Brothers of the Head (2006 - Fulton & Pepe)
Strange mix between
Tommy, How to Get Ahead in Advertising and
This is Spinal Tap. Unfortunately it never quite all comes together. It's a movie within a movie within a movie faux documentary about a pair of conjoined twins turned punk rock stars in '70s England. Harry and Luke Treadway star as Tom and Barry Howe, born joined at the stomach and sold by their father to a once-successful music promoter looking for a gimmick. Tom learns how to play guitar, Barry does the singing, they both write the songs and soon they are an underground sensation in the clubs. But as with most rock bands, excess of drugs, the love of the wrong girl and narrow-minded record executives conspire to keep them from becoming superstars.
The movie is presented as a present-day documentary that interviews those who knew the twins. However, most of the footage is from an unassembled documentary shot around forming their band, The Bang Bang, and their initial touring. Then there are also dramatic recreations interspersed from an unfinished Ken Russell biopic called
Two-Way Romeo that played up the gothic elements of their story (Russell appears as himself in the current interview segments). Of course all of it is bullsh!t, but there are times when these three tracks playfully come together. It's played straight as if all three of these fictitious films are real, and most of the comedy comes from the juxtapositioning, as when the present-day documentarians interviewing the '70s documentarian present him trashing Russell's film for its lack of authenticity, decrying that he "should stick to
Women in Love." It's all very convoluted, but the mockumentaries feel and look like real documentaries - probably helped by the fact that the co-directors, Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe, are responsible for the Terry Gilliam behind-the-scenes unmaking-of classic
Lost in LaMancha, among other docs. But the balancing act between the three phony realities is too precarious to keep up for very long, and too many of the scenes are repetitious. Screenwriter Toni Grisoni (
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas) tries to adapt Sci-Fi writer Brian Aldiss' cult novel in a deconstructive Charlie Kaufmanesque fashion, but he simply doesn't pull it off. What's left is not powerful enough as a drama, and not funny enough as a comedy.
There's some good stuff in
Brothers of the Head like the music, the performances and the look and tone of the '70s club scene, but despite being about conjoined twins ironically it isn't very cohesive and breaks away into a sum less than its parts.
GRADE: C+
Reply to Topic
