5 Punk Art Films About Punk Art

1. Fish Story

Three young men go trolling for dates. A schoolgirl misses her stop on a ferry. A punk-rock band, arriving too early on the scene to be appreciated, struggles to maintain their identity while recording an album. These stories, separated with entirely different looks, tones, and taking place over decades, form the backbone of Fish Story, a film that strives for (and in this writer€™s opinion, fully attains) the life-affirming kick of It's A Wonderful Life and films of that ilk. See, a comet is coming hurtling to earth and when it strikes, we all die. Instantly. No rescue mission, no fallout shelters, no nothing. The human race has a date with destruction and it is imminent. The only person not panicking is a used record store owner who insists that the world has nothing to fear, that a single song from the only album of a decades-defunk band hold the key to humanity€™s salvation. Why does he think that? Is he right? What does any of this have to do with the other stories or the myriad plot threads and thematics that reoccur throughout the film? And just what in the hell is a €œfish story€ anyway? You€™ll have to see the film to find out. We€™ve talked about the way that films and filmmakers implode and explore typical narratives, well, Fish Story abandons the basics of traditional narrative in its opening moments, and it€™s only in the closing ones that the stealth-structure of the piece fully reveals itself. For much of its run time, Fish Story runs laps around the viewer, forcing you to stay engaged because there is no way to know what is a throwaway detail and what is a cornerstone of the master plan. Until of course you realize that ALL OF IT is a cornerstone of the master plan. What sets Fish Story apart from every other €œArt is Great! Life is Cool! Yay!€ movies is that Fish Story is unafraid to look into the darkest, ugliest aspects of its characters before delivering them to their destinies. The main characters are uniformly flawed, with several leads being flat-out unlikable. It€™s a film that fully acknowledges how lonely and awful life can be, and that understands the debilitating effects of the close-minded idiocy that takes up so much of the world. But Fish Story argues that the world is infinitely more valuable than those bad bits would have you believe. It insists that a life, every life, holds value and that while we are culpable for the woes of life, we are also fully capable of transcending those miseries and achieving something greater. Fish Story does not deny the worst aspects of humanity, it builds them into an essential factor in its argument for the value in this goofy species we€™re all a part of.