Two Films Making The Rounds

What We Do Is Secret, directed by Rodger Grossman.

Written by Michelle Baer Ghaffari and Rodger Grossman.
Release Date: 2008 (USA).
Starring Shane West, Bijou Phillips, Noah Segan, and Rick Gonzalez (as Pat Smear).
92 min. Color. Coalition Film

This Todd Praina produced film, currently making the rounds of the film festivals, is about Darby Crash and his band the Germs. It's an inspired recreation of early Los Angeles punk rock circa 1977 -- 1980. Crash committed suicide in 1980, which the movie also documents.
Interestingly, Shane West was so authentic in portraying Crash that the Germs hired him as lead singer for their recent tours. That lead to a outbreak of criticism, but Shane West is still with the band.

Sleepwalking Through The Mekong, directed by John Pirozzi
Editors, David Dodson, Bryan Carr; music, Dengue Fever.
Starring Ethan and Zac Holtzman, Ch'hom Nimol, David Ralicke, Paul Dreux Smith and Senon Gaus Williams.
Reviewed at SF Indie FIlm Festival, February 16th, 2008. English, Khmer dialogue.
Running time: 67 Min. Color/B&W, DV. Film 101 Productions.
The eclectic LA psychedelic garage surf band Dengue Fever became fascinated by Cambodian 60S AND 70S pop music. On a visit to that country, a friend came down with the dengue, a fever that carried by a mosquito, hence the name.
To their immense good fortune, they hooked up with a Cambodian-born pop chanteuse who sings in Khmer they discovered in a club in Long Beach. To say the singer, the beautiful Ch'hom Nimol, is a major asset to the band, would be an understatement.
Their last year's release, Venus on Earth (M80), received generally high praise, a follow-up to their "Sip Off The Mekong (M80)" and "Escape From Dragon House (BRG)."
In "Sleepwalking Through the Mekong" a film by John Pirozzi, shown recently at the SF Indie Film Festival, they visit Cambodia to play at a Water Music Festival in 2005, in an exotic version of reconnecting with their adopted roots, much like British blues rockers would visit Rosedale in search of Robert Johnson's legendary Crossroads, Mississippi, where he allegedly sold his soul to the devil; except in this case it was also a matter of their lead singer's homecoming--the lovely Ch'hom Nimol.
This is a vastly illuminating film. Maybe a bit too much like a travel film to rock visually all the time, but the soundtrack certainly does.
The journey to self discovery by the band in a country that suffered through one of the most brutal periods of the twentieth century with the reign of the Khmer Rouge is profoundly told, and inspiring.
Two of the most renowned Cambodian musician of that era-- Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth-- perhaps died on the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge in the mid Seventies. They are a the backdrop among the other millions who perished, yet their music lives on in the band and in the music of the other musician we encounter in the film.
The band's mash of styles -- the fuzzy psychedelic jazzlike riffs behind the hypnotic female vocals sung largely in Khmer -- is just beyond all normal categories. It clarifies and transcends cultural expectations. Its satisfactions, however, are not immediate for me. Ths is a band and film worth studying.