Dotsthavesp I wanted to but couldn't!

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

rooprect Argh once again I'm the victim of a marketing scheme which ruined my enjoyment of this otherwise good film. You've probably noticed the first words on the DVD box in bold letters are: "THE GREATEST ROCK'N'ROLL FILM OF ALL TIME!" On the back another hyperbolic film critic raves "THE GREATEST ROCK'N'ROLL FILM EVER MADE!" And then it goes on to list "featuring music and appearances by..." and name-drops every famous act since 1965, even daring to play the Beatles card.DON'T. YOU. BELIEVE. IT.While Mayor of the Sunset Strip is an interesting, nostalgic trip to California's music scene in the last quarter of the 20th century, it's a far cry from "the greatest rock'n'roll film ever" or even any sort of rock'n'roll film. It lacks the music to make it a true rock'n'roll film.The focus is not on music but rather on the phenomenon of pop celebrity. Often the "music and appearances by..." are only 0.5 second clips of some celebrity shaking hands with Rodney. Some are just photographs.The bulk of the celebrity interviews are: Kim Fowley for 10-15 mins total, Nancy Sinatra for maybe 5 mins, Joan Jett for maybe 1 min, Cher 1 mins, Bowie 45 sec, Gwen Stefani 30 sec (but parts repeated to make it longer), Ray Manzarek 15 sec, and a few others for 15 sec or less. Tori Amos appears through the door of her trailer looking confused for exactly 1.5 seconds, and the Beatles "appearances" are just photos and stock footage.Marketing for this film is deceptive at best, dishonest at worst. If this sort of thing pisses you off as much as it does me, pumping your expectations to unrealistic heights then dropping you on your butt unfulfilled, then you may want to put down the ritzy DVD box, take a deep breath, remind yourself that it's just a mid-budget documentary, and enjoy it for what it's worth, not what it promises to be.Now about the movie itself. It suffers from a bit of identity crisis, at times trying to prove that Rodney is an icon whom we should adore, at times portraying him as a loser who never got his due. He is shown as a short, gentle, harmless man, but then we are shown images of him licking topless women and stories of him having sex with every groupie who ever hitched a ride to California. We are shown images of a shabby-looking home with holes in the furniture, but then it's made clear that he was the successful owner of a downtown nightclub where patrons and girls by the dozen would kill to get into his VIP room. I'm not sure what the filmmaker was trying to do. But the result was that I didn't feel any sympathy for Rodney by the end of the film, because it's obvious that he had more wine, women & song in 1 day than most of us have in our miserable lives. Is the director's point that he didn't get enough??Rodney himself has a cute boyish face which makes him instantly lovable, but his awkward, 1-word answers to the director's questions become slightly irritating by the end of the film. I certainly don't fault Rodney for playing his cards close to his chest; he strikes me as a very private man with serious reservations about having his life splayed out on a buffet table. I fault the filmmakers for not coaxing the good stuff out of him. And I'm not talking about dirt & drama, I'm talking about the simple passion for music that drove Rodney. Would it have killed the filmmakers to spend 5 minutes asking him what his favorite song or band or style was? No, instead it always seems to be "who's the most famous person you met?"Well, lack of music notwithstanding, this is an interesting documentary about an underdog. It doesn't really tell a story, not like the excellent "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" (now THAT ONE can indeed be called the greatest rock'n'roll film ever). In Mayor of the Sunset Strip I feel as though the filmmakers failed to deliver. That plus the absurdly inflated expectations I had from the DVD box made this a ho-hum experience.If you're truly interested in discovering "the greatest rock'n'roll film ever", please check out the aforementioned "Anvil" (even if you're not a metal fan, it's charmingly honest). Also check out the classic satires "This Is Spinal Tap", "Still Crazy", "The Ruttles: All You Need Is Cash", the brilliant documentary "Searching for Sugar Man", and if you can stand a little 80s cheeze there is tremendous poetry in "Eddie & the Cruisers". When I consider all these terrific rock'n'roll films through the decades, there is no doubt in my mind that Mayor just isn't in the same class. As long as you don't expect it to be, you'll have a good time.

