Comparing listening to music in today’s internet driven world versus that of 8 tracks, cassette tapes, and CDs is almost impossible. WIth the click of a button you can download anything you want to your phone – legally – and this is not even counting the innumerable piracy trends that afflict modern music. With that in mind, the 2018 film “Stadium Anthems” – one part satire, one part mockumentary – attempts to comment on the absurdity of breaking into the record business in the modern age, what sells, and what it takes to make them sell. But, truthfully, the film is confusing. It’s strewn with mixed messages and red herrings, covered in sexual innuendo and fetishism, and, at the end of the day, fails to make the statement it intended.
Probably the most confusing aspect of “Stadium Anthems,” directed and written for the screen by Scott Douglas Brown, is that it’s not really about anything. Most of its run-time takes place in a board room of a music industry with its participants lauding the new record by a fictional band called The New World Gods, fronted by the enigmatic sex addict Warren Paradise (Jude Moran). Lauding is not the right word, for they all hate it, but, lugubriously, they know it will sell.
One exec Pete Barnacle (Christopher Soren Kelly) knows this most of all, laments to his wife ad nauseam that he feels he is losing his soul; but as we know she long ago gave up her dream of being a musician to support her husband, his admission feels a bit hallow. Chauvinism runs deep through this film, but in a fit of perplexity, that chauvinism doesn’t exist to make a point, but rather for shock value.
Examples of this are rampant. There’s one woman in the boardroom (Lauren Ashlyn O’Brien) who often speaks but is swiftly ignored, trumped only by another, Patty (played by pornstar Kayden Kross) who is relegated to stuffing her face with food after food during the entire movie’s run-time when she’s not committing sex acts with inanimate objects against herself. Of course the S&M fetishism is not resigned to the females. One male board member wears a ball gag the entire film, multiple others have coitus with a Real Doll, and, toward the film’s end, yet another is raped by a German dominatrix to the point his pancreas is ruptured. Shock value can carry a movie; but none of this seems to happen for any other reason than for it to happen.
Even the film’s heroine (named Heroin, in a fit of irony) starts the film by stuffing her face full of odd foods in a window front for crowds to watch and get off too. She is, in fact, the shining star of this film, is played by Toddy Walters, and in fact supplies many of the original numbers for the film’s score. She breaks into the record business as a female that begins to get taken seriously, though she’s still treated, for lack of a better word, like an object.
I don’t know where to start to analyze this film. I rely pretty heavily on IMDb descriptions for plot points going in, but the following description, “In the raunchy but intelligent music industry satire “Stadium Anthems,” a female recording artist must navigate the male-dominated recorded music industry in the Internet Age” fails to do the film justice. A female recording artist does navigate the system, but she doesn’t change it. The label is dysfunctional, relying on Heroin to save it from Chapter 11, and she’s honestly rather good.
But the high points of the film – namely her performances with her band – are interrupted heavily with food fetishes, sexual innuendo, prison rape jokes, obnoxious Chewbacca sounds, and a tiresome amount of Star Wars references. Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this; I just didn’t see the overall point of their inclusion. “Stadium Anthems” doesn’t seem to mean to make a statement; it’s simply a collection of elements of the bizarre that happen, end, and then happen again until the film’s credits finally roll.
In fairness, the cinematography, acting, and soundtrack for the film are all top of the line. Walters is one of the film’s high points; but everyone else, from Kelly, to Moran, to Jordan Leigh, who plays Jim Strong, do an amazing job. There’s no telling anyone here is acting. The shots are crisp and precise, the original songs are pleasing and well produced, and the mockumentary interviews come off as authentic and rightly satiric. The film watches well, doesn’t drag, and does make you laugh along the way. A little more direction in terms of making a definitive message, and “Stadium Anthems” may have indeed been great. Alas, it will it least entertain even if its points of music in the modern age and piracy don’t ultimately transcend.
-by Mark Ziobro
