What We Do Is Secret

This movie was great, both to inform people who care to learn, and people who are already interested in the subject and punks in general. I read a comment in here that said this movie was too "clean" and that punks were "scum and proud". If this is a reason to dislike this movie then you obviously are not seeing things how you're supposed to. The whole mind set of punks is being themselves and being individual because they feel that's what is right. In their minds they're not doing anything wrong; in their minds, they were the ones who were truly clean, where as the high and mighty assholes of society living their fake lives were the ones who were scum and proud. This film is through the viewpoint of the punks, to better relate to them. Keep that in mind when watching this film, it isn't like every other punk movie spat out by the media to show how outrageous and unethical punk is, whoring it like it's some kind of circus act, if you're looking for that in a punk movie, you're missing the point and should steer clear of this film.

Last year there was an accomplished little film called Control by Anton Corbijn starring Samantha Morton, Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, et al., with beautiful black and white images of England evoking the short life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, an English rock group of the 80's. This is the same thing, only the singer and the group, "legendary" and "seminal" though they may be among followers of punk, are less remembered among music fans, and the extent of the legend hardly becomes clear in this version. The focus is a lead singer who runs a group called The Germs. The film-making, which mixes dramatized sequences with fake documentary interviews, seeks to evoke the LA punk scene of the late 70's and early 80's. The scene and the film are sloppier, the concert sequences are more violent and less musical, the characters are less defined, and the ending is sudden. Yet in the opinion of some fans, it's not violent or sloppy enough, and one can see their point.

The lead singer in question, played by the successful TV actor Shane West, is a professed Fascist, though anarchy seems more his style, who takes on the name Darby Crash. He has been expelled from a special high school whose teachers proclaim him ungovernable but brilliant. He gives other band members names like Lorna Doom (Bijou Phillips) and Pat Smear (Rick Gonzalez). Gonzales has wonderful cheekbones, but never seems like a punker. Darby tells a French interviewer that he has a five-year plan--indication of his ambition but also a hint that his days are intentionally numbered. He's giving himself that long to make it big; perhaps also that long to live? So it went, anyway. At some point he seems to have said to the band they'd be as big as the Beatles. Ironically, he offed himself the night John Lennon was shot. In a late sequence Darby's cohorts mourn Lennon as they watch reports on TV of his death, while the scene cuts back and forth to their lead singer, alone with a girl groupie pledged to go out with him, deliberately overdosing.

This movie may awaken nostalgia or longing in those who wish life were crazier than it is now. The LA punk scene was a time of true mayhem, which is conveyed here even if the styles and interactions don't always quite fit the period. The group is assembled haphazardly including two girls recruited on the basis that they should have no talent and not be able to play an instrument. The Germs began to play without knowledge of the rudiments of music or their axes and their energy grew out of the outrage of the audience, which itself seemed more in search of violence and anger than art from the stage. This was a time of "joke bands," set up with some gimmick, like a male lead singer wearing a dress, and wailing laments that were not taken seriously by the band. The Germs were more serious, insofar as their leader cut himself and bled in public. The aim was to risk everything, and The Germs got banned from one music venue after another. At one point they stage a comeback by changing their name to "GI," for "Germs Incognito." They have trouble finding a drummer and run through nine. The one who sticks is a guy from Arizona who calls himself Don Bolles (Noah Segan). Segan has a wide-eyed eagerness and energy that, faute de mieux, has to pass for Bolles' personality. A homosexual relationship seems to develop between a certain Robby Henley (Ashton Holmes), who hero-worships Darby, but maybe he just wants to be in the band. Later he replaces Bolles as drummer through a violent misunderstanding. A woman called Amber (Missy Doty) becomes manager, over someone else, by virtue of paying for Darby's and the others' drinks and drugs.

Briefly Penelope Spheeris becomes a character, shown working with a big movie camera on her film, The Decline of Western Civilization--a reminder that this is a scene that has been well documented. This is a fictionalized recreation, with documentary touches. In that respect more than Control it resembles Fulton and Pepe's 2005 Brothers of the Head, which cunningly presents multiple forms of fake footage for an invented Siamese twin punk band. But both of those deserve higher ratings than What We Do Is Secret, though some may value the raw crudity of the concert sequences here, rarely recreated with such ferocity.

