Bomb City (2017) — Books, Films & Other Superheroes

Helena’s Notes:

Note1: The few punks who dared show their faces on the mean streets of Vukovar (and its industrial suburb, Borovo) all happened to be the sweetest, gentlest, artiest of types you could ever imagine multiplied by ten. They liked listening to Brahms, reading Bukowski’s poetry and kissing girls (not me! Jeez! Those guys were like the brothers I never had but wouldn’t want to fuck). They also enjoyed wearing maxi-dresses and experimenting with vegetarianism, which I guess could’ve been seen as both death and authority-defying in a country where a caveman and a smoked pig shared a throne.

So no, it was not the punks I was afraid of – it was the so-called normal guys. It’s always the so-called normal guys.

Note2: That arrest scene came with so much shouting, swearing, crying and general noise-making I had to ask myself if the scriptwriter had ever been involved in an actual arrest involving actual live pigs. Because when the ammoed up authority tries to have its way with you, the very best thing to do is stay low play dead live another day. Trust.

Note3: One of the punks looks exactly like the bra-wearing punk-doll from Traitors. Shoulders up, that is. And Marilyn Mason bookending the whole thing, nice touch, I approve.

Note4: Have you noticed Olga’s been letting me sit in the first chair a lot lately? She reckons this is down to her “increasing preoccupation” (do people actually say shit like this??) with her new novel, but the blatantly obvious truth is she could no longer ignore popular demand which erm demands that she gives the readers what they basically wanted all along: me.

Olga’s Notes:

Note1: The less I know about the movie I’m about to watch the more I look forward to watching it. I rarely choose to see movie trailers, don’t own a TV set, don’t read the newspapers or magazines, and I’m certainly not interested in anything that critics have to say about, well – anything.

It took about thirty or so minutes for me to realise I was in for an all-emotional, all-American, based-on-true-story trip out of my head straight down to heart. And by then, it was too late to turn around, pretend like nothing's happened.

Note2: I’m not what you’d call sentimental. If I have an excess emotion of any kind, I’ll try my best to feel & channel it, instead of, say, cut my achy breaky heart in a hundred little pieces and try to forcefeed it to the world. I knew Bomb City was trying to manipulate my emotions from the word go, but thought it was just my head getting annoyed at the script (‘There was glass and metal everywhere, it was chaos! It was worse than any nightmare!’). Then the real feelings came –anger, fear, disbelief, grief – and they hit me surprisingly bad and hard.

Yet still I wonder if this was the point. And if the best bits of this movie have been left on the cutting room floor.

Note3: I no longer take it for granted that being a leader of the all-female punk-rock band in a Muslim country such is Morocco (Traitors) had to be a million times harder than, say, being a male punk-rock band member in an enlightened American state of Texas (Bomb City).