End-of-the-road movie for a generation

The Toronto Star
Friday, October 18, 1996
By Peter Goddard

Hard Core Logo

Starring Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, Bernie Coulson, and John Pyper-Ferguson, screenplay by Noel S. Baker, based on the novel by Michael Turner, cinematography by Danny Nowak, directed by Bruce McDonald. At Canada Square and Eaton Centre.

Forget the Vatican's banks, the far side of the moon or the left side of Bob Dole's brain. No place on earth contains more mysteries than the interior of a band's tour van - a space Bruce McDonald in Hard Core Logo, makes into a rolling metaphor for Life As It Is and other Really Big Ideas.

Logo is a classic rock flick, equidistant in spirit from Don't Look Back, Spinal Tap and Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard. With a hot soundtrack and cameos from the likes of Art Bergmann, it's also a somewhat nostalgic finale to Vancouver's great punk scene as well as to McDonald's trilogy which began with Roadkill and continued with Highway 61.

Hot nostalgia? Exactly. No other kind's possible for the late '70s and '80s. Hard Core Logo gets revved up when the band's on stage, but elsewhere McDonald and screenwriter Noel S. Baker remind you of how all the energy is beginning to slip away. This is also an end-of-the-road movie for a entire generation.

Inevitably, the more historically inclined critics will like to align it with another tradition - that of Anglo-Canadian "road" films - or "river" films, like Bill Mason's Paddle To The Sea - best defined by Don Shebib's Goin' Down The Road.

(Quebecois filmmakers have always seemed less inclined to hit the road, unless that road headed south - like in La Floride, say. But - wait on there. How could I have forgotten the seminal Molson's commercials we're now seeing, with those swash-buckling, funny-speaking coureur de bois looking for the big brewski in the sky?)

In truth, only the truly innocent and/or R.E.M fans might think one of these rented, rolling hell-holes is about getting a bunch of greasy rockers from gig to gig - in real life or in this flick's gritty approximation of it.

Anyone who's ever spent any time in one - and three minutes is about all you need - will instantly remember the unique rock van smell; a combination of petrified pizza bits, clothes unwashed for six months, cheap booze, cheaper sex all coated with the furry residue from inexpensive drugs.

But like all road flicks, the distance covered in Logo is the one between the guys who are forced to live together in their beat-up Gruman delivery truck - "the goat van," they call it - as the band heads east from Vancouver for a few farewell gigs across the prairies.

Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon) is band leader as well as lead singer and lead jerk. In short, he's hard not to like even if he's scamming everyone at least part of the time. (Dillon, who also appeared in McDonald's Dance Me Outside and looks uncannily like the punk Bruce Willis thinks he is, also happens to be singer/songwriter for the Headstones.)

Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie) is the Keith Richards to Dick's Mick, the suave guitarist who may be the only one in the band who might have a future in music - well, an extra month or two. He and Joe go way back together and they can't forget it, despite their best efforts.

Then there are band members Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson) and John Oxenberger (John Pyper-Ferguson) who, like Elvis. have long ago left the auditorium. For them, the van ride along endless two-lane blacktops to gigs where no one shows, particularly the man with the money, is tantamount to having the mob call in that favor it's owed.

There is, of course, more than money involved. There's the cadaverous, punk legend Bucky Haight (the cadaverous and superbly eerie Julian Richings) who Dick just must visit. The few ghostly moments the script gives Haight amount to a small part but Riching is so dead-on right in it - and, yes, the key word here is dead - it almost takes over the entire film, which is something considering how strong the rest of the cast - particularly Dillon - is.

Finally, there's the strangest character of all, Bruce McDonald (played by the hirsute but otherwise well-cast Bruce McDonald), who's busy recording all of this for a movie despite his characters' insistance he go take a long walk off a short dock - or something like that.

But even here, you feel the tug of McDonald's own past and his on-going penchant for shooting movie-within-movies (consider his early short, Let Me See.)

Screenwriter Noel S. Baker has provided some of the funniest and deftest writing Canadian moviemaking has heard in years. But it can't hide the bitter-sweetness just below the surface.