Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...line of this movie belongs to a Ramones groupie--"I love Joey Ramone because he's so handsome...." Yet exuberant the Ramones are, and you'd expect them to make a movie the way they write a song--with good spirits, no subtlety and a lot of loud pounding. Rock and Roll High School is like that, only the adolescent fury that propels a two-and-a-half minute song can't sustain a 100-minute movie...
Vince Lombardi High School, the movie's back-drop, indiscriminately mixes atmospheres of mid-'70s boredom and early '60s California youth culture. For the first 15 minutes, Rock and Roll High School could be an updated surfing movie, just as the Ramones are in a sense punk's answer to the Beach Boys. The jokes are the oldest in the book--football players stuff freshmen in closets; a shy, bespectacled girl sidles up to a football captain; the wonks display gadgets at a "science fair...
...school, amid the principal's "final solution"--a massive vinyl-burning. We watch horrified as Who's Next, Sticky Fingers and Rocket to Russia go up in foul-smelling smoke. But Soles breaks into the principal's office and, with the P.A.'s aid, turns Lombardi into "Rock and Roll High School." The kids go wild, the Ramones break into "Do You Wanna Dance," and in a scene of mayhem they rip the school apart--in the end actually blowing...
EXCEPT FOR THE RAMONES and Soles, there's little to recommend Rock and Roll High School. Most of the jokes are silly, like this one--a fellow in Indian dress walks along the ticket line for the Ramones gig: "A scalper," one fan tells another knowingly. The soundtrack is good--music by Eno and Nick Lowe side by side with Alice Cooper and Todd Rundgren. (If you want to hear live Ramones recordings, though, don't buy this soundtrack album; get a double-album import called It's Alive, four uninterrupted sides of lobotomized thumping...
...Cambodian operation itself as the major issue before the public. Washington took on the character of a besieged city. On May 9 a crowd estimated at between 75,000 and 100,000 demonstrated on the Ellipse, south of the White House. The President saw himself as the firm rock in this rushing stream, but the turmoil had its effect. Pretending indifference, he was deeply wounded by the hatred of the protesters. In his ambivalence Nixon reached a point of exhaustion that caused his advisers deep concern...