Better scene than heard

The crowd in UVA’s Olsson Hall for a recent “Rock & Roll Movie Night,” the local music community’s best kept secret, looks like the crowd you’d see at a local rock concert. A handful of kids sit scattered around an auditorium like they don’t want to necessarily be in the front row, all staring ahead before the film begins, as if waiting for the precise moment a band takes the stage.

Only instead of an opening act, the crowd gets Nick Rubin. A thin man in a maroon sweater and cream-colored shirt, jeans and brown boots, Rubin gives a quick preview of coming attractions—both local rock shows as well as next week’s film, Rockers, a reggae drama that he describes as “a cross between The Harder They Come and Hustle and Flow”—then dims the lights and starts the show.

Currently the rock program director at WTJU and a graduate student in UVA’s music department, Rubin started “Rock & Roll Movie Night” in the spring of 2008 to screen music flicks free of charge. Crowds have never exceeded a couple dozen, but Rubin has also never had an empty house.

“A lot of people came for Spinal Tap,” he says on a recent screening night; the show is The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’ 1980s punk rock documentary. “A lot of people came for Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster. And Heavy Metal Parking Lot”—a 1986 documentary featuring mullet-inclined metal heads hanging out on an asphalt park before a Judas Priest concert—“might’ve been an added attraction for a lot of people.” (See below for the “Rock & Roll Movie Night” schedule.)

Right now, “Rock & Roll Movie Night” is like Charlottesville’s great undiscovered drive-in or dive bar: No one seems to know that it exists, which means a crowd is yet to claim it as its own. “There’s always been people here,” says Rubin, who admits that he could do more to promote the event. “I’m not trying to show movies that are super esoteric.”

But Rubin doesn’t necessarily pick for mass moviegoer appeal. Instead, the flicks that he picks hold all the appeal of a concert—this week’s screening of Sign o’ the Times, for instance, or The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, films that pass on plot and deliver the sort of suspense that only a rock show can bring. And with the age of the music video nearly as dead as James Brown and our economy caught in a mosh, a free show by the Stones or the Artist is a rejuvenating experience for a music fan, an inexpensive spectacle, but a spectacle all the same.

During The Decline of Western Civilization, singer Darby Crash of The Germs, a pimpled catastrophe of a frontman who seems to speak in a slurry dialect I’ll call “Beerspeak,” throws himself around a stage, mumbling his lyrics to a small, captivated audience. “Evolution’s a process too slow to save my soul,” he drools. After the film ends, I ask Rubin whether a troubled music industry means the death of the rock movie.

“I don’t think so,” he responds. “Maybe those big statement movies, like the big albums that absolutely everyone you know owns. Who knows if we’ll ever see another Thriller? And maybe it’s the same with rock movies. I mean, MTV…that’s not where you see [videos] anymore.”

He’s right, people. Instead, you see them on Mondays at “Rock & Roll Movie Night.” Check the schedule below, then come on out!

For those about to rock…

All “Rock & Roll Movie Night” screenings are free, and are held on Mondays at 8pm in room 120 of Olsson Hall, on the UVA Grounds. Below is the schedule for the remainder of the year.

November 17: Sign O’ the Times—Prince and a few key members of The Revolution go crazy for a camera crew during a live set taped during a career peak.

November 24: The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2: The Metal Years—Spheeris returns to the California music scene to capture the egos and excess of a few hair bands.

December 1: High Fidelity—The romantic comedy choice of music fans. “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”