wonderdawg Back in 1965 Rodney Bingenheimer was hired as a stand-in for Davy Jones on The Monkees TV show and soon ingratiated himself into the hip inner circles of LA showbiz. In a world filled with phonies Rodney was the real deal: the ultimate fan, a geeky unassuming little guy reflecting the stars back at themselves the way they wanted to be seen. In return they gave him a form of love and acceptance he had never received as a youngster growing up lonely in a sleepy little California town.Now in his late 50s Rodney is still living his life like a rock and roll song only now it's playing on the B-side of the American Dream. Unlike Dick Clark it never occurred to him to use his insider status to build up his bankroll. Cut back to Sundays from midnight – 3am on L.A.'s KROQ-FM (where he has hosted a weekly show since the 70s) he lives in a small apartment overflowing with souvenirs from his glory days. There are photos of Rodney in the 60s with Elvis, Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon; Led Zep and the Who hanging out at his rock club, Rodney's English Disco, the epicenter of the early 70s Sunset Strip "scene"; Rodney on the air (he was the first to play records by Blondie, Ramones, Sex Pistols and Nirvana, among others, practically inventing alternative rock radio in the process.) Soundbites from David Bowie; Cher; Joan Jett; Brooke Shields, Gwen Stefani; Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek; Johnny Marr of the Smiths and Chris Martin of Coldplay testify to his widespread popularity within the industry. In his hometown, however, Rodney still can't get any respect. His father and stepmom are clearly baffled by his success and a boyhood acquaintance wonders aloud why "celebrities glom onto this guy that around here people just made fun of." Writer/director George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness: A Film-Maker's Apocalypse) is more interested in emotional truth than technical polish. He's got a sharp eye for "one-shot-is-worth-a-thousand-words" imagery (the scene in which Rodney walks past a wall of gold records and into a grubby little kitchen littered with empty pop bottles speaks volumes about the rock and roll fantasy he has spent his whole life pursuing and the humbling reality of the consequences.) I also like the way the film contrasts the innocence of Rodney's fanboy obsession with the reptilian charm of Kim Fowley, a fabled LA music biz hustler with so many hidden agendas he could run for political office. (Call him the anti-Rodney.)This film aims to be more than just a feature length version of one of those Behind The Music documentaries. Hickenlooper wants to use Rodney's curious "career" to get at some larger truth about our celebrity-obsessed society. And if he isn't completely successful, well, Mayor of Sunset Strip still works as an intriguingly intimate and deeply poignant portrait of the most famous person you may have never heard of.

Michael DeZubiria I remember listening to Rodney Bingenheimer's radio show on KROQ when I was in high school. I knew nothing of him at the time and only know what I know now because of what I learned from this movie, but regardless of how popular Rodney became with the rock stars and celebrities and regardless of how well his show ever did, the guy just does not have a voice for radio. I think that in his case it is vital that you know him personally or that you know about his history in the music business, because listening to him as a radio talk show host is intolerably boring. It is not a surprise, to say the least, that his radio show never strayed far from the midnight to 3am shift on Sundays, although I would rather listen to him than Jed the Fish any day of the week. Jed the Fish irritates the hell out of me.Speaking of which, one of the more interesting things that I learned from this documentary was actually just proof of something that I had always suspected, that Jed the Fish has always been faking that ridiculous accent that he always talks with on the air. In his brief interviews in the movie he makes the mistake of talking in his regular voice, revealing how much of a fake he really is. On the other hand, he is, in fact, an entertainer, so I don't want to give the impression that he is some kind of fraud because he talks with a fake accent on the air. He's been on KROQ for some ridiculous number of years, so he must be doing something right. Not my thing, I guess. I think I may have just developed this contempt for KROQ for ruining great songs and popularizing bad songs in the ten years or so since I first moved to Irvine and started listening to them.The thing that I really liked about this documentary is that it really gives good insight into the life of Rodney Bingenheimer, who seems like some geeky guy who made his way into rock stardom by a simple love of music and what must have been a very disarming and unusually charming demeanor. For some reason he reminds me of this 1978 Honda Civic that I had in high school, it was the crappiest car in the parking lot but everyone loved it. I remember lots all the hot Flygirls used to always want to drive it, it was like a toy. Interpret that as you will, I still haven't figured it out.There are moments in the film when I almost felt bad for being so bored by Rodney's radio program, because despite having been experienced far more than every high school kid's dreams of the, ah, fleshy pearls of rock and roll decadence, Rodney has been through a lot of pain in his life. He had some truly heartbreaking experiences in his life growing up, which are kind of manifested in scenes like the one where he goes to visit his parents, with whom he had something of a falling out, and finds that they don't have any pictures of him in the front room. The saddest thing is that he brings the camera crew into a back room and points to a picture of himself, framed on hung on the wall but almost hidden in a corner where no one would ever see it. And he acted like it was perfectly normal.Rodney's demeanor that thing that really leaves the film open to interpretation. Despite having just watched a documentary about the guy, I feel like I know less about him than I knew before, just because he is such a closed off kind of person. There are scenes when he genuinely loses his temper, and there are scenes where he is clearly uncomfortable and comes right out and says that he doesn't want to talk about certain things, but at the same time he discloses information about himself that almost anyone else would probably find embarrassing.This is one of the rare instances in documentary film-making where you can learn so much about a person but come away from it amazed at how little you really know about him. It's like the old saying, the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. Rodney is a truly unique person with a truly unique personality, and while I can't claim to have been entertained by his radio show even for a minute, he is certainly a fascinating person to learn about. Especially since I went to high school listening to the kind of music that he introduced to the world and I now live in the area that is portrayed in the movie. All music fans should watch this.

