I assumed, in the best possible situation, that we would all be arrested.
Started the week off with a pair of documentaries about phenomena particular to the '70s, one of which won Best Documentary at the Oscars. (See if you can guess which one.) First up was 2008's Man on Wire, about French wire-walker Philippe Petit's mad quest to walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 (this was after first warming up with Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbour Bridge). Directed by James Marsh, the film at times plays like a caper with its reenactments of the lengths to which Petit and his crew had to go to smuggle their equipment into the buildings (which were still under construction at the time), hustle it up to the roof, avoid being caught by security, and rig the wire so he could perform his stunt (relatively) safely. All the while, we see contemporary interviews with everybody who was involved (even those who initially agreed to help but then bowed out for whatever reason) interwoven with archival footage of the months of planning and preparation.
By the time Man on Wire reaches the actual morning of the walk, the event has been built up to such an extent that it's a shame Marsh has to mostly rely on still photographs to depict the 45 minutes that Petit spent crossing between the towers before giving himself up to police. With this one act, though, he achieved the sort of thing that hardly anybody else would have even dreamed of attempting. And once you've walked between the tallest buildings in the world -- which Time Magazine called the "Artistic Crime of the Century" -- what do you do for an encore? The film doesn't say, but in the end it shows that Petit hasn't lost his way with a wire -- even if they're no longer as high as they used to be.
Film number two was 2000's The Filth and the Fury, the story of the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of the Sex Pistols in the late '70s. Directed by Julien Temple, who had previously helmed 1980's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (which was largely told from the point of view of manager Malcolm McLaren), the film acts as something of a corrective to the record since it relies on contemporary interviews with surviving members Paul Cook, Steve Jones, John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) and original bassist Glen Matlock, with Sid Vicious by necessity represented by archival footage. Temple also places the Pistols in the context of the social and political unrest that plagued Great Britain in the late '70s and even incorporates numerous clips from Laurence Olivier's 1955 film of Richard III, which are not as incongruous as one might think.
How much one gets out of a film like this may depend on how much import one ascribes to the Sex Pistols' place in music history, but I never found it to be anything less than fascinating. Still, whereas End of the Century spurred me on to dig into the Ramones' back catalog, I feel like I can continue to do without Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. If I can go 36 years without having it in my collection, there's no reason why I should feel obligated to add it now.