Fifteen years ago Bruce McDonald cemented his status as Canada’s preeminent rock n’ roll filmmaker with Hard Core Logo, a ballsy, crude and thoughtful faux documentary about a struggling punk band traveling across Canada for a final tour.
Though the film quickly became a cult favorite, no one anticipated a sequel. Yet somehow all these years later McDonald returns to TIFF with Hard Core Logo II, a film that he doesn’t necessarily even think of as a sequel.
“I’d consider this a kind of a flipside or a companion piece,” explains the director. “You take a couple of minor characters from the first one and make them the main characters of the second one. In a highfalutin way, you could say it’s like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead.”
One of the minor characters that McDonald upgraded to protagonist is a fictionalized version of himself, a character who spent years directing episodes of a Christian Kung Fu (“my hopefully affectionate solute to my career in episodic television,” McDonald admits) to distance himself from filming the death of bandleader Joe Dick, only to return to documentary filmmaking after learning that Dick’s spirit may have possessed Die Mannequin’s Care Failure.
The decision to cast the young singer and non-actor came as a result of scheduling conflicts with the original cast, as well as an amusing piece of advice.
“A friend of mine, Jody Colero, who’s a music guy, said to me, ‘Hey Bruce, have you ever thought that maybe my kids don’t want to see a 45-year-old Joe Dick? They want to see a 21-year-old rock chick.’ It made sense,” says the director, laughing.
Though Hard Core Logo II veered in an unexpected direction, it’s McDonald’s second film in a row that returns him to a world and collaborators that he worked with in the 90s, following a virtual Twitch City reunion on Trigger.
“You reach a point where you’re like, ‘You know what? I just want to work with my friends,'” admits McDonald who doubts his current nostalgia wave will last forever.
“I’ll get to a point where I’m like, ‘Am I just running in circles?’ And then I’ll do a ‘lobster boy on the run’ movie next. Whatever will break the pattern when it gets too familiar.”
Hard Core Logo II screens Tuesday (September 13), 10:15 pm, at the Scotiabank 4 and September 17, 12:45 pm, at the AMC 3. The original Hard Core Logo precedes the September 13 screening at 7:45 pm.
