Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #132 Bandslam (2009)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I recently started reading a book called Purple Bananas by Jason Webber, a gentleman I met when he was working as a publicist for Insane Clown Posse and Psychopathic records. It’s about a subject near and dear to my heart: the profound, life-changing and life-affirming emotional and spiritual connection we feel with our favorite artists and art. 

Webber begins Purple Bananas with a chapter about the awful day the world discovered that Prince had died. Webber’s book about his relationship with Prince’s music and how it helped him get through this thing we call life captures on a visceral level the overwhelming, disorienting sense of despair and confusion we all felt learning of Prince’s death.

Prince was a God. Gods do not die. Gods particularly do not die of drug overdoses when they’re famously sober. Yet Prince had somehow died of a drug overdose all the same when he had so much more to give us. 

I felt the same way when David Bowie died. Bowie was a God. Gods do not die. They particularly do not die of fatal diseases seemingly nobody knew about. Yet there it was all over the internet: Bowie dead at 69. 

Like Webber, I wept like a goddamn baby when I found out that David Bowie had died. It hit me hard. Bowie wasn’t just someone whose music and films and words and ideas I adored: he was like a secret friend and mentor whose music and example made an unkind world bearable. 

Being a Bowie fan defined me. To put things in Marc Maron terms, he was one of my guys. And now he was gone forever, much too soon. 

Will Burton (Gaelan Connell), the protagonist of the unspeakably obnoxious 2009 rock and roll romantic high school comedy Bandslam feels a similar bond with Bowie. The pathetic wish fulfillment fantasy’s framing device finds our eminently punchable know-it-all of a protagonist writing letters to his hero David Bowie about his life as a high school student, filling his missives with curdled, self-satisfied bon mots like, “I’m getting ready for school, or as I like to call it, Guantanamo with a lunch period” and “School isn’t gut-wrenchingly awful. Mostly, it’s just kind of novocaine for the soul.” 

Disagree!

When Will makes the big journey from Cincinnati to small town New Jersey with his supportive single mother Karen (Lisa Kudrow) he’s understandably worried about fitting in. Luckily for Will, Bandslam takes place in a Ready Player One-like alternate universe where being a geek who knows about pop culture makes you sexually irresistible to women as quirky as they are impossibly gorgeous, not to mention important and the object of envy rather than derision. 

The first time Charlotte Barnes (Disney star Aly Michalka) sees Will shuffling around her high school, looking like uncooked bread, for example, the model-gorgeous, super-popular former cheerleader sports an expression that silently but unmistakably conveys, “Who is that awkward, self-conscious stranger and what do I need to do to get his cock inside me?” 

She MUST have him so she makes the first move and cajoles him into baby-sitting adorable tots with her as a way of getting close to him. Charlotte decides to teach Will about the Velvet Underground, only to have him turn around and insist, “Well, actually, if we’re gonna start with the Velvets, I’d rather listen to the 1969 self-titled The Velvet Underground, unless you think the band went downhill when Lou Reed fired John Cale.” 

The most beautiful woman in New Jersey does not angrily demand that the gangly outsider whip out his dick so she can suck it in appreciation for the mini-history lesson, but you can tell she wants to. Why wouldn’t she? He knows basic information about one of the most legendary rock bands of all time. That is precious and rare and should always be rewarded with oral sex.

What women doesn’t get aroused when a man utters the magic words, “Well, actually…” then kindly dispenses information that he thinks she does not know, being a woman and all, about such matters as The Velvet Underground? 

No wonder Charlotte introduces Will to her bandmates as, literally,  the "coolest kid ever”, because he “knows absolutely everything about music." 

Being smarter and better and sexier than everyone else, due to being a Mojo subscriber, Will is less impressed with the actual musicians he encounters. When Charlotte and her band bang out an eminently respectable cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me”, Will lectures Charlotte’s band-mates, “Look, I know you’re going for this kind of Thin Lizzy dual guitar, third-above harmony, but I mean it’s tough, sonically, to pull off, because you can’t get the bass sound fat enough, or even in the same octave to create any real presence, especially if your instruments aren’t exactly tuned to each other.” 

While Will snottily dresses down absolute strangers just having fun Charlotte looks at him with a look of pure lust. Just hearing him use phrases like “dual guitar”, “third above harmony” and “same octave” is enough to drive her to the very brink of orgasm. Though he did not seek the position, Charlotte anoints Will her band’s manager and dominant creative voice. 

