‘SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD UNITE’ FILM DOESN’T LOVE MORRISSEY
That line about heroes betraying the past, delivered by DJ Full Metal Mickey (Manganiello) to die hard Moz head Dean, was Kijak’s way of addressing the planet-sized elephant in the room anytime Morrissey is in the conversation.
“Yeah, that's that's a direct address,” said Kijak, a longtime fan of The Smiths since his teenage years in the 80s, in an interview. “And, I got to say, because the film took so long to make, things seemed to get even worse [with Morrissey] well after we had locked it, so you’re like,
god, was that enough? I think the film is aware of it, and I put a lot of things in the film, like clues.”
“It's really tricky to kind of disentangle what that means to feel so connected to someone, and identify with someone so much and then kind of realize that maybe there's this other part of them that you don't identify with and really don't want to be identified with,” said Coltrane, who wasn’t a fan of The Smiths growing up but grew connected to them after a painful breakup. “But at the same time, you know, not wanting to reject the part of yourself that was validated by that person’s art.”
“We want to stand against what has maybe come to be seen as anti-immigrant or any hateful rhetoric,” he explained. “It's just so disappointing, too, because that’s our nostalgia you're messing with, man. You want to hang on to it because it meant so much to you at one time. So yeah, it's a really difficult question to wrestle with. We’re painfully, painfully aware of it, and the problem of it, but we wanted this to be a celebration of something that was bigger than that, that had to do with our youth, and ourselves and our culture as kids back then.”
“Like look at the cast. I wanted it to be a diverse group of kids who represented all different aspects of that fandom at the time,” he said. “It wasn’t a token decision. I mean, my best friend was like the only Black girl in her school who was a total new waver punk, and she felt othered in so many ways. These were her bands, this was her style, and she doesn't see herself represented in stuff like that.”
Full article:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5b...smiths-but-cant-erase-the-morrissey-of-it-all
See also:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pg9xqy/morrissey-were-through