Music

Watch Hard Core Logo on AUX BOX office tonight at 9:30PM

by Allan Tong

Airs August 12, 9:30 pm, and August 13, 12:30 am & 1:30 pm

The mockumentary has become a cliche, but 1996’s Hard Core Logo endures as the signature film of director Bruce McDonald.

With an obvious nod to This Is Spinal Tap and based on Michael Turner’s novel, HCL follows the eponymous punk bank touring western Canada in a last-gasp reunion tour. They’re supposedly doing it to help their legendary mentor, Bucky Haight of the band Nazis in the White House (played by Julian Richards), who lost a leg in a shooting, but the tour is never smooth.

The Headstones’ Hugh Dillon delivers a strong performance as front man Joe Dick who acts like a general holding together his weary troops as the tour grinds them down in a war of attrition. Old tensions surface, particularly from band member Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie) who vies with Joe for the spotlight, the John-and-Paul of the group.  Like Spinal Tap, there runs the theme of grown men chasing an adolescent dream that had died long ago. This is by turns amusing and sad, and McDonald’s faux-documentary approach balances this tone for the most part.  However, McDonald needlessly becomes self-conscious at times by acknowledging himself and his crew (i.e. the LSD sequence) which distracts us from the band.

HCL has its fun moments and the concert moments are authentic and powerful, but a sense of dread grows as the film wears on like dark clouds looming across the Saskatchewan horizon.