Writer-director Kurt Voss has been in love with the underground
punk/metal music scene since the late 1970s and dedicated himself
to making films about the music industry available to movie lovers
who also happen to love rock and roll upon graduating from UCLA’s
prestigious film school.
Writer-director Kurt Voss has been in love with the underground punk/metal music scene since the late 1970s and dedicated himself to making films about the music industry available to movie lovers who also happen to love rock and roll upon graduating from UCLA’s prestigious film school.
With “Border Radio” and “Sugartime,” Voss crafted two terrific movies about the music business, both being much better than the over-hyped “Almost Famous” and “Rock Star” Hollywood big budget films that followed them.
With Voss being such a vibrant independent voice in cinema, it is with great regret that “Down and Out With The Dolls” is such a drag. I fully expected crisp dialogue, well-drawn characters and a pounding rock score. Instead, we are left with the worst film of Voss’ career, a meandering, mean-spirited, unfunny comedy with terrible acting, poor direction and poorly-constructed songs.
The film, which tries to tell a thousand stories through various romantic and comedic subplots, is essentially a flashback story of the Paper Dolls, an all-girl rock and roll band trying to hit the big time in Portland, Ore. The film is a series of cat fights, and starts with two of the girls beating each other up. A narrator instructs us that “the Paper Dolls could have been something, but we became nothing. Here’s our story.”
We flashback to the group’s inception. Kali (Nichole Barrett) is a young groupie who wants to rock but instead mostly gets star-struck by local music celebrities. She meets Fauna (Zoe Poledouris), who is a local star, having sung for many popular local groups.
Fauna, who has attitude and cynicism in spades, has just broken up with her boyfriend, who just so happens to be the leader of her band. Upon splitting up, she is without a musical outlet, so she and Kali (guitar) decide to recruit two other friends, Reggie (Kinnie Starr) to play drums and Lavender (Melody Moore) to play bass.
Now that they have a quartet, all they need to do is rehearse, write some songs and record a demo. It is in this process that the film starts to collapse.
The process of becoming a band should be the most thrilling part of the film, but it gets bogged down with poor dialogue, wooden pacing and shouting matches. The four women who play the leads are all appealing, but they don’t have acting chops to match their musical skills, as they are all professional musicians in real life.
They set out to try to earn a contract with a local independent label, the label that put the city’s best band, the Suicide Bombers, on the map. Kali and Fauna both know Levi (Coyote Shovers), the singer and leader of the Suicide Bombers and use their networking skills to try and secure a contract. The Paper Dolls are inspired by Levi’s band and think they can secure a national deal once they are recorded by the indie.
The love story is convoluted and predictable, as both Kali and Fauna fall for Levi. Of course, Fauna, who is thin and pretty on the outside, wins Levi’s affections over the portly Kali. What could have been a valuable communication about body image instead turns into a story of revenge, where Kali is out to get Fauna for stealing “her man.”
“Down and Out With the Dolls” is a complete disappointment and proves that art houses sometimes show films that are just as superficial and shallow as the smut peddled out of the Hollywood factories.
DOWN AND OUT WITH THE DOLLS. Written and directed by Kurt Voss. With Zoe Poledouris, Kinnie Starr, Nicole Barrett, Melody Moore, Lemmy Kilmister, Coyote Shivers and Brendan O’Hara. Rated R (language and nudity), 90 minutes. Now playing at art house theaters in the Bay Area.
