It seems that everyone who was anyone gets a retrospective DVD nowadays. Fifteen minutes of semi-fame BITD equals two hours of talking heads and grainy clips on DVD. While we wait for “$2 Per Diem and a Peanut Butter Sandwich — the E. Factor Saga,” let’s take a look at 2008’s “TV Party” (Brink Films), which answers the musical question “How can a documentary have so much footage of prime-era Debbie Harry and still be so hard to watch?”
In its original run from 1979 to 1982, “TV Party” was, well, a TV party! It literally was a weekly party that was televised. Every week, the hoi polloi of the Lower East Side got together for an hour of chemically enhanced conversation and hijinks. Filmed with zero money, zero script and zero technical know-how, it’s kinda what you would get if you let the art class kids loose in the AV room.
There’s a lot of self-conscious acting up, forced fun here. Do you really think your Uncle Vin always wore a lampshade on his head, just because he did it in all your birthday party videos? Sorry kid, he was pimping it for the cameras, and that’s what most of the on-camera party-goers here were doing. No one is that ON all the time. There’s no doubt that it was fun to be there, but it’s a headache to watch.
There’s a montage of the weekly musical guests, and most of the artists were equally tough to listen to. To quote Chris Stein, who was the co-host of the show, it was “weird f*cking stuff — noise rock!”
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