Brothers of the Head (2006)

This is what I would call a Ficumentary - a fictional documentary. This is a very believable and engrossing story with stunning performances by Luke and Harry Treadaway. Their performance is both extreme and very subtle. I've never seen or felt so much from a simple glance. And the movie is so believable I went and looked the main characters - Tom and Barry Howe - up on the Internet convinced that they were real.As the movie progresses, and thank to the main actors Luke and Harry Treadaway, you can see the characters self-destructing before your eyes. The weigh of their lives bares down on them with ...well... unbearable weight.Both Luke and Harry Treadaway have gone on to do other separate movies. Harry Treadaway, as an example, was the lead in the movie "City of Ember".A fastinating and unique movie experience, and especially so for music fanatics.

How do you follow up a documentary that plays out like a tragi-comedy? Easy: make a tragi-comedy that masquerades as a documentary.After the brilliant Lost In La Mancha, a hair-raising account of Terry Gilliam's aborted efforts to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe return with another tale of industry implosion - though this time the industry under the spotlight is the music business of the mid-1970s, characterised by pan-sexual hijinks, druggy indulgence, a burgeoning punk scene and, we're invited to believe, the most jaw-dropping double act of the decade. And that includes Bernie Winters and Schnorbitz.Unfortunately, Brothers Of The Head, suffused throughout with a sense of impending doom, is on a hiding to nothing: a cursory glance at the two previous attempts to adapt Brian Aldiss's works for the screen - Frankenstein Unbound, and Artificial Intelligence: AI - should have sounded klaxons. And, though no fault of his own, screenwriter Tony Grisoni's CV doesn't immediately inspire confidence; neither Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas or Tideland received the smoothest of rides, critically or commercially. Garnish this strange brew with a latterly unbankable director (Ken Russell, cameoing as himself) and it begins to look like deliberate self-sabotage.Conjoined twins Tom and Barry Howe (real-life identical siblings Harry and Luke Treadaway) grow up in an isolated cottage on the windswept shores of L'Estrange Head, on England's east coast. The twins are joined at the chest by a Cronenberg-esquire protuberance, and it's pretty much taken as read that a surgical procedure would more than likely kill them.When they hit 18, their father sells them to ailing music impresario Zak Bedderwick (Addfield). Recognising a lucrative novelty act when he sees one, Bedderwick wastes no time in installing the pretty things in his country estate and grooming them for stardom. "Hand on heart, I never exploited anyone who didn't want to be exploited" says Bedderwick. He's all heart.Under the tutelage of musician Paul Day (Dick) and the strong-arm tactics of their manager Nick Sidney (Harris) the pair are transformed into a fearsome live act, developing drug habits and egos the size and shape of Tower Bridge. Things get messier when journalist Laura Ashworth (Emery, Kent) falls for the gentle Tom ("If you're in trouble and you need a friend, Laura Ashworth is the last person you want coming round the corner," reflects Paul), as the more volatile Barry is caught in a jealous, voyeuristic bind. Splitting up due to 'creative differences' is not an option. It's going to end badly.With echoes of Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Velvet Goldmine and Peter Watkins' Privilege, Brothers Of The Head rankles so much because there's the potential for a similarly good film here. The music, bridging the gap between glam and punk, is marvellous, if suspiciously redolent of the more recent New Wave of New Wave (of New Wave) style, and the period documentary footage is terrifically authentic. The Treadaways make a good-looking team; their incessant huggy embrace both an act of physical necessity and a sly nod to the era's gender transgressions. Mick Ronson and David Bowie performing 'Starman' on 'Top Of the Pops' springs immediately to mind.Yet for all their supposed turbulent symbiosis, what we mostly get is Tom looking glum, and Barry acting up. There's no real sense of their inner lives, and the film relies far too much on peripheral characters, such as a surgeon popping up to tell us helpful stuff like "the emotional and intellectual lives of conjoined twins are combined in a highly intricate way." Well, duh.Toward the end, the film all but fizzles out like a faulty amp, while the belated revelation that Barry may or may not have harboured the remains of a third foetus in his cranium goes absolutely nowhere. Although Ken Russell gets some mileage out of it during a characteristically over-the-top sequence in his pretend-film-within-a-pretend-film, the Howes biopic 'Two-Way-Romeo'. "I think Ken Russell should stick to Women In Love," muses documentary-maker Eddie Pasqau (Bower) wryly, in one of the few genuinely funny lines.There's a hollow ring to this pretentious picture; a surface film about surfaces. The instinctive action at credits up is a shrug: is that it?

Just got back from the screening of "Brothers of the Head" at the Atlanta Film Festival. What can I say about it? To tell the truth, I don't know what to make of the movie. It's really hard to tell if it's a comedy trying to be a drama, or a drama trying to be a comedy. It's mainly a drama, which has some funny moments. But to me, it felt like a film with an identity crisis.Maybe it's because I was expecting it to be a comedy coming into it, but it just didn't work for me. I heard comparisons to Hedwig and the Angry Inch but those should be thrown out as the two movies are nothing alike, save the music.The film was well done, I'll give it that, and it had excellent performances from the actors, especially the love interest (played by two different ladies for two different time periods) and the manager. But I found myself laughing at parts that a first played for comedy, then become deathly serious. I didn't know what was acceptable to laugh at. What starts out as a joke morphs into abuse at one point, in another one you start laughing, then you realize your laughing about a tumor.It is a challenging film, and maybe if I went into it fresh, knowing it was a drama, I would've enjoyed it more. I did enjoy the music, even if it was rough around the edges. I wouldn't be opposed to picking up an album from "The Bang Bang" if it was well produced.Well, conjoined twin rock stars... a drama... who'da thunk?

There have been many self-destructive rock star movies over the years from "The Doors" to "Sid and Nancy," but what if said star was a 'twin' - a Siamese twin.'Brothers of the Head' could more appropriately be titled 'Bros of the Chest' since that is where the twins are conjoined. As you would expect, one twin is docile and plays guitar while the other twin is more out-of-control but does manage to write some of the band's better songs.The major problem with this movie is that the twins only produce three (maybe four) songs which leaves too much time for derivative rock star antics in between (re: drugs, alcohol, and groupies). Of course, the groupie thing gets a bit uncomfortable when only one brother 'scores' and the other bro is forced to watch from an all-too-intimate distance.There's also the issue of identity as to which twin is in control as detailed in the song: 'Are you YOU or me?' Not to mention the film itself has its own multiple personality issues as it slides from insider documentary to Ken Russell adaptation (yes, the director is interviewed within the film). The Russell segments are few and far between and add very little commentary when they are injected between the pseudo-'documentary' segments (and yes, there is a film-within-the-film pseudo-docu director is interviewed too).Overall, an extremely dark portrait of a freaks-gone-famous punk phenomenon that offers little solace for the audience and a scattershot approach to the mockumentary format that won't score points with genre fans. Don't expect any laughs or a feel-good ending either, this is mockery at its most dour. Welcome to the dark side of mock 'n' roll.