calling this film a 'mockumentary' or fictional is an inaccurate description. sure Malcolm McLaren might be a first class(definitely first class though)A-hole, but much of what takes place here really did happen to the 'Pistols' during their exploits. also anyone lashing out at this film entirely misses the point. it's not a film applauding Malcolm McLaren, hardly, it's a very detached and humorous film art concocted by the clever and talented Julien Temple. anyone mindlessly trashing a Julien Temple film without taking into account the director's skill and reputation is being a little child-like. Julien Temple is a great film maker who shouldn't be so easily dismissed by a few jabbing remarks.don't be so naive. this isn't McLaren's film, it's Julien Temple's. anyone who thinks this is a film by McLaren has their information all wrong.if you are a real 'Sex Pistol' fan, how can you so easily dismiss the great music number with Sid Vicious singing his cover of "My Way"? didn't you know that Julien Temple directed that for this particular film? that music cover is an important footnote in the 'Pistols' history. how can you say you love the band or Sid and then just dismiss that like it was nothing.their are many great and hilarious moments in this film (most of them real) that are due to the skill of Julien Temple as a film maker. the scene where Sid "El KaBongs" a redneck with his guitar is a hilarious example of how the boundaries of real life and cartoon violence can become blurred. there are many other great music numbers and animation in this film, plus interesting little anecdotes like the story of Johnny being attacked by thugs.anyone telling you not to watch this and that it's not a great piece of 'Sex Pistol' history, has probably become disturbingly involved in the dispute between Lydon and McLaren on a personal level. to become involved with celebrities on that level is, well, MORONIC. you don't know them personally, even though it can feel like it. people should remain detached when enjoying celebrity culture. too much personal involvement makes you miss the message of things. like the fact that this is a Julien Temple film and not an endorsement of Malcolm McLaren.

Malcom McLaren died two days ago. He was, basically, a legend in his own mind. This is not to put him down but to say that, like Howard Beale in "Network" or even Barack Obama in the White House, he was up against the BIG BOYS with money. On to the film......A "mocku, rocku, documentary" of the Sex Pistols, it's really up there with "This is Spinal Tap" and "The Rutles"....very enjoyable bullshit, though totally biased. McLaren's view of history and his part in it.Back in 1980 fans of the Pistols (like me) had very limited chances of seeing them and the archival footage here is great!! So is the animation but you do need the inside story to understand it. Younger viewers will not understand who Ronnie Biggs is or why "Belsen Was a Gas" is in such bad taste. Read some history before seeing.The songs are hot and director Julien Temple suffered under McLaren's ideas of what should be in the film. He did much better in "The Filth and the Fury" and for some more accurate views of the era, read "England's Dreaming" by Jon Savage and "Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" by John Lydon.And for us die-hard fans, youTube has some amazing videos, including the final show at Winterland.

If you ever wondered how boy bands (yes, even though the Sex Pistols are antipodes to the cosmetic-fairy image of boy bands the principle is the same) are created then this is a must see.The film has a feel of being made fast and cheap but hey its the Sex Pistols so what do you expect?? A misplaced, angry bunch of hoodlums put together to form the most extreme opposite of what the music industry was (and still is) serving as artificially produced boy bands. That's what Malcom Maclaren talks about in the film, how he took 4 guys with no future and made them (for a brief but very explosive period) the center of the music world. Like I said before, this is a must see for all inquisitive music lovers, managers, PR managers and especially music managers because what Malcom tells is sometimes ingenious - like the fact he himself send loads of anonymous hate mail to the media about his own band thus fueling a raged public and a media hype knowing that bad news travels much faster and further than good one. To quote Salvador Dali: "Its good when they talk about me even when they say good things."All in all - its not a movie with a plot but a documentary of how a band is created using Sex Pistols as a brilliant example. I give it a 10/10 not for the film quality but for the lesson.

Not only is The Great Rock N Roll Swindle thoroughly inaccurate, but when it comes down to it, not much about it is interesting or even entertaining. Malcolm McLaren apparently squandered the majority of the Sex Pistols earnings on this waste of film, which makes it that much more obnoxious. The intention, from the beginning, was to create a monument to the "genius" of McLaren, who to this day takes full credit for creating punk music, creating the Sex Pistols, and at times even writing all the songs. Viewers follow McLaren to various settings, where he tells his story to his sidekick, a female dwarf, and simply takes credit for one thing after another. One particularly irritating scene has McLaren in an abandoned airplane hangar, waiting for a plane, being hounded by reporters and giving them their "big story". The most entertaining elements of the film are the animated short pieces, however, even these reek of McLaren's overbearing self-importance.Even as a farce, this film doesn't work. Little about it is entertaining, except for Steve Jones, who is surprisingly decent as a pseudo-detective type person. 20 years later, Julien Temple, who wrote and directed this film, also directed the Sex Pistols documentary "The Filth and the Fury". While that movie is much better and more interesting than "Swindle", it still is full of Temple's "artistic flourishes" that just don't work, like interviewing band members in shadow, as if they are some kind of crime witness trying to hide their identity. An interesting bit of trivia: Film critic Roger Ebert was one of the original scriptwriters for the movie "Who Killed Bambi?", which eventually became "Swindle".