DIRECTROSPECTIVE: GARAGE DAYS (2002)

Notes on the films of Australian director Alex Proyas.

Lucy (Chris Sadrinna), Bruno (Russell Dykstra), Tanya (Pia Miranda), and Freddy (Kick Gurry) making preparations for high jinks to come.

It’s the film that the director of goth action-tragedy THE CROW and X-Files-via-Edward-Hopper neo-noir DARK CITY was born to make, the one you’ve been waiting his whole career to see… ladies and gentlemen… Alex Proyas has finally made a comedy! An ostensible comedy!

GARAGE DAYS is ostensibly a number of things, but what we actually get is something else. It looks like a comedy - as garishly overlit as THE CROW and DARK CITY are shadowy and atmospheric, its turn-of-the-millenium Sydney a bright and energetic place where splitscreens abound. Its script contains plenty of bon mots and non-sequiturs and graphic sexual disclosures that often bear the cadence of jokes, though actual jokes are hard to find. While it deals entirely with the trials and tribulations of a struggling rock band, occasionally seen just finishing a song, we don’t hear them play a single song until the very end. The plot inches here and there toward a satire of the music industry, but our gang of (ostensibly) lovable goofballs are too caught up in high jinks to engage enough with the industry for any meaningful satirical statement to be made. Proyas takes his strongest stance in the film by far against the proliferation of video poker machines - “pokies,” in Aussie parlance - in Sydney bars that used to have shitty stages where shitty bands could perform. There are some digressions into comic drug freakout montages, but I don’t get the impression that Proyas has done many drugs (though the one real-for-real laugh I found in the whole film came when two characters tripping their asses off point at the Sydney Opera House and burst into uncontainable laughter). Nor is there much of a sense of the importance of any kind of authenticity to the Sydney music scene - nobody really has any taste to speak of. Again, there are no jokes and no songs.

What possessed Proyas to make this film? Coming off of the well-received but commercially under-performing DARK CITY, one would think he might want to pick a project with better box office prospects than an Australia-centric comedy with a bunch of TV actors and the bad guy from XXX (which hadn’t even come out yet). It’s also not funny. I don’t think Proyas is a particularly funny guy. He made THE CROW and DARK CITY and whatever SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS was supposed to be. Here he’s credited with the story alongside first-wave Aussie punk musician and screenwriter Dave Warner, and the two of them share screenplay credit with Michael Udesky, whose only other major credit to that point was a staff writer for MTV’s sort-of-steamy college drama Undressed. THE CROW has a bit of rock and roll edge to it, but if the music angle was the appeal, why doesn’t this movie have any fucking performances in it, outside of the AC/DC lip-sync dream sequence at the beginning and the big climactic disappointment at the Sydney Homebake festival that ends the film? Do any of these people like comedy? Do they know that there’s more to it than just showing off all the different names you know for ejaculate?

As the film’s tagline asks us - it’s all over the poster - “What if you finally got your big break and you just plain sucked?” Maybe the film is an exercise in self-reflection: following the success of THE CROW, a comic book adaptation, Proyas got the chance to make a big, original science fiction film in DARK CITY and it was a financial disappointment. But the film was appreciated by critics, and Proyas even got in a fight with the studio over the final cut. That’s not what you do when you think your movie is a piece of shit. And to the extent that every movie about the music industry is at least in part about the movie industry, this one I guess suggests that at least one movie exec is a philandering narcissist who lies to people, but his disinterest in the band is only proven right by their big public failure at Homebake. It’s their own fault. They’re just not that great. That’s where the beleaguered-filmmaker-as-indie-band metaphor falls apart: Proyas thinks he’s great.

Another thing about the tagline: it only describes the last ten minutes of the film. Most of it isn’t about getting your big break and just plain sucking. It’s about the lead singer, Freddy (Kick Gurry from the Wachowskis’ SPEED RACER) realizing he has feelings for Kate (Maya Stange), the girlfriend of lead guitarist Joe (Brett Stiller), who it turns out has been cheating on Kate with a gothy temptress named Angie (Yvette Duncan), who it then turns out has been a hallucination the whole time and Joe’s actually schizophrenic and tries to kill himself. This is the real plot of this comedy!

