THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART II: THE METAL YEARS, an outlandish documentary chronicle of the Los Angeles heavy metal scene in the late-‘80s plays like the source material for THIS IS SPINAL TAP. The only problem? SPINAL was first released in 1982, a full half-decade before THE METAL YEARS, which suggests its subjects viewed the earlier film as some sort of model of the proper rock and roll lifestyle. Did they miss the joke?

There are loads of comparisons but one scene in particular from METAL YEARS plays like a deleted scene from SPINAL TAP. A washed-up group named LONDON decides to burn a Russian flag to get the crowd geared up for their next song. The lead singer takes a lighter to it. Nothing happens. Several fans join in. Still nothing. Oh how inflammable material makes fools of us all.

Admittedly, SPINAL TAP, though beloved in some circles almost immediately upon its release, was a cult phenomenon that took years to find its place in the pop culture lexicon. Likely many METAL YEARS' interviewees had not even seen it when they contributed to their disturbing and oftentimes hilarious reenactment of the mockumentary’s excess and stupidity. This does not excuse their behavior, though it does make Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer seem like fortune tellers as well as geniuses.

THE METAL YEARS (which, as the title suggests, is the second film in a series chronicling the rise of punk and hard rock music) tells no story and covers no watershed event in the lives of these glam-haired, made-up, drugged-out musicians. It consists instead, of a series of well-edited interviews of rock and rollers from two ends of the spectrum: have's like Steven Tyler and Joe Perry from AEROSMITH, who warn of the dangers of drug abuse and delight in the pleasures of groupie sex; and have-nots, who are all so convinced of their impending ascension to the metal star firmament that when asked what they will do if they don't make it they all respond the same way. "But I will make it." If there is any irony in the robotic answers of these alleged non-conformists, it is lost on them.

Give credit to director Penelope Spheeris, who would go on to direct the finest chronicle of heavy metal fandom, 1991's WAYNE'S WORLD, for choosing some truly outstanding settings for her interviews. Alice Cooper appears on his elaborate stage set beneath a gigantic noose. Ozzy Osborne shows up in his bathrobe, kibbitzing while he cooks some eggs. KISS' Gene Simmons speaks from a lingerie store (where all the shoppers appear to have misplaced their pants and their shirts and their shame). Paul Stanley talks candidly about the stark realities of celebrity from the confines of an enormous bed, with three scantily clad model (probably just home from Gene Simmons' Lingerie and Porn Emporium) crawling all over him. Stanley calls heavy metal "the true rock and roll of the ‘80s" but he never says anything about music. All he talks about is sex, money, and the sex that can be had as a result of acquiring tremendous amounts of money.

And that's what made heavy metal the real rock and roll of the 1980s, where how you sounded was far less important than how you looked, and the measure of success in that field was how much you resembled a woman. None of these rising stars of the heavy metal world have any philosophies on creation or musicianship. They do, however, have plenty to say about their favorite vices. "My personal taste?" one says, "I like sluts. I like slutty girls." The lead singer of the band ODIN wears assless chaps and a thong because, he claims, "It ventilates my scrotum sack." When asked what makes LONDON different from other bands, one member replies, "We don't wipe our asses so we smell really bad." They also declare that since they often must rely on the succor of well-healed female fans to feed and clothe them, their "dicks get hard for gold cards." There may be a fine line between stupid and clever, but sometimes that line is really, really clear.

(The veterans aren't all geniuses either. Steven Tyler, when ask to pinpoint the secret to his success says, "It's rhythm and blues. It's twos and fours. It's fucking. You can really fuck to an Aerosmith song." It's clear I must never go to an Aerosmith concert.)

The music was mostly terrible, but the sound of metal, harmonizing guitars, powerful vocals, Steven Tyler's twos and fours, was good, and better than you might have remembered. But flashy as it was, it couldn't compete with all that hair and glitter, and that's what attracted people, and within a fair amount of time, the same people realized that people looked fairly and dependably stupid when they have to duck to fit their hair through doorways. Some theorists believe culture is cyclical, that everything that is popular once will become popular again. If that day does come for metal, I will rely on my copy of THE METAL YEARS and SPINAL to get me through the tough times.

IF YOU LIKED THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION II, CHECK OUT: THE LAST WALTZ (1978), Martin Scorsese’s vivid documentary of The Band’s farewell concert. With camerawork by Michael Chapman and Vilmos Zsigmond it is, at the very least, the best-looking rock concert film ever made.

THE BAD

On the day that excessive ambition becomes a marker for success, NEW YORK, NEW YORK will be rediscovered as a masterpiece. The film fails on many levels — on most levels really — but it is not for lack of trying. It is for trying too hard.

Scorsese claims he wanted to pay homage to the great Technicolor musicals. He also wanted to capture the moral ambiguities of film noir. He wanted to experiment with improvisation acting. He wanted to portray the impossibilities of love between two competing artists, and even more generally, between all men and women. In each count, Scorsese unquestionably succeeds. Yet the final result, while containing all of these elements, bears no narrative or thematic coherence, and has little of its forbearers’ emotional resonance. But with such disparate interests contained in a movie almost twice as long as it should be, how could it?

