Rage: 20 Years of Punk Rock, West Coast Style

"In the beginning, there was a boring silence of rock-star bullshit." Thus begins this rockin' documentary on the punks who brought anarchy to surferland, or as filmmakers Scott Jacoby and Michael Bishop put it, "The [Sex] Pistols called collect, and the West Coast paid the bill." Constructed almost entirely of interviews with SoCal punkers like Jello Biafra, Jack Grisham, Duane Peters and Keith Morris, interspersed with rapid-fire montages of graffiti and the music in question, Rage makes a good case for the brilliance of its subjects, all of whom are fiercely radical and articulate, except perhaps for Peters, whose utterances are generally on the level of this gem about skating to the sound of punk rock: "There's nothin' fuckin' greater other than fuckin' a good chick!" Punk, as it turns out, is a state of mind rather than a musical genre, which is why Green Day are not punk and goth band Christian Death, represented here by keyboardist Gitane Demone, are. While the MTV bashing gets redundant, and statements like that of Germs drummer Don Bolles that frontman Darby Crash had more charisma than Jesus are less than profound, there are some good observations to be had: TSOL singer Jack Grisham notes that punk legends are like old bluesmen in that they've hardly seen any profits, and the always articulate Biafra advises that it's "important to do these things when you don't know enough not to."