Jubilee

JUBILEE is a visually charged, absurdly violent, and darkly comic tribute to British punk rock and its self-proclaimed Blank Generation. This unconventional vision from avant-garde British filmmaker Derek Jarman is a m?lange of music-video sensibilities (featuring music and performances by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam and the Ants, Brian Eno, and others) and historical realism, thoroughly steeped in the anarchistic fury, fashion, and dissent of late 1970s England. A sort of postmodern fairy tale, Jarman's film revels in the nihilistic, decadent world of its motley antiheroes. In 1578, Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) asks court magician Dee (Richard O'Brien) to give her a vision of "the shadow of her time." Dee invokes the angel Ariel (David Haughton), an androgynous gothic sprite who transports them to the Great Britain of the future--a post-Thatcherian wasteland where civilization has come to a halt. The streets are roamed by a band of violent punks, including the queen's sadistic alter ego, Bod (a...