Wasted Orient, a
film about Chinese punk band Joyside, plays like a soused travelogue document —
an alternately rowdy and curiously lulling waste of time for anyone not
directly connected to the movie’s subjects or its maker.

A biography of Pennsylvania-born director Kevin Fritz
proudly notes that he applied for an overseas internship as a joke, and ended
up at China’s
prestigious Peking University
to study Chinese. There, he met Joyside’s band members in 2003, and began
filming their tour that same year. Obsessed with Johnny Thunders and the
philosophies of American punk, Joyside decide to spread their beer-soaked
message of apathy across the countryside, filming everything along the way. This
mainly means countless binge drinking sessions, a few performances captured in
tight, handheld fashion (songs include “I Don’t Care About Society,” “I Want
Beer” and “I Wanna Piss Around You”), and band members traipsing through public
toilets and their cigarette-littered apartments. There are also a few muddled interview
segments, but mostly Wasted Orient offers
up a grab-bag collection of random footage, like someone pouring hot candle wax
on their tongue, or a mosh-pit kid dealing with a busted eye.

Fritz obviously somehow mistakes nihilism and the indulgence
of base behavior for truth, and refuses to dig deeply at all into the personal
lives and backgrounds of his subjects — a group that includes perpetually bleary-eyed
frontman Bian Yuan (a figure somewhat reminiscent of G.G. Allin), as well as Liu
Hao, Fan Bo, Xin Shuang and Yang Yang. Viewers learn more from a random sticker
(using the first letters of the band’s name to spell out its ostensible “likes,”
which include: “Johnny Rotten, Orgasm, Your Money, Slut, Ice-Cold Beer, Drugs,
Every Fucking Day!”) than from anything that Fritz manifestly offers forth.

Presented in 1.33:1 full-screen, Wasted Orient comes housed in a nice, clear plastic Amray case,
with a tri-fold, full-color insert that includes a lengthy and surprisingly
well-reasoned director’s statement on one side and a smattering of Joyside
photos and illustrations on the other side. The English subtitles touted on the
back cover are not present on the disc, which is a huge additional strike on this title, since it leaves one to
decipher the ramblings of Bian Yuan on their own. Sometimes he slips into
English and one can follow him (he deems rock ’n’ roll “an addiction to chaos,”
and says that he has no relationship with the world, and isn’t interested in
one), but just as frequently one is left grasping for straws. The disc’s
sole bonus feature consists of six extra minutes of footage rather pointlessly divided
into three chapters; here we see another performance and… hey, some vomiting! Yawn.
To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here.
D+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)