This scene from the Matrix Reloaded is one of the Worst Ever Movie and TV Music Scenes
Beat me. Whip me. Bite me. For the record, I think the ten best rock movies ever are Oliver!, Mary Poppins, Moulin Rouge, Josie and the Pussycats, Cabaret, The Wedding Singer, Slade in Flame, Amadeus, Spice World and The Doors.
I know these are controversial choices because everyone I asked to reveal their Worst Ever Movie and TV Music Scenes (WEMaTMS) mentioned one of the above.
Usually The Doors.
How can any movie in which Billy Idol hobbles about with his foot stuck in a duck, suck? In fact can you think of a single movie that wouldn't be improved by the addition of Billy Idol with a duck on his foot?
You see where I'm coming from. So here, instead, are my alternatives for WEMaTMS ignominy:
1) In Black Snake Moan, cuckolded blues musician Samuel L Jackson chains local slut Christina Ricci to a radiator to teach her the error of her ways. Learning that Ricci's joyless nymphomania is the result of parental rape, Jackson relents and takes her to a live blues concert. While Jackson plays like a demon, Ricci overcomes her initial shyness and proceeds to engage in super-horny, slo-mo, bisexual, frottage-heavy, soft-porn, rap-video-style dirty dancing while Jackson smiles on paternalistically. Easily the most bizarrely inappropriate thing I've seen since the cheerleaders for the Philadelphia Kixx indoor soccer team taught a horde of tweens to dance like strippers at half-time on "Girl Scout Night".
2) The crust-rave scene in Matrix Reloaded. The evil machines are coming to destroy Zion, but Nemo's got a plan. So the humans celebrate by gyrating like glued-up New Model Army fans circa 1989. Here the entire premise of the Matrix trilogy collapses. In the virtual-reality created by the machines, Nemo and his chums are cool, shade-wearing, super-sharp, kung-fu uber-mods. In Zion, they're stinking hedgemonkeys. Go machines. Kill humans.
3) Sylvester Stallone in Rhinestone. OK, so this is the equivalent of dropping a thermonuclear device into a barrel full of dead mackerel, but the scene where Sly hams his way through Old McDonald's Farm while a glassy-eyed Dolly Parton pretends to be amused and a codger comments, "That was scary son, for a minute there I thought you were gonna explode", is chilling is the same way that Terry Wogan being ironic about the Eurovision Song Competition is chilling. Some people are so profoundly crap that not even camp can save them.
4) The buskers on the Gilmore Girls. For sure, GG spits hip baby-boomer pop references like a groovy gatling gun, but essentially it's Absolutely Fabulous re-written by Norman Rockwell and directed by Leni Riefenstahl. In line with this hideously seductive cuddly conformity, GG flaunts it's "edgy" good taste with a series of celebrity buskers who are in fact haggard, American art-rock has-beens who were only slightly more interesting than they were irritating for about five minutes back in the decade that pop forgot. Step forward Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon. Now step back again. Thank you.
5) The indie band in Laurel Canyon. Most of the really awful musical scenes in movies are the result of the director hamfistedly cobbling together some Frankenstein pastiche of an existing genre or - even worse - some future genre (which always looks uncannily like the 80s, except cokier). Laurel Canyon's great crime, however, lies in its terrible authenticity. Seeking to cast an English-sounding, no-balls, indie, afraid-to-rock xerox-of-a-xerox of a Smiths cover band, they chose real-life mewly-pukey lightweights Folk Implosion. Who are all in knitted hipster hats with silly earflaps. In terms of rubbishness, they're up there with the "grunge" band in Singles who were fronted by a singer called Cliff Poncier (no, really) played by Matt Dillon in a wig.
6) Hazel O'Connor in Breaking Glass. It was the 80s. Everything sucked. Especially films about the rise and fall of New Wave bands fronted by the poor man's Toyah Wilcox. See also the "left wing" cabaret scene in Who Dares Wins.
7) Every scene in Friends which mentions how great Hootie and the Blowfish are. Or Sting.
8) A pre-Tarzan Christopher Lambert - looking like Sting shagged through a hedge backwards - plays second fiddle to a really bad French art-punkpop combo in Luc Besson's terrifyingly dull Subway. "How can we keep on watching that fucking TV / We're so bored we don't care what we see," sings the straight-looking black bloke Christopher drags in off the street to front the ennui-stricken band. Yeah, TV is bad. It's deep. It's French rock. It's 1985. The punk drummer with the Johnny Wrongcock specs and Himmler moustache pretty much steals the show.
9) Quincy and the Punks. The classic episode in which proper music-loving, middle-aged TV criminal pathologist Quincy took on and destroyed an entire subculture. This paved the way for the epic scene in which proper music-loving middle-aged TV private eye Mike Hammer smashed some punk rockers to little pieces when they scratched his favourite Sinatra record on the jukebox. In a logical plot progression, Mike then had sex with a woman with enormous breasts.
10) In Rude Boy, Joe Strummer plays Let The Good Times Roll on the jonah in a rubadub and then delivers a dumbed-down, sloppily glottal-stopped lecture on the merits of communism to his fascist scumbag roadie. Later on, Joe waves his finger in the Nazi's face. "I'm watching you," he says. Should've sacked the twat in the first reel, Joe. And the director. Actually all the bits of Rude Boy without acting are amazing.
So maybe we'll give this slot to Sir Paul McCartney's Give My Regards to Broad Street instead.
