US forcing them to play under assumed names caused more of a sensation than the harmless Pistols would have ever caused on their own.
The live concert footage (overdubbed with studio tracks) is remarkable, especially a charity party the band played at for children of firemen who had lost their jobs. Rotten proclaims it one of the best times he had, being lovingly covered in cream pies by very young children as he sang, "Mommy, I'm not an animal"! Quite touching.
The band's moniker was conceived by McLaren to depict A Clockwork Orange sort of maniacal youth gang; a pack of sexy guys brandishing weapons, but the Pistols were actually too charmingly laughable to pull off that image. The shots of the band as cheeky kids with mischievous smiles against a soundtrack of the Pistols' dauntless anarchistic diatribes on television depicted their genuine innocence. All they really did was tell the truth, and as Rotten says, "We declared war on England without meaning to."
Rating:
Summary: I would rate it a 3,if it wasn't for all the old footage
Review: I found the movie a little boring at times (except for the amazing old footage of the Sex Pistols in the late 70's era).
I thought it was a bit dramatic how when they interviewed Steve Jones,John Lydon,and Paul Cook that they wouldn't show their faces.Some of the things they were saying were very repetitive.If you want to know more about the Sex Pistols,I would suggest watching this movie.It corresponds very well to John Lydon's "Rotten:No Irish,No Blacks,No Dogs".
Rating: 
Summary: An important but flawed documentary on a crucial band
Review: For some reason, Julien Temple has made not one, but two documentaries on the Sex Pistols. The first and slightly better film was THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE, and tells the Sex Pistols' story more or less from Malcolm McLaren's perspective. This second film, besides being messier than the earlier one, is far less original. It actually culls considerable hunks from the earlier film, but despite this manages to be the mirror image of the other. Instead of telling things from the standpoint of McLaren, it is told from the standpoint of the band members, and they clearly don't like him at all.
It is amazing that Temple, who has actually made some good films over the years, has managed to make two poor films on the Sex Pistols. One would think that making a good documentary about the Sex Pistols would be as easy as catching fish in a bathtub. They were so outrageous, so dramatic, their impact on society so huge that it would be simply a matter of casually editing already existing footage. But what we have in THE FILTH AND THE FURY is a visual mess, almost borderline incoherent at times, almost completely without any new insight into the Sex Pistols, and with the insertion of a host of images that aren't really relevant to the time or their story. Why, for instance, the absolutely endless excerpts from Laurence Olivier's RICHARD III. The pretentiousness of the film can hardly be overstated. For instance, in contemporary interviews, the members of the band are left in darkness, as if they were part of a witness protection program.
One of the points of the film seems to be to minimize the role that McLaren played in creating the band, as if the four members of the Sex Pistols pulled the whole enterprise together. Besides being enormously self-serving, it overlooks a number of key facts. For instance, McLaren's time spent in New York earlier in the 1970s, getting to know bands and performers like Television, Richard Hell, the Ramones, and deciding that he would like to import something like that into London. Indeed, his first choice for the lead singer of the Sex Pistols was Richard Hell, who originated the fashion styles that were later associated with the Sex Pistols. Hell declined, deciding to stay in New York, but Hell's dress code provided the pattern for much of the clothing available in Sex, McLaren's boutique. Typically, the documentary leaves Hell out of the story entirely. The worst thing about pushing McLaren to the periphery of the story, as if he were lucky to be along for the ride rather than the owner of the ride, is that it leaves out the ideological context for the punk movement. Was McLaren the exploitative jerk that especially Johnny Rotten asserts that he was? It is entirely possible, but even if so it doesn't negate the formative role he played.
Where the film excels and where it gets quite good is when the members of the band, especially John Lydon, talk about what went wrong with the band and with the punk movement. There is also some great footage of the Sex Pistols performing live, but very nearly all of this is dubbed with studio recordings. This is not merely dishonest, it considerably lessens the value of the film. Luckily, much of the American footage contains the original soundtrack, including the absolutely chilling "No Fun" from their final concert in San Francisco. The way Johnny Rotten keeps growling the words "No fun" while sitting in a crouch on the stage sounds more like a lesson in metaphysics than a confession. It is a stunning bit, made more complete by the visibly distraught Steve Jones to the side of Rotten.