The movie is less successful, indeed makes little effort, at showing how The Germs interacted with and influenced, or were influenced by, other punk bands of the time; and in detailing the personalities involved; or specific songs. Datelines indicate times and venues of main Germs concerts, and the making of an album is briefly sketched in. But concerts are represented by one partial, ill-defined song each. Contrast Control where some concerts get extended sequences, and songs come through to even an uninformed viewer. Here, the atmosphere outside of violent clashes between people, boasting by Darby, and the in-your-face nosh pit concert scenes, is not really that punk. The clothes and manners could be any beatnik hippie depressed young folk of the last fifty years, and the effort to define a moment through a key group and voice is a failure.

I'm sorry but this movie is awful. Very surface, poorly made, badly acted- a major disappointment. Shane West is passable, but almost everyone else in the film is bad.

And the script- they have taken the seedy, turbulent life of Darby Crash and turned it into an after school special. Actually, after school specials were more interesting than this.

I am shocked that Pat Smear and the other surviving members of The Germs would have anything to do with this film. It makes them all seem one dimensional and uninteresting. Stick with Penelope Spheeris' great documentary THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION- it will have to do until a better Germs biopic comes along.

It's simply this: Shane West, as a singer and performer of Germs songs as Darby Crash in What We Do is Secret, works fine. In the 1/4 of the film where the filmmakers turned their attention to the on-stage performances for the film (or one-time album recording), West does very good work, so good in fact one may be tempted to revisit just those aggressive and loud and messy and amazingly crude songs when the film is broadcast on a loop on IFC (you know it will be). And yet, for all of West's feracity in the part as the singer, when he has to *act* as Darby Crash, it's at best halfway believable and at worst very stupid.

There is a resemblance, somewhere, between West- who previously appeared in such films as, yes, A Walk to Remember- and the grimy and death-by-junk singer who had a real intelligence and some crazy ideas. But at the same time West also looks and sounds and sometimes emotes just like what he is: a good but definite pretty boy. Darby Crash was many things, but a pretty boy assuredly not. And because the writing means to try its damndest to put a lot of the emotional weight on Crash, many moments (though not all) with West as Crash fall flat. Thankfully, by the third act, he isn't as irksome, and it almost turns into a halfway decent portrayal of such a true cult figure (cult in the literal sense perhaps).

And yet I can't put all blame on West, or even for the other competent-to-good-to-not-so-good supporting actors playing other members of the Germs. It's the first-time writer/director Rodger Grossman, who hasn't quite figured out at times how to be very confident with the camera, and at best is most daring (in somewhat predictable ways) during the musical sequences and perhaps one shot where a pool is reflected. The rest is a lot of rote work as far as the dramatic stuff goes - when it comes to the "iterviews" done with the people in the band, the groupies, the b-word "manager/girlfriend/mother" of Darby Crash, they fare much better. Indeed if Grossman had been more decisive with how to take the direction of the film (as a documentary done with actors filling in the parts and going through actual things they may or may not have said), it would have worked better either way as gritty bio-pic or bittersweet pseudo-documentary.

I probably sound harder on this movie than the actual vote/rating would say. Maybe it's because as a big fan of The Germs I was slightly more forgiving than other people may be. For the uninitiated it definitely gives a precisely strange and f***-ed up idea of who Crash was and how he drifted into heroin. And as well the uninitiated will find that it stinks. It's for die-hards only.

I'm a lifelong Germs fan. I loved the biography on Darby and was very excited to see this film. If you're a fan of the band, it is kind of cool to see them on screen doing their thing (not much video exists of the band so I'm used to articles and pictures). But overall, I did not enjoy it.

Unlike Sid and Nancy there are no memorable scenes and the film does not use music well. I challenge you to watch this and years later recall a scene as vividly as the "walking through the glass" scene in Sid and Nancy. Darby's inner struggles could have been explored in a fascinating way. They were not. This is just a basic run down of what the band looked like and where they hung out. I can't see any reason why anyone who isn't a huge Germs fan might enjoy this film. At the end a poem is read which Darby had written as a young teenager, but the actor messes up Darby's words. Appropriate.