Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Fred Negro, Paul Elliott, Sam Crassweller, Ross Knight, Steve Lucas, Tim Rogers
Intro:
...a raucous, energetic, hilarious, heartbreaking delight from hard-thumping beginning to beautifully bittersweet ending.
Filmmaker, author, curator, collector and high-octane consumer of all things lusciously lurid and wonderfully weird, Andrew Leavold is a Melbourne treasure, most famous for running Trash Video, a waaay-pre-streaming video shop (aaah, those were the days) specialising in cult artefacts and cinematic oddities that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. It’s utterly fitting then that the new documentary from Andrew Leavold (who previously helmed the delightful The Search For Weng Weng and The Last Pinoy Action King) should focus on another Melbourne treasure in the form of the one and only Fred Negro.
Though perhaps unknown to the wider community, the still-kicking Fred Negro (yes, his real name) has long been a fixture of Melbourne’s punk, indie and outsider music communities through the late 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s, playing in impressively named bands like I Spit On Your Gravy, The Brady Bunch Lawnmower Massacre, The Band Who Shot Liberty Valance, Shonkytonk and The Fuck Fucks, whose brilliant song “Beer Sandwich” is an on-point Aussie classic constantly and criminally ignored in all of those tedious, bone-weary “Best Australian Songs Of All Time” lists and “Great Aussie BBQ Songs” CDs.
Perhaps Fred Negro’s greatest legacy, however, will be as the deranged and demented cartoonist behind the long running Pub comic strip, which amused and scandalised readers of the Inpress free music paper in equal measure before finally being dumped for its continued inspired naughtiness, anti-establishment bravura brilliance, and wildly inappropriate approximations of people both living and dead.
Fred is a loose, freewheeling, highly unconventional figure, and Pub The Movie captures him beautifully, through both interview and fly-on-the-wall work, vintage archival footage, and talking head interviews with those who worked and caroused with him, as well as contemporary figures like the great Tim Rogers, who daringly managed Fred’s band The Twits for a short period. All are gracious, funny, candid and brutally honest, and their stories mesh to create an absolutely enthralling portrait of 1980s pre-gentrification St. Kilda, which was once a glorious seaside den of iniquity, home to multiple live music venues, seedy share-houses, and “the Thursday crawl”, whereby a horde of likeminded punks would march from pub to pub to seek out more bands and more partying.
It’s entertainingly presented as a swirling bacchanale of debauched, music driven fun and excitement, but Leavold doesn’t shy away from the role that hard drugs and booze have played in destroying the lives of so many who were part of the scene. There are tears from the talkers here, and there will likely be tears in the audience too.
It’s in Fred Negro’s own battles with booze, drugs and poverty that Pub The Movie really pushes the emotional buttons of the viewer, and also in this loveable, messy raconteur’s ability to maintain relationships and raise two interesting and well-adjusted children in amongst the madness and constant motion of his very unusual life. Directed with obvious love and affection by Andrew Leavold (but with too much frankness and honesty to ever skirt anywhere near hagiography), Pub The Movie is a raucous, energetic, hilarious, heartbreaking delight from hard-thumping beginning to beautifully bittersweet ending.
Pub: The Movie screens at Cinema Nova in Melbourne on February 16 and at Dendy Newtown in Sydney on February 25.