In the end, this is an important film for anyone interested in rock, punk, or the Sex Pistols. But one nonetheless feels frustration that a filmmaker with such extraordinary access to the band members had to mar his film with so much needless and irrelevant footage of British comedians and Laurence Olivier's RICHARD III. He would have done better to focus more distinctly on the band itself.
Rating:
Summary: The Sex Pistols, in their own words.
Review: Filthy, awful, horrible words at that. The film beautifully outlines the short history of those quintessential punk rock icons, the Sex Pistols, from their painful birth out of the English social strife in the late 1970's, to the heights of infamy, to their on-stage self-destruction just two years later. A must-see for any alt. rock fan. The "cut and paste" quality of the piece might rub some the wrong way, but I feel it fits the subject matter like a glove. If you have an interest in punk rock, or in general hellrazing, you're gonna want to see this!
Favorite quotes:
"We managed to offend all the people we were f***ing fed up with..." - Johnny Rotten
"We weren't the nice boys that they thought we were. We aren't nice boys... we were f***ing nasty little bastards. And we still are..." - Sid Vicious
Rating:
Summary: Get down and dirty
Review: It's not immediately apparent where Punk stands in historical terms. There were only a handful of great bands, the music was rarely memorable, and the whole thing (the real thing I mean, not the post-punk posing) was practically over within four years. Compared with the sixties, when the pop movement encompassed a revolution in sexual habits, drug-taking, fashion, music, film, civil rights, concepts of individuality and community, and even took on and managed to end a major war, it looks like Punk was just one of a number of notable ripples (another being Red Brigades-style terrorism) which extended outwards after 1969. But ripple or not, it had a bigger cultural impact than anything else on my teenage years: I clearly remember in 1978 a friend pulling out his latest purchase, a record called "Never Mind the Bollocks" and how completely staggered I felt when I looked at this luminous urine-yellow cover, took in the ransom-note font and then heard the noise - I couldn't comprehend it as music at first - of the first few tracks. These bits of vinyl and card seemed at the time as dangerous a thing as a shipment of heroin. Basically I and most of Britain was in a daze when the Pistols appeared. The sixties had been a huge upheaval, but the energy seemed to dissipate as rapidly as it had appeared. By 1974 the oil embargo, massive inflation, strikes, terrorism, pomp rock, et. al. had all but crushed the mod movement and the airwaves were jammed with coma-inducing pop like the Bay City Rollers and Abba. Moreover, the "establishment", that is the traditional structures of power, having been battered halfway to oblivion in the sixties, were gradually and rather insidiously reasserting themselves. What this film captures is the electrifying effect the Pistols had on a country that had become complacent in its own dismalness. The famous Grundy interview is as notable now for the toe-curling triteness of daytime TV of that time as for the naughtiness of the Pistols. Footage of the housing estates from whence the group emerged reveals the brutal starkness of urban working-class Britain. With the rubbish piling up on the streets thanks to another strike and utter shabbiness seemingly everywhere, there's a strong impression of a country at the nadir of a massive multi-year hangover. The Pistols woke the country up like an exploding alarm clock, caused an outcry that seems almost funny in retrospect, and made flares, permed hair on males and Emerson Lake and Palmer utterly unfashionable for a couple of decades. On a more serious note, it is also worth considering that Punk probably helped Mrs. Thatcher get elected in 1979. Much of the population was shocked into believing that a strong law and order Government was the only hope for Britain. So perhaps a bit more than just a historical ripple, albeit in a very ironic manner? As for the Pistols themselves, it is not hard to see why they only lasted a couple of years: they are the (mostly) living proof that anarchy is great in theory but hard to sustain in practice. There is a lot of bitching between the boys twenty-plus years on, and while most other reviewers seem to have found Rotten inspirational, I thought he was full of s***, moaning about just about everything including bizarre things such as once having had to stay in a motel. Apparently blind to irony, he even at one point launches a heartfelt attack on the people he considers let Sid down: "they had no respect" he wails. Good film of a fascinating time with well-chosen footage, witty asides (nice idea to compare the Pistols with Richard III), wild music and interesting interviews. My only complaint is that it was difficult to work out who was talking in the voiceovers and not always easy to hear them either.
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