Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains | Diane Lane, Ray Winstone

Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains | Diane Lane, Ray Winstone | Excellent!!!

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Ladies And Gentlem...

	Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains Diane Lane, Ray Winstone Rhino Entertainment, 2008 average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

At Last, The Coolest Cult Film Of The 80's!

I also first saw this on the old Night Flight TV show & was fortunate to record the broadcast. One of my fav trashy films, & it's coming to dvd at last!

Also stars the Tubes Fee Waybill & the late Tubes keyboard player Vince Welnick; + a very young Laura Dern.

Besides being just plain fun & required for Tubes fans (Fee steals the movie), this is also an early indictment of corporate broadcast media.

The picture quality is excellent. Here's a few tidbits:

1. It's in widescreen (16X9), all the boots I've seen are fullscreen

2. The shower scene does not appear to be cut; it's actually not all that explicit, though Running time is the same as the boots.

3. Only extras are 2 commentaries: 1 from Lane & Dern, & 1 from Adler. The Dern/Lane commentary is really entertaining, though they got a couple facts wrong (Called Vince Welnick the Tubes bass player for one), & the Adler was so boring I gave up after 20 minutes. The short U-Tube featurettes are NOT on here.

4. No sign of the LP or cd so far. The film credits mentions a soundtrack on Ode Records (Adler's label). I don't remember seeing a soundtrack when it came out.

Fans of R&R cult films should buy this, it doesn't get much better. Liquid Sky is the only similar 80's film that even comes close.

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Excellent!!!

I absolutely love this movie! I love Diane Lane, she is amazing in everything she does and this is no exception! Great acting by Diane and everyone else too. Very fun. I own all of her movies and this movie was awesome! I highly recommend to everyone! Go get it!!!

A Three Star Film with a Five Star Ending

Diane Lane is proof that beauty and talent alone are not enough to make you a star. Lane is the daughter of an acting coach and a playboy centerfold, and she has more beauty and talent than any of the other actors of her generation but she has also been in more bad movies than any other actor of her generation.

Although in recent years she has landed roles in some box office hits like A Perfect Storm (2000) and Unfaithful (2002) and thus achieved a kind of belated star status, her best role was her first. In 1979 , she starred with no less than Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance. Because it is wise and smart and relatively cliche-free, this is one of the most appealing coming-of-age films of all-time. After that there were a couple of small but memorable roles in Coppola's S.E. Hinton films, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (1983), and, later, in Coppola's The Cotton Club (1985). She did take three years off after Cotton Club, but other than that she has worked steadily in mostly forgotten or just plain forgettable films.

And then there is this largely forgotten because seen by so few film from 1982, Ladies and Gentleman the Fabulous Stains. In it, Lane plays a smalltown discontent who makes a splash in the local media when she throws a fit after being fired from her fast food job. Her spunky I've-had-it-with-everything-attitude gives her a local notoriety that makes her unemployable. So, she has little choice but to live the life of a rebel, and pursue the one career opportunity open to just-turned-15 ne'er-do-well rebels: she starts a punk band!

In the early going the film is pretty uneven. Lane herself as Corinne "third degree" Burns is always solid but the other performances are just so so. Laura Dern plays a cousin who is also in the band but she rarely speaks, and Christine Lahti plays her sketchy aunt but also utters very few lines. The film achieved its cult status partly because it features Sex Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones and The Clash's Paul Simenon as members of a traveling punk band called The Looters, but these guys do little more than strike poses and lend the film a certain cool just by hanging out in the background. More importantly, the film earned its cult status by being smart about the way the hype-driven record industry exploits both talent and fans. There's even a dig at the then just launched MTV.

Other than Lane, the only real charisma is delivered by Fee Waybill of Tubes fame. The Tubes had some huge hits in the early 70's with "White Punks on Dope" and "Mondo Bondage" and, in 1982, had yet to make their own big MTV comeback with "Shes a Beauty". Here Waybill plays the lead singer of the Metal Corpses, a one-hit-has-been rock act that is running on drug and groupie fumes. Although the character is not developed enough, its actually a pretty good and memorable performance mainly because Waybill doesn't go for Spinal-Tappish laughs but actually crafts a believable character that is humbled not only by having to play the small club circuit in his days of decline but also by having to share a tour bus with a fistful of brash young up-and-comers who think very little of him or his band, The Metal Corpses. There is no peaceful retirment for old rockers, just early death or a long slow fade from glory. Waybill brings some soul to his part which can't be said of most of the other performances. Particularly weak is the reggae manager who is supposed to be there to lend authenticity to the proceedings but whose presence has just the opposite effect.

But the film is Lane's. Her Corinne Burns is a natural beauty, maybe even a supernatural beauty, and even at 15 she knows how the world works: workers are exploited by corporations, women are exploited by men, art is exploited by industry. Corinne knows that the hardest thing about life is not to sell-out to anything and she eventually learns the hard way that that is easier said than done. Corinne gains fame by voicing and venting the discontent and frustration that her generation of young females feels and the result is she gains a legion of young fans that want to be just like Corinne Burns. But there is also something ruthless about Corinne and The Stains meteoric rise to fame has as much to do with media savvy and knowing just how to use people as it does with talent. Still, there is something irresistable about Corinne veiling her beauty queen good looks behind punk/new wave make-up and spiked and skunk-striped hair. And something not-quite-consistent about the way she preaches about women "not putting out" while wearing nothing but fishnet nylons, black panties and a sheer red blouse onstage. But the truthfulness of these observations of the small and the not so small ironies and hypocrisies of fame are what make this film so good.

The film isn't raw enough to have been a hit with the punk crowd, and the film didn't find an audience in this country just like punk didn't find an audience in this country in 1982. In hindsight though the film seems to predict the rise of Madonna and her legions of followers as well as the pop starlets that followed in her wake.

I don't want to over-hype the film. Its probably a three-star film, but the singlemost reason that this film should be viewed is to see Corinne Burns and the Stains do a cheesy MTV promo video for an awesome punk song (penned by Jones and Simenon) called "I Wanna Be Professional". The video sums up everything, its a five-star ending to a three-star film.

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Not the cult classic it once was

A young Diane Lane gives one of cinema's most obnoxious performances in history (and I mean it as a compliment - it's a good acting job) in a movie that seemed so great seeing it 25 years ago when you were a teenager, but seeing it now after all those years, awful! You want to feel sorry for Corrine "3rd Degree" Burns at the start since she's an orphan but with her nasty attitude you wind up rooting for her downfall at the end.

The ending is classic Hollywood absurdity...just after her fans turn on her as a sellout and her career seemingly over, suddenly and with no explanation she's got a hit record and slick video out! Never mind that her hit song was stolen by her from another band with no threat of a copyright lawsuit, her manager had just dumped her and the rest of her band had run off! Was this ending her wishful fantasy or intended to be real?

There is something Madonna-ish in this story, amazing since it came out only a year or two before she hit it big. I think Madonna must have seen this film and copied the clothes and the attitude into her act.

So if you buy this movie to see it for the first time in years, better give it to your teenage kids, they'll love it, but for the rest of us, I think we're all just too grown up now to still like this movie.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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