End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
2003 Directed by Michael Gramaglia, Jim Fields
Synopsis
The story of the punk rock band The Ramones.
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The Ramones were the first punk band I ever saw (Whisky a Go Go, 1976), and they're still my favorite. Their first album hit me between the eyes like a pickaxe. It turned my perception of what constituted "good" music inside-out, and made me realize just how stale and pretentious the prog- and arena-rock I'd been listening to up until that point really was. I lost track of them during the 90s, so when this documentary came out, my interest in seeing what they'd been up to during the intervening years was piqued.
"End of the Century" delivers the goods. Anyone who thought the Ramones were just a bunch of glue-sniffing mooks from Queens who played the same 3 chords…
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The Ramones were the first punk band I ever saw (Whisky a Go Go, 1976), and they're still my favorite. Their first album hit me between the eyes like a pickaxe. It turned my perception of what constituted "good" music inside-out, and made me realize just how stale and pretentious the prog- and arena-rock I'd been listening to up until that point really was. I lost track of them during the 90s, so when this documentary came out, my interest in seeing what they'd been up to during the intervening years was piqued.
"End of the Century" delivers the goods. Anyone who thought the Ramones were just a bunch of glue-sniffing mooks from Queens who played the same 3 chords…
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This doco was very interesting about this great band and really goes into which i liked i do think it skips over some stuff to quickly but that might be just me. but found out some stuff about this band and it was very good and good to see some of there music in there but would have liked metion of there there stuff like when they were on the simpsons but oh well still a good music doco.
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I've long been interested in the history of punk, and the growth and development of the movement. Ultimately its growth was organic and gradual, and was far from being a sudden explosion in '77; the fact that the mainstream media caught on to the growing "movement" at this time is largely irrelevant, kids in America and the UK (arguably especially America) were already making weird, angry, fast, loud music for a couple of years before.
As with any rockumentary, once you get aging and possibly drug addled people in to talk about the past, things are often going to be very hazy, and egos usually start to obstruct the view of the truth. This seems particularly evident in this documentary.…
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Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia begin their history of the groundbreaking punk band with the 2002 Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction before spinning back to their early 1970s origins, and how their stripped-down riffs changed a generation of music. It could have proved fascinating had the focus remained on the irony of band members who changed their names to present the image of brothers, then proceeded to behave like a dysfunctional family for 20 years. Instead, Fields and Gramaglia spend lots of time on the Ramones’ inability to break out commercially, despite all the rockers who step forward to cite their influence. And it might have been nice to see some of that influence on the film itself. Is it too much to ask that a documentary about the Ramones not offer a sensibility that is to filmmaking what Toto was to rock and roll?
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A painfully insightful documentary on punk rock's most lovable-yet-dysfunctional family.
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A stellar documentary on the greatest band of all time.
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One of the best music documentaries.