Ah,  but Charlotte is not the only impossibly perfect, nauseatingly quirky Manic Pixie Dream Girl on the hunt for some music geek cock. On his first day, Will discovers that a multi-high-school battle of the bands called Bandslam is as important to his new school as high school football is to some Texas towns from a dark-haired beauty named, I shit you not, Sa5m, played by Disney star Vanessa Hudgens. Needles to say, the “5” in Sa5m is silent.

Charlotte and Will’s lives intersect when a teacher pairs them together for a project where they have to get to know each other and then do a presentation that expresses the existential truth of their partner’s existence. 

Sa5m, who feels betrayed and hurt that she cannot have Will’s cock all for herself, and has to fight Charlotte for it, possibly to the death, does a pretentious presentation about how Will is an empty vessel who only reflects back what he sees, and is devoid of a voice and identity of his own. 

Will, meanwhile, does a cutesy little short film where he drags a cut-out of Sa5m around the city while dispensing factoids about her likes and dislikes.  Like Charlotte and the movie itself, Sa5m cannot resist Will, despite him being the most obnoxious, least likable character in the history of film. That includes Adolf Hitler in Downfall. We might find him arrogant and insufferable but in a million different ways the movie angrily insists that, actually, he’s funny and smart and incredibly knowledgable about music and a real catch. 

It’s hard to believe that a small town in New Jersey would even boast two women as impossibly gorgeous as Charlotte and Sa5m, let alone that they would be locked in a life or death battle for the same geek’s cock.

In Bandslam, knowing about the music of David Bowie somehow makes you as cool and sexually desirable as actually being David Bowie. Then again, Will doesn’t have to actually do any work or risk rejection, since the most beautiful women in the world hurl themselves at him in appreciation of his knowledge of indie and classic rock. 

Charlotte kisses Will, ostensibly as a mitzvah and for educational purposes, but really because she wants his nerd dick and obviously wouldn’t mind sharing him if that’s what it takes. Then Sa5m repays Will’s comically inept moves with a tender, passionate kiss before brightly inquiring, “Have you seen Evil Dead 2? It’s my favorite movie.”

In its endless, shapeless third act Bandslam ropes in a bunch of pointless paternal melodrama involving the death of Charlotte’s dad and the revelation that Will’s long-gone alcoholic, ne’er do well dad killed a child while driving drunk before a big battle of the bands where Charlotte’s band, now fronted by Sa5m, performs what the film depicts as the ultimate culmination of Will’s encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth century music: a ska cover of “Everything I Own” from soft-rockers Bread. 

They don’t win, but a viral Youtube video of the performance attracts the attention of, yes, DAVID FUCKING BOWIE who wants to sign these peppy teenagers on the basis of a BREAD COVER they performed once. At a high school battle of the bands. 

Sitting in a coffee shop and stiffly reciting/typing the words “Dear Will Burton, it says on your MySpace page that you manage I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. Nice name. I really like your band. You know, I’m starting an indie label. Are you signed to anyone? Maybe we can sit down and have a chat” constitutes the entirety of Bowie’s performance and I gotta admit: it’s not great. I’m pretty sure they did not waste Bowie’s time with more than one take. 

As much as I despised Bandslam with every fiber of my being, I might just have given it a pass if Bowie played the same role here that he did in August, as the heavy hammer of fate who destroys an insufferable protagonist with a few artfully chosen words of painful truth.

If the email Bowie sends Will at the end read, “Will, I have just read all of the letters you have sent me and I have never encountered a more obnoxious, self-satisfied, entitled brat. You’re not funny. You’re not clever. You’re not special. You’re not better than other people because you’ve read some Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. Get over yourself and calm the fuck down, Sincerely, David Bowie” I would have felt so vindicated. Instead David Bowie is just as impossibly generous to Will as Charlotte and Sa5m. 

I have absolutely no idea why Bowie agreed to be in this nonsense. Maybe the part flattered him but the role and the performance both ring weirdly hollow, since Bandslam does not understand our powerful connection to our favorite artists any more than it does the politics of high school life. The same, thankfully is not true of Purple Bananas, which has the bracing ring of truth as opposed to Bandslam’s hackneyed hokum. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here