almost famous: almost perfect

There exists a small but important category of films which try to capture a moment, past but treasured, in the life of a music scene. Ken Russell is a frequent romper in this sandbox, his forays ranging from Tommy to the Music Lovers and beyond. A few of my favorites, off the top of my head, are 24 Hour Party People with its diligent and very funny portrayal of the Manchester scene, and Todd Haynes' flawed but enchanting (and homoerotically epic) Velvet Goldmine, which brings to life the vibrancy of those early Glam Rockers. Almost Famous is for those of us Americans who fell in love with music when it still came on vinyl, those of us who remember the magic of the gatefold and the inner sleeve and spent our Sunday evenings with one ear glued to a transistor radio while Casey Kasem announced the week's American Top Forty. Cameron Crowe will never again make a film anywhere near this good. How could he? It was the movie he was born to make,-- all the others are some kind of filler,-- and there's hardly anything wrong with it.

These days I am hard on Philip Seymour Hoffman. I would not, for example, have handed him a gold statue for his overweening, overmincing, truly annoying portrayal of Truman Capote. Not that Capote wasn't the Monarch of Overween and Overmince, but PSH made it look like a heavy and difficult task, whereas Capote always made it look easy. (So, incidentally, does Toby Jones in Infamous, released --or, rather, swallowed,-- by the studio at the same time as Seymour Hoffman's biopic.)

Still, I would without hesitation give him an Oscar for this, his Lester Bangs. Although he's got maybe thirty lines in the whole picture, his readings are both hilarious and heart-breaking, and keep wonderfully true to the man himself. Nostalgically, that means something to me, as there was a time when I, too, wanted to be Lester Bangs.

While I'm at it, let me wax on awhile about other performances. Kate Hudson did one thing wrong: the opening "stewardess" routine. It may be the way it's filmed; anyway, something rings untrue about it. In the context of a lesser performance, the glitch might have gone unnoticed, but in a two-hour tour-de-force during which it's the single false note, it stands out. I'd have given her an Oscar as well, sure, and Frances McDormand, too, who brings wit and depth and intensity to a potentially thankless role as the unhip mom.

This is my favorite thing Billy Crudup ever did, and I can't think of anything he's ever done badly. Has he given a bad performance, ever, in anything? And Jason Lee is perfect as the arrogant lead singer, because he's more than that, and less than that, all at once and without contradiction.

Almost Famous makes me want to fall in love with music again. From the opening scenes it captures that magical shibboleth music was, maybe still is, when you're young. Only back then, there was this mystical ritual after you got your long-awaited record home from the local record-store (which usually had a headshop upstairs): the stripping off of the thin plastic overwrap, the smell of the cover, open it up, look at the secrets of the gatefold. Slip the record out of its sleeve, feel the weight of promise as you glance at the lyrics. Slip the vinyl out, look it over. Is there a secret message scribbled anywhere? Once the Replacements wrote "We're sorry, Portland," in the lacuna at the end of the last song. We were all overjoyed when we found it. It was an apology in reference to their last drunken debauch at Satyricon, a legendary show during which Tommy stripped off his clothes (my friend Tres ended up with his green polyester houndstooth jacket, another friend got one leg of his green polyester houndstooth pants), and my co-worker Rebecca got to drum awhile because the whole thing was so drunk and disorderly. The apology was on the Don't Tell a Soul LP and they played at Roseland that tour. They were on their best behaviour, and it may have been their dullest live performance ever.

But I digress. THEN you put the record on, generally with headphones the first time. And if it was any good, if it was Zeppelin or Lou Reed or Pixies or fucking Jane's Addiction, it might change your perception of reality for good, like an acid trip does, flip all the switches in your brain the other way and then sometimes, if you're lucky, not all of them get switched back into normalcy, and you're looking at the world through the pane of a different window.

That's what Almost Famous is about. About the hypnotically numinous promise that rock and roll held out,-- holds out, I reckon; I'm just too old to see it anymore,-- and the inevitable disillusionment which comes crashing down in its place after the high is over. But the sweetness of the movie's nostalgia is not twee at all, and Crowe manages to give us an autobiographical piece that is funny and unpretentious and non-egotistical, a full-on piece of magic.

robert carlyle film festival: eragon

Stefen Fangmeier is an accomplished Visual Effects guy around Hollywood, and this is his maiden voyage in the director's chair. It is also a knock-kneed, by-the-numbers, teen-aimed fantasy that has not one iota of that visceral id-muscle which fuels Harry Potter or the Twilight series. It follows the Joseph Campbell playbook fairly carefully, charting a normal lad's journey into his destined True Love and True Work, both found in the same dragon. She is his Dragon; he is her Rider; this was Destined from Before Time. (The Dragon's egg will not hatch until it is in the presence of its Rider. Also, if the Rider dies, his Dragon will follow, but not necessarily the other way round.)

