Foivos Vlahos The music inheritage of CBGB and the history of PUNK in a movie. Simply outstanding.

alfiecycling this contains spoilers ! if you dig the music of the 70's and punk in particular you will enjoy this. I certainly did. This tells the story of the founding of the famous NY club CBGB and PUNK magazine. Hillel Kristal borrowed money from his mom to buy the Palace Bar in the Bowery.This after two bankruptcies...LOL. His daughter , Lisa, dropped out of college for lack of funds. So she is hired, fired then rehired by her father, Hillel aka Hilly. It has a superb cast and the CBGB set is spot on.Hilly and Lisa are played by Alan Rickman and Ashley Greene. I loved their performances. They are actually quite funny here.Hilly : "You gotta spend money to make money." Lisa : "You gotta have money to spend money to make money. And since you spend all the money you make,you don't have any money to spend. So you might wanna think about saving the money you make instead of spending the money you make"...Way to go Lisa ! Also, Ashley's New Yawk accent is right on the money.Freddy Rodriguez plays Idaho, a violin bowing homeless junkie that Hilly takes under his wing.We see a NY style shakedown of Hilly thwarted by his new found biker buddies, the Titans of Hell. We see The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, The Dead Boys and, towards the very end, The Police all auditioning for Hilly to get a gig at CBGB. We also see Blondie and Iggy Pop singing, I Wanna Be Your Dog. And Patti Smith perform,Because The Night. I love this movie and have watched it numerous times because of where it takes me. Just before the closing credits Hilly says that he opened the club because he thought country music was gonna be the next big thing...and it was ...in Nashville.LOL.During the ending credits we see the real Talking Heads accepting their induction into the Rock'N' Roll Hall Of Fame and what they do to honor Hilly is so moving.That is a MUST SEE !The only negative I can talk about is the movie spends too much time on The Dead Boys. Apparently Hilly saw something in them and invested a lot of money to manage them and nearly lost his club to this band that eventually crashed and burned.

Samhuinn In CBGB (2013), Alan Rickman plays Hilly Kristal, the manager of music club CBGB that famously provided a stage for unorthodox American punk and new wave bands such as the Ramones, Television and The Police. With the help of old friends, his mother's money and his estranged but intelligent daughter, Kristal helped 1970s youth find its voice in music.The main problem of the film is the structuring of the plot. Initially proposed as a story-within-story, the framework of the origins of Punk Magazine is quickly discarded to tell the tale of Hilly Kristal. The remnants of the cartoonish framework amount to little more than annotated scene transitions that can be described as disruptive more than original or even whimsical. This stylistic flaw could have been overlooked if the main story about Kristal had been engaging, but this is not the case. Portrayed as a failed businessman more than a music industry icon, what should have been his visionary idealism and love for music can only be seen as disillusioned incompetence and greed. These flaws, combined with the character's hard-headedness and disregard of advice, make it very difficult to sympathize with Kristal. Come the miraculous happy ending of the film, in which all personal and financial troubles are resolved without much explanation, the viewer cannot help but feel cheated.(AREA 555 on Wordpress)

steveh46 I have no emotional investment in the time, place, or music represented in the movie CBGB. If anything, I prefer the Country, Blue Grass, and Blues Hilly original meant to present in his bar. But, never having been to CBGB or having any great interest in the bands who developed there, I can react to the movie as a movie instead of worrying about whether the CBGB in the movie really matches up with what I saw there or whether the actors chosen to play my favorite band really look or sound like the people they're playing.So? I liked the movie. I liked Hilly, the main character in the movie who started CBGB. The film is frequently amusing, such as when Hilly's mom (played by the same actress who was George Costanza's mom on Seinfeld) enjoys a bowl of the chili.The acting is fine. Rickman does a good job and I didn't realize until the credits that it was Freddy Rodriguez very convincingly playing the junkie Idaho.I went to see a screening with a musician who'd played CBGB in the early 90s and he said, yes it was that filthy and Rickman does a pretty good job as Hilly. One of the producers and an actress who'd had a small part in the film were also there and added a lot of information.If you're interested in the start of Punk and weren't there, you'll probably like the movie. If you were there, it may depend on how much historical accuracy you expect. You shouldn't expect a lot of historical accuracy in any movie though, so take it for what it is: a fairly entertaining movie.