Wasted Orient

"Wasted" is the word for it—the heroes of Kevin Fritz's documentary, four young men who comprise the Beijing punk rock band Joyside, spend their days and nights so inebriated that they make Keith Richards look like a teetotaler. Working on a shoestring budget (less than $2,500) using funky equipment, director Fritz (a Pennsylvanian who applied for an overseas scholarship "as a joke" and ended up at Peking University) accompanied the band as they toured Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Wuhan, and other Chinese cities. What he found was a music scene that wasn't exactly burgeoning—as he writes in his liner notes, "rock 'n' roll will never be part of society in China"—but still amazingly tolerant, considering that Joyside is a group of young drunks (rare is the shot in which one of them isn't hoisting a bottle of beer or Gordon's gin) thrashing through tunes with titles such as "I Want Beer" and "I'm Lazy and Wasted." Singer Bian Yuan and his mates are better than you would expect: yes, they're decades behind the curve, wearing their Ramones and Sex Pistols influences on their sleeves and spouting the same kind of nihilist "no future" rhetoric (some of it in English) coined 30 years ago—but this is no big surprise, considering that Mao Tse-tung (who died in 1976) was a master suppressor of Western culture throughout his long reign. Not that Joyside cares about that, or anything else: these kids are just having a good time—playing, peeing, puking, burping, and slacking their way across a country that hardly knows what to make of them. For better or worse, Fritz's film is as shambling as the band, with low-fi sound, a murky look, and lots of jumpy, handheld camerawork. DVD extras include brief deleted scenes and a booklet. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (S. Graham)