David Wraith If it hadn't already been used, a perfect alternative title for a movie about Los Angeles DJ, Rodney Bingenheimer might have been Almost Famous. Listen to how Alice Copper describes Bingenheimer: `He was accepted by the Rolling Stones, he was accepted by The Beatles, he was accepted by The Beach Boys…' This slightly unflattering choice of words is significant. Not `was friends with,' not `hung out with,' not `partied with,' but `was accepted by.' One critic called the documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip the greatest rock & roll movie ever made. I'd have to watch Stop Making Sense and The Velvet Goldmine again before I could make that commitment, but in my opinion, Mayor isn't even about rock & roll. It's about fame, or the proximity to fame. It's about acceptance. Rodney Bingenheimer's greatest achievement is that, for a generation, he introduced the most influential artists in modern rock to America radio. His second greatest accomplishment was his ability to be accepted. So many larger than life personalities try to force themselves into the spotlight. Meanwhile, quiet, shy, unassuming Rodney Bingenheimer has lived at the edge of the spotlight for his entire adult life. Pamela Des Barres (who appears in the film) is arguably the world's greatest groupie. Bingenheimer is probably a close second, despite the handicap of being male (being a groupie, like being a fashion model or porn star, is one of the few pursuits in patriarchal society where being male is a handicap). But, while Des Barres is a pop icon, published author and happily married to former rocker Michael Des Barres, Bingenheimer is single, lives in a modest home with tattered furniture and has a once-a-week, 3 hour late-night radio show. George Hickenlooper's Mayor of the Sunset Strip is a thought provoking look at Los Angeles and the thin but often uncrossable line between `the famous and the not so famous.' From its opening it seems to ask the question, why is one of the most influential men in American radio not a household name, when so many less deserving souls (cough-Carson Daly-cough) are. From the first frame of the film, I found myself sizing Bingenheimer up to come up with an answer. He's a short, skinny, funny looking guy. He's got what you'd call `a great face for radio.' However, he doesn't have a radio voice and after twenty years on the air he has not developed a radio persona. Perhaps this is why he will never reach the heights of Wolfman Jack, Kasey Casem or Rick Dees (yes, I just used `heights' and Rick Dees in the same sentence. No small feat). He lacks the authority of a Kurt Loader and perhaps was just born too early to take advantage of MTV, the network that can make less-than-handsome music aficionados like Matt Pinfield into TV personalities. Over the span of the film, we see Rodney with the likes of Oasis, No Doubt, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Coldplay and Cher (who Rodney says was like a mother to him, although she looks remarkably younger than he does. Hmmm …). Many of these artists and many more credit Rodney with being the first to play their music on American radio. In photo montages we see old stills of Rodney with Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. We see film clips of Rodney with Jerry Lee Lewis, The Mamas and the Papas and John Lennon. The list is so impressive; if you saw it out of context you'd swear the pictures were fakes. The diminutive Bingenheimer often looks matted into the footage like Woody Allen in Zelig or Tom Hanks in Forest Gump. Before the credits roll we will see Rodney betrayed by his best friend. We will see his unrequited love for a young girl who insists they are `just friends.' In one humorous and painful scene, we see his estranged family searching the house for pictures of Rodney in desperate attempt to look less estranged. Throughout the film two seemingly opposing questions dominate: With all these famous friends, why isn't Rodney more successful? And, why did all the famous people gravitate toward him to begin with?In the end, perhaps the fact that Rodney Bingenheimer couldn't parlay his access to the rich and famous into wealth and fame is not the tragedy of Rodney Bingenheimer. Perhaps the fact that we find anyone who doesn't cash in on their proximity to fame tragic is the tragedy of America. Rodney Bingenheimer is our inner geek, the star-stuck autograph hound in all of us. Hickenlooper's film holds up a mirror to a celebrity obsessed culture, a culture fixated on something 99.9999% its members will never experience. Perhaps this is the tragedy of all our lives. After all, as bad as we may feel for Bingenheimer, the fact remains: WE are watching a movie about HIM, a movie in which he is hanging out with David Bowie, and we are not.