Herald rating: * *
Director: Marco and Mauro LaVilla
Rating: M (offensive language)
Running time: 90 minutes
Screening: Village Queen St
Review: Russell Baillie
This disco-mentary, if you will, isn't the first to point its camera into international club culture and examine the rise of the turntable-spinning DJ as an alternative to the guitar-strumming rock star.
The trouble is, it seems to think it is. And even if it isn't, we should really be impressed anyway because hey, we're hanging out backstage with some Vinyl Important Persons.
And hey, we can regurgitate those old arguments about DJs-as-artists to put it all into something hopefully resembling context.
However, Hang the DJ has got more problems than its possible backfire of a title, taken from the Smiths' song Panic.
One is a noticeable time lag between filming and this reaching our screens. Much of the footage and interviews here date back to 1996 and 1997 when "jungle" and "trip-hop" were freshly minted terms.
But worse, its globe-trotting makers, Canadian twins Marco and Mauro LaVilla, seem to have employed a see-what-sticks approach to their doco's structure. Which means we get bogged down in greying talking heads ranging from the hilariously pseudo-intellectual to the banal (the nay saying opinion of the Liverpool diehard Beatles fan represents what exactly?).
That's when we're not basking in the glow of the formidable egos of the record spinners themselves.
Biggest-headed of those is New Yorker Junior Vasquez, a bitchy veteran who seems to be wondering why the film isn't just about him and his brilliant career.
Fellow American Roger Sanchez also gets a lot of camera time, spent mostly climbing in and out of plush vehicles outside the hotels and nightclubs of Europe, record bag at his side, showing he's just like a touring rock star. He even signs autographs. Well, one. And he even has groupies. Er, one of those too. However, it would seem that while DJ groupies aren't any brighter than rock star groupies, they are better dressed.
It does do a nice line in showing the art of scratch-DJing - via the turntable talents of Q-Bert and others - and breakdancing.
But crossing to the hip-hop side of the tracks, where the turntable creativity is so in-your-face, makes the clubland guys just look all the more aloof and unconvincing as artistes.
So, the real conclusion of this disco-doco is that being a jetset big-name club DJ is nice work if you can get it.
Whether it's a meaningful existence, too, is for a smarter study than this to prove.
Hang The DJ
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