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| Categories | General Garage Rock Punk Urban Folk Ireland Music & Musicals General AAS Strummer, Joe All Sony Pictures Titles DVD Widescreen Unrated US & CA DVDs: Region 1 2000 & Newer English Dolby Surround Sound Standard Edition Grade Level (feature_five_browse-bin) |
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Description |
| As the frontman of The Clash from 1977 onwards, Joe Strummer changed people's lives forever. Four years after his death, his influence reaches out around the world, more strongly now than ever before. In acclaimed filmmaker Julien Temple's 'The Future Is Unwritten', Joe Strummer is revealed not just as a legend or a musician, but as a true communicator of our times. Drawing on both a shared punk history and the close personal friendship that developed during the last years of Joe Strummer's life, Julien Temple's film is a celebration of Joe Strummer--before, during, and after The Clash. |
| Julien Temple, one of the early documentarians of the London punk scene and director of the 2000 Sex Pistols film The Filth and the Fury, turns his attention now to that other seminal British band: The Clash--or more accurately, to the band's co-founder, lyricist, rhythm guitarist and lead singer, Joe Strummer. The Future is Unwritten is more than just a biography of Strummer; it is a tribute and exploration of a musician, artist and devoted humanist. Though Temple respects and admires Strummer (his influence is exalted by close friends, peers and fans like Bono and John Cusack), he doesn't romanticize this larger-than-life personality and presents Strummer honestly and not always in flattering light, though the director's fondness for his subject is constant. Most movingly, Strummer himself provides the narration via reassembled excerpts from a variety of interviews and the BBC radio show he hosted during the nineties. In the wrong hands, this could be contrived, but in this masterful documentary it serves as a testament to not just Joe Strummer the myth, but Joe Strummer the man, telling us his story in vivid detail. The Future is Unwritten is a moving and personal portrait of a musician who helped shaped not just punk, but modern music as a whole. --Kira Canny |
Customer Reviews |
 The Two Joe Strummers 2008-12-11 |
| By Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) |
My favorite part of this documentary is finding out about Joe Strummer's youth and how living in a number of foreign countries fostered in him a love of all kinds of music. However this is not an homage to Strummer or The Clash but rather a kind of behind-the-scenes expose of both Strummer and his band. Clash fans might be turned off by much of this, they will certainly be dismayed to find that The Clash was the brainchild not of Strummer but of a Malcolm McLaren-like manager named Bernie who introduced Strummer to Jones and Simenon. In the unwritten history of English music there is Before the Sex Pistols (BSP) and After the Sex Pistols (ASP) and Strummer lived on both sides of this cultural divide. On the one hand Strummer was an art school hippie with folksie roots (early on he called himself "Woody") and on the other he was a conniving opportunist and commercial strategist who valued fame more than friendship (when punk and Bernie's offer to be a part of it came along he abandoned his hippie community). So Strummer is a man divided from the beginning and the difficulties that he had both within The Clash and afterwards stem from an inability to resolve this identity clash. No one doubts that Strummer was an important musical voice (maybe The Voice of 1977) but those early Clash songs like "White Riot" are the product of both the folksy freedom fighter and the ambitious commercial strategist and the balance between these two Joes was always precarious at best. Once the ambitious strategist lost touch with the freedom fighter The Clash was doomed. Even though the Joe Strummer-Mick Jones battle was played out in public it seems that the real battle being fought on Combat Rock was a battle between the two Joes: the one who wanted to speak to the world and the one who found that once the world started listening he had very little left to say or reason for saying it.
After The Clash disbanded it took Strummer many years to rediscover his folksy roots and self. But the last chapter of the Joe Strummer story is a relatively satisfying one as rock bios go as he did finally find a way to reconnect those two warring halves when he formed The Mescaleros. In that band he could be both Joe the folksy hippie world musician and Joe the punk rock star.
Julien Temple's exquisite selection and arrangment of period footage and data makes this a visually, psychologically, and culturally rich experience and the inclusion of tapes from Joe Strummer's radio show in which Joe offers commentary on the artists and songs that he plays is rich and informative. But the inclusion of Johnny Depp (with ridiculous eyeliner and braided beard and head wrap) was a bad idea. Johnny the actor is fine but Johhny the actor as wannabe rocker is the opposite of folk and punk and all things authentic. |
 great doc about a great artist 2008-11-03 |
| By Kyle N. Niemi (New Jersey) |
So, I was trying to get my hands on this movie for a little while. I tried to download it, then it seemed to only be available from Europe, but, I finally got a hold of it from Amazon.
It's really a great documentary. It's well put-together and will give you a lot of good insight on the life and legacy of Joe Strummer: whether you know him from the 101ers, The Clash, The Mescaleros, etc. |
| Quality material, not just another recycle job! 2008-09-15 |
| By endsng (sunny south florida) |
| This is a very good documentary; lots of great footage. It really seems like a fresh retrospective. Some of the other stuff that's come out between 'Westway' and this, seems to have less to offer than 'This is video Clash', the late '80's quickie compilation. GREAT STUFF, from the beginning to the final incarnation of the band (i think the last album was a little better than the reviews, but not as good as what Husker Du was generating at that time). WHAT A BAND! I think Mick Jones had the right idea musically, during the Combat Rock period. Too bad we couldn't see a continuation of that. |
| Julian Temple Does Good Here 2008-09-03 |
| By John P. Marsh (North Las Vegas) |
| The structure of this doc gives the illusion of being casual and free flowing, but it's a clever structural ride taking us thru Joe Strummer's emotional journey as a struggling artist, cultural hero and disappeared recluse. While it is sort of organized around a 'wake-like' celebration (a sort of street assembly featuring sing-along hootnany clips and open fire-barrels) it's really about Joe's motivations and response to how his political committment is slowly co-opted by the system that he tried to subvert. Temple's directorial effort here - which utlizes lots of stock footage, present-day recollections and Strummer's radio show (as voice overs) is really good. I think it took the production team numerous hours to piece it all together and in the end it explains a lot about Strummer's relationship to music and society. Recommended and a superb rockumentary. |
| IT'S A ROCKIN WORLD 2008-09-01 |
| By Michael J. Odum (Snellville, GA) |
| It's a rockin' world make no mistake about it. These are the words of one Joe Strummer. But in my opinion and as this doc will attest the world is a not as rockin' as it was when Mr. Strummer was still with us. The story of the man, his bands and his influence on the world regardless of whether or not they could understand him. As pointed out in the DVD by one fan, "you guys are great but I can't understand the words." Joe replys simply. " That's ashame because the words are really great." |
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