There are other high-jinksy subplots that run parallel to this, the most significant being Freddy’s efforts to blackmail philandering narcissist music exec Shad Kern (XXX bad guy Martin Csokas) into doing for his band what Kern’s done for Australia’s hottest rock group, “Sprimp.” No evidence exists within the film to suggest that the writers are aware that “Sprimp” is an extremely shitty and funny name for a band, which is too bad. People just say “Sprimp” all the time like it’s not some Tim & Eric-level gobbledygook. Add to this the big loud sequence in which pixieish bassist Tanya (Pia Miranda) has her rich, conservative parents over for dinner with the whole band to convince them to bankroll some studio time for the band to record a demo. The band’s male drummer and drug guru Lucy (Chris Sadrinna, I guess probably named after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the sort of drug reference that only a real serious drug guy could have come up with) gives everyone something to calm their nerves before the sit-down, which mild mood-stabilizer he has of course mixed up with a powerful hallucinogen, and everybody freaks out in a broad way that makes it clear, again, that Proyas & Co. have definitely absolutely ever done drugs before and certainly know what they’re like. I’m not a drug guy and even I can tell this is fucking stupid. It’s what I thought acid was like when I first found out about it from, like, a TV spot for FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS or something. To be fair, though, if I found out this movie was written by seven-year-old me, I would be extremely impressed. Little guy did a great job, considering. Then there’s a lot of business centered around the band’s manager, Bruno (Russell Dykstra), a true doofus who realistically has a diagnosable intellectual disability. Bruno fucks everything up because he’s stupid, you see. It’s funny! (It’s very not funny.)

So we go the whole movie without ever hearing the band play a song, but the hints we get about the kind of music they play - there’s mention both of a death metal song and a Latin number - make them sound like they’re going to be comically bad and then I guess that’s the bit, that these people really want to be a famous band but they’re absolute dogshit, right? Then they finally do get a chance to play at Homebake, and then Sprimp refuses to go on, so they rush the main stage and plug in and get ready to play for thousands of people, and they aren’t even terrible. They’re not good, but they’re just the kind of unimpressive bar band you can find anywhere. And then the movie more or less ends. There’s no comedic fallout from the band’s big dream being dashed - and, to be honest, nobody seemed to care all that much in the first place except for Freddy - and we’ve been sitting through two goddamned hours of this shit. I don’t want this blog to be a place where I just rip into movies that don’t work, because complaining about movies is the third-largest type of content on the internet behind pornography and white nationalism, but Jesus Christ does this movie not work. I think I might prefer A LIFE LESS ORDINARY, and that’s really saying something. At least that one doesn’t have an out-of-nowhere racist caricature taxi driver scene.

If the film has anything to say, I suppose it’s that Sydney’s vibrant bar band culture is disappearing as the bars get rid of their stages in favor of DJs and video poker machines. Seems like maybe that was a thing that happened in Sydney around the turn of the millennium. Here’s the problem, though: besides Freddy, everyone in these bars, from the owners to the staff to the patrons, seems to prefer the DJs and the video poker. I like a bar band as much as the next guy, but maybe the problem isn’t that Sydney’s bar crowd has no appreciation for artistry. It’s that Freddy’s band sucks ass and doesn’t even offer you a slim chance to win money. There’s a scene at another bar where a decent band is playing and the place is packed to the gills. But the film is clearly on Freddy’s side, the side of guitar music as the highest form of bar entertainment, even if it’s fucking terrible. He has a big dramatic scene where he tackles a whole line of pokies which then fall over like dominoes in a shower of sparks. It’s supposed to be cool, I think, or at least endearingly idealistic. It’s not! That tagline suggests a film that digs into this mismatch between one’s ambition and one’s talent, but this ain’t that film. I’m with the people at the bar - I’d rather watch a movie about video poker.