Definately a fun film.The atmosphere of the down and out times in England that bred the punk movement are captured,as are the kids who rebelled against both authority,aristocracy and the music industries political pretentiousness.It made me remember the era in my life where metal let me down and punk briefly took its place.The Pistols will never be remembered as brilliant musicians,and Malcolm McLaren has since grabbed onto and profited from numerous other bandwagons,but it can't be denied that they were influential & fun.

While they never surpassed the Stooges or the NY Dolls in my youthful esteem, the Sex Pistols were very important to me back in the day. I didn't worship the ground they walked on, but I came pretty close. I had a teacher flying back from England to NY who was on the same plane as they were as they started their ill-fated tour of the U.S., and she said to me afterwards, "I figured those were those guys you were so into, and I debated going over and getting their autographs for you, but they were acting like such animals and I guess I got scared off." While I was basically a pacifist even then (barring those occasional schoolyard fistfights), I wanted to throw a vase of flowers at her head. When I heard that they had broken up after a disastrous concert in San Francisco, I walked through the school hallways in a disconsolate funk for days. Over 20 years later, after Julien Temple's "The Great Rock N Roll Swindle" which presented the Sex Pistols story from Manager Malcolm McLaren's point of view (I never saw the movie, but I had the album; 20 % of it was great, the rest was annoying, silly garbage), Temple is apparently out to rectify matters by interviewing the surviving Pistols and committing their recollections to film. It's not a perfect movie. There are too many fragments of people like the guy in the rubber bondage suit, apparently McLaren himself, giving incoherent sound bites, too many fragments featuring ridiculous fans from previously released films like "D.O.A.", and too many incomplete clips of the Pistols performing in their heyday. Would that Temple had featured an intact performance or 2 to remind the viewer why, in their prime, the Pistols were often so ferociously magical. Too, the surviving members being interviewed in the present day-- Rotten (nee John Lydon), Steve Jones (who admits to idolizing NY Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders), Paul Cook, Glen Matlock-- are inexplicably shrouded in shadow. Perhaps the contrast between the way they are now and the way they were then was too startling and disconcerting for Temple? Personally, I think it would have been very effective, but Temple evidently didn't see it that way. All of it did make me nostalgic for that passionate time from the past, although much of what I lapped up admiringly as a teenager makes me cringe with embarrassment now. Still, the very best of the Sex Pistols songs are still among the best rock songs ever, and almost assuredly will remain so. Take away the safety pins, take away the calculated posturing and the sucking up to the media, and songs like "God Save The Queen" are still superlative rock songs. Some of the clips, particularly those dealing with the sad, doomed John Simon Ritchie aka Sid Vicious, and his even more pathetic paramour, Nancy Spungeon (very little sympathy is wasted on her; Jones admits, "I couldn't stand her"), are depressing in the extreme to watch, particularly when Vicious speaks while sober and not whacked out on heroin. In one clip taken just before he overdosed himself into oblivion, the interviewer asks him where he'd be right at that very moment if he had his choice. His eyes dead black holes, his face a pasty, zombie white, too consumed by his own misery to pay attention any longer to the Sid Vicious persona he's expected to adopt during interviews, he mutters, "Under the ground." It wouldn't be long before he got his wish. John Lydon, speaking in 2000, actually becomes weepy as he remembers his late comrade, wishing he could have helped him avoid his self-destructive fate, but "I was too young." I found it overall a sad film (maybe because, in part, it made me self-conscious about my own lost youth), with flashes here and there of exhilerating, electrifying energy and passionate anger, and it's recommended even for those who didn't care about the Sex Pistols in particular or punk rock in general. I can't imagine a more evocative documentary being made about that all-too-short period in time. For better or worse.