Glatpoti It is so daring, it is so ambitious, it is so thrilling and weird and pointed and powerful. I never knew where it was going.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

bbewnylorac In this well paced, very affectionate doco, Joe Strummer comes across as a very intelligent, spirited, charismatic man who wasn't perfect but had an impact on many people around the world. He very much made the most of his life, and was tough as nails yet artistic and generous. From a quite alienating childhood in boarding school, and periods in his 20s living in squats and drifting somewhat, he carved out his own path for others to follow. He was mentally strong, whereas his brother, from the same background, was not, and took his own life. Strummer realised he would have to make things happen because no one else would. Having started in dirty, sweaty pubs,the doco shows how very strange and hard to handle it was when Strummer and his bandmates won fame and fortune and played the huge stadiums. Unlike the Stones, they seemed to have an ethos that didn't adjust well to the popular scene. Srummer wasn't conventional in his instrumental or vocal or songwriting style, yet people loved him because he conveyed it with passion. As one interviewee said, he might have grown up fairly well off as the son of a diplomat, but he he wasn't a phoney. The format of interviewing friends and relatives around campfires -- combined with historical concert footage and interviews, montages and even cartoons -- works very well. Criticisms include that his girlfriends tend to appear and disappear with no explanation: one minute he's with the Bolivian girl, the next with a string of British blondes. Also, why no subtitles giving the names of all those people interviewed around the campfire? I guess we're supposed to be cool enough to just know them.

Reggie_Charan Growing up, Joe Strummer was a hero of mine, but even I was left cold by this film. For better and worse, The Future Is Unwritten is not a straightforward "Behind the Music" style documentary. Rather it is a biographical art film, chock full of interviews, performance footage, home movies, and mostly pointless animation sketches lifted from "Animal Farm." The movie is coherent but overlong by about a half hour.The campfire format, while touching in thought, is actually pretty annoying in execution. First off, without titles, its hard to even know who half of these interviewees are. Secondly, who really needs to hear people like Bono, Johnny Depp, and John Cusack mouth butt licking hosannas about the man? They were not relevant to Strummer's life and their opinions add nothing to his story.This picture is at it's best when Strummer, through taped interviews and conversation, touches on facets of his life most people did not know about: the suicide of his older brother, coming to terms with the death of his parents, the joy of fatherhood. To me, these were most moving because it showed Joe Strummer not as the punk icon we all knew and loved, but as a regular human being who had to deal with the joys and sorrows of life we all must face.There have been better, more straightforward documentaries about Strummer and The Clash. (Westway, VH1 Legends, and Kurt Loder's narrated MTV Documentary from the early 90's come to mind.) Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is for diehards only.

MisterWhiplash Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is maybe the first time one has seen a documentary done a "punk rocker" like this, where it's a story of the ups and downs and valleys and little peaks for a rock star done in the style of Eisenstein caught in the midst of a room covered with punk garb and an assistant with a mohawk. It mixes archival footage, interviews, movie footage from Animal Farm and 1984, Peter Cushing movies and Raging Bull, as well as a kind of loose structure formed out of 'London Calling' radio clips that Strummer did with his own music choices for his audience, and it's a mix that the suits the director wonderfully. His previous film was a revisionist take on the Sex Pistols- maybe the masterpiece of punk-rock docs, the Filth and the Fury- and the Future is Unwritten comes just as close to the subliminally, anger, trouble, and creative spirit that went with its subject matter.Can anyone completely know Joe Strummer? Probably the same could go for Bob Dylan, who also has a movie about him out now that stretches the boundaries of cinema in I'm Not There. Temple raises questions for the fans of the Clash who might've not known certain things; that Strummer could be a very generous front-runner to the fans that needed help, and could also get p-od if his audience wasn't in some check with himself (or rather that they could be connecting with the audience and not some abstract rock-blob, which they feel they become by the time of Shea stadium); that towards the end of the Clash it was just Strummer and his management team (!); that Strummer anguished for the better part of a decade over how his career would go- this part I did know- that he went into some movies, made a horrible effort to get out of his record contract, and drifted in the tide of experiencing whatever for inspiration. His tale is more enigmatic than most, but as any artist he was many things at any time: moody to a fault, pushy, pleasant, quiet, frustrated, quixotic, and always with ideas that could come from anywhere, from Central American rebel uprisings to his walk from one place to another.It is, more often than not, a sad film, probably more-so than the destructive tome on the Pistols, because Temple brings up many 'what-ifs', and a lot of the loneliness that could encompass Strummer (i.e. the scene when he's recording for days on end by himself in the studio shows him frayed and frazzled, as he sometimes appears in interviews too) and carried around him with, as any major rock and roll personality has, a rotten past and family history (father, brother, et all). But all those moments when Temple gets the audience to really feel the weight of the fact that such a man has been gone for good for five years now, he also reminds us brilliantly what he DID accomplish. There is a mark left from him, on his fans and on his loved ones and on the likes of Bono and Scorsese and (as funny as it is to see him Jack Sparrow-ed up) Depp, not to mention practically any *good* punk band.Strummer was a thinking-man's punk, one who's lyrics could be taken into context of political and social significance, and had the stamina- along with his rowdy band-mates- to try and do what few rock bands could ever do: make a significant impact on consciousness, as if it were intuitive to do so. That they were eclectic didn't hurt either (even if, arguably, the Clash were more significant than the Mescaleros could ever be). And, in the end, the Future is Unwritten is mandatory viewing for anyone who gave a g*damn about the Clash or about the progression of the creative forces that started, actually, in folk and hippie music, progressed through punk, and went back out again into techno and, gasp, hippies and punks combined! It's daring for what's in-between the lines of the typical rock and roller story, and how Temple and his team make one of the best edited films of the year.

Vez Wow, I was blown away by this film. Despite having been born in 1990, and not having got into punk 'til 1 1/2 years after Joe's death (something I'm constantly kicking myself for), this film made me feel involved in his life + the '70s punk scene, as though I actually lived it. That's the sign of a pretty feckin' good film, if you ask me.I found the format to be fantastically original (everything from having Joe 'narrate' through his radio show, to the use of his cartoons and the campfire interviews), the content was thorough but not overly concerned with trivial details, and it was just generally a warm, involving + insightful portrayal of Joe's life and the British punk scene.Fantastic. See it.