Most of the best material is contained in the lengthy scene that introduces the setting and characters (not coincidentally, it is also the only scene that was not heavily improvised according to Scorsese). De Niro, wearing a Hawaiian shirt laden with New York imagery, plays Jimmy Doyle, a musician trying to get laid on V-J Day. Liza Minnelli's Francine is a USO worker who resists Jimmy's cheesy pick up lines. The sequence contains both a virtuoso use of cinematography — where the clever use of costume, a crane, and framing beautifully introduce Jimmy Doyle as an outsider even in a crowd — and sharp dialogue worth of the screwball greats. When Jimmy finally gets the hint from Francine he says, "I'll take a rain check. Maybe next war." "She replies, "What makes you think you'll win the next one?"

From there the film is a lengthy, sometimes tedious, sometimes fascinating experiment. It is not boring but it is, in most critical ways, a failure. It has the visual tropes of classic musicals, and the emotional ones of noir, but it has the impact of waiting on line for a broken roller coaster: you wait and wait for progress, but none ever comes. All your left to look at in the meantime is the dormant track that lies around you, that suggests what could have been, but simply is not.

De Niro's Jimmy Doyle is a blueprint for his next role for Scorsese, Jake La Motta in RAGING BULL. He is possessive, bitter, and controlled by rage he cannot understand or release. Though De Niro made period films (THE GODFATHER PART II) he was associated with a modern style of acting. In NEW YORK, NEW YORK's anachronistic attempt to recreate highly stylized Technicolor grandeur, it's a strange fit. The old musicals are built upon an almost religious belief in the power of music to conquer obstacles, heal rifts and unite mankind. Scorsese uses the form for the opposite purpose: in NEW YORK, NEW YORK music destroys relationships and people, as all obsessions ultimately do in Scorsese's work.

As it was made for a major studio with a large budget, NEW YORK, NEW YORK might make an interesting companion piece for study alongside Scorsese's recent big-budget epics GANGS OF NEW YORK and THE AVIATOR, which (the former more than the latter) suffer their own problems of unappealing or uninteresting characters . Scorsese is such a potent filmmaker when his subjects are small and personal — TAXI DRIVER and MEAN STREETS tell complete stories with almost documentary authenticity.

His larger films have their moments of brilliance; Scorsese is too talented for them not to. But they all suffer in their own way. Perhaps when the money is too readily available he becomes too ambitious for his own good. Or perhaps the money leads to ambition and ambition can sometimes get out of control.

INSTEAD OF NEW YORK, NEW YORK, CHECK OUT: THE BAND WAGON (1953), one of the watershed musicals created in the Arthur Freed unit of MGM during the 1950s by director Vincente Minnelli. Fred Astaire plays a washed-up movie star, who tries to jump start his career by trying his hand at Broadway and falls in love with his leading lady, played by Cyd Charisse. The narrative and thematic similarities between THE BAND WAGON and NEW YORK, NEW YORK (and in the last names of the former’s director and the latter’s star) are most certainly not coincidental.

THE UGLY

Unless you have an irrational phobia toward frogs, there is nothing frightening about FROGS, and in a weird way, that is why I like it. This is a horror movie about something is inherently not scary; it'd be much the same if it was named PILLOWS or GRAPEFRUIT or SPARE TIRE. FROGS' creators, perhaps sensing that their subject had about as much terror value as a napkin, push the toads to the background and use other animals — lots of other animals — to do most of the murder heavy lifting.

Yes, you read correctly, the frogs in the horror movie FROGS are not killers! They breed a lot and make a lot of noise, but their consciences are clean, for, as improbable as it sounds, they don't actually kill anybody. Instead our large and largely uninteresting cast is offed by an assortment of various other creatures: snakes and lizards and spiders and scorpions and crocodiles and crabs. It's makes you wonder; if you're making a movie about frogs, called FROGS, why would you not make the frogs the focus? And if frogs aren't believable wreaking havoc (and they most certainly would not be) maybe they don't really deserve a movie in the first place. Are the frogs controlling these creatures to do their murderous will? Are they also controlling the people who foolishly chose to give them a whole movie?

FROGS is the sort of movie that only works if you care about the cast and thanks to a uniformly uncharismatic and unlikable lot, we don't. I cared more about the wellfare of my high school bullies than I did about any of these people. Ray Milland plays a crusty Southern patriarch, who has gathered his family together to their palatial estate for their annual July 4th celebration. Sam Elliott plays an environmentalist and photographer who happens to stumble on the clan and their frog-infested abode, just in time to get swamped in (as it were) and overrun by the animal kingdom. But Elliott's pectoral muscles give a more expressive performance than his face, and Milland's character is so grumpy that when faced with the choice of leaving his home and surviving or staying put and dying (after several of his children are already dead, mind you) he chooses dying. If he wants to die, why should I want him to live?

At one point Milland's character tells Elliott's to investigate the frogs. He says they "have a deal." But they do not; Milland told him to do something and Elliott agreed, that is a favor, not a deal. If he'd offer Elliott one of his daughters to have his way with in exchange for the frog hunt, that would be a deal. This has nothing to do with anything except me being a stickler. Moving on...

There is nothing redeeming about FROGS; if there was, it would not make the Ugly cut. Remember, the next time you see frogs massing, don't be alarmed. No, really, don't be alarmed. I'm pretty confident they won't do anything to hurt you.

IF YOU LIKED FROGS, CHECK OUT: FUTURAMA, for any of the episodes with the Hypnotoad, who is exactly like he sounds, only way cooler.