Observe the checklist: family (in the form of a very nice uncle played by Alun Armstrong in an entirely futile performance) gets offed early by evil forces trying to keep our hero from his fate: check. Beautiful anima-figure sets it all in motion by stealing the egg and casting it into our hero's path, then recurs to set our minds at rest that although his dragon is his soul-mate, he'll have an appropriate screen at which to project his libido: check. Gruff and wizened mentor arrives: check... in the form of Jeremy Irons, in a very fine albeit, again, wasted performance. Boy and Dragon have adventures, check, pursued by the evil minion (Carlyle) of the evil king (Malkovich, annoying as usual. Luckily, his screen-time is minimal, and he's usually playing off Carlyle, who makes up for his sucking-void lack of presence).

Carlyle is easily the best thing about this whole mess; he is the eerie warrior called Durza. Nearly impossible to kill, the look on his face when he takes an arrow through the forehead, a mix of ecstasy, triumph and Schadenfreude, is utterly chilling. That's the best moment. You can fast-forward to that, then turn it off afterwards. I'd tell you how it ends right now to save you the time, but the ending is so unextraordinary that it's gone completely out of my mind already.

johnny depp double feature: dead man and benny and joon

*SPOILER ALERTS; BOTH FILMS*

Dead Man is the only Jim Jarmusch movie I like. Like his others, it is overlong, slow, rambling, and suffers annoying descents into triteness of dialogue. Unlike the others, its mise-en-scene is sufficiently magnificent and its talent sufficiently compelling to raise it up into a sort of shambolic greatness. It doesn't hurt, also, that its story,--the slow journey of a man to his inevitable death,--has a sort of catharsis built into it.

When I call its mise-en-scene magnificent, I mean that the film is composed of near-perfect elements interwoven to create a world of essential integrity. It has interesting and well-chosen camera angles ably edited, sets filled with fascinating details photographed in eye-pleasing black and white, massively talented actors (Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott. Robert Mitchum!) who bring unusual heft to the usual raggediness that is a Jarmusch script. There's a story steeped enough in mythological symbology to give it a needed depth (also unusual for Jarmusch), a hypnotic one-guitar-with-reverb score by Neil Young, and the beautiful, plastic face of Johnny Depp. All of these elements entwine to pull off the feat, although it is just by a nose, just barely by a nose. A different editor, a different actor, if it was filmed in color,-- just one or two false moves, a few more unravelled edges, and it'd have been a goner.

It is, in a very real sense, a paen to Depp's astonishing beauty. We spend a good amount of time watching his William Blake, in close-up, dying. He may be dying from the first moment we meet him on the train from the east (as suggested by the alarmed comment of Crispin Glover's Fireman that Blake is headed for the end of the line); if not, he's certainly picked up his death-wound within the first half-hour. Think of it as a hipster translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There are demons and trials and trickster guardians and portals to be passed through. There's even one very funny scene I'd rank nigh onto brilliant: when he stumbles up to a campfire manned by Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris and Iggy Pop, a sort of ersatz family vaguely but disturbingly reminiscent of the one in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

With Jarmusch, relaxation into the flow is imperative. Once you start fidgeting and fighting it, you may as well turn it off, because it's never going to sell you if you don't buy it from the outset. Back in my university days, I'd have recommended you get a little baked before you sit down to Dead Man; relax and let the strangeness wash across you like a tide.



The only reasons to watch Benny and Joon, on the other hand, are either nostalgic or for canon-completism for any of four or five rising stars appearing in it, including William H. Macy and Oliver Platt. Its only real claim to importance is its placement in Depp's CV. Emerging two years before Dead Man and in the same year as the equally quirky but much darker Arizona Dreams and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, it marks his cautious emergence as the world's strangest young leading man after his extreme anti-pop-idol rebellion of Edward Scissorhands.

Do they even make movies like this anymore? It was quite the industry in those days, as I recall: brightly-colored sentimental hogwash about mentally-challenged but generally adorable people whose love overcomes all obstacles. The genre was always (am I remembering this right?) marked by the musical montage: this one incorporates two or three full-length songs while the characters brood or walk around or go about their daily lives. Catchy songs, too, including that one-hit monster-wonder by the Proclaimers about walking five hundred miles, remember that? And a gorgeous Joe Cocker rendition of an old Blind Faith song, "Can't Find My Way Home," one of the saddest and most beautiful songs ever written.

It's inoffensive enough, with generally good acting (Julianne Moore, inspired as always, plus Aidan Quinn and Mary Stuart Masterson), and it follows the expected formula, providing the proper dosages of hope and heartbreak on its way to its happy ending. It's Depp's talent for underplaying that keeps this clear of The Sucking Fen of Treacly Emotional Manipulation. It's his underplaying which makes him great, which makes him interesting to watch even when he's overplaying (Jack Sparrow, anyone?), and although this should be classed among his juvenilia, it's a near-heroic effort to create a singularly memorable character.

Let me preface my final comment by saying that it's not particularly easy to warm my heart. Things like finding Tom Hanks on the top of the Empire State Building and pledging true love on the Titanic leave me not just cold but surly to boot. That understood, Benny and Joon is worth the watch for its climactic scene, in which Sam demonstrates his love by scaling the fortress wall to swing in front of Joon's hospital window. The music, the use of slow motion, and especially the Buster Keaton deadpan on Sam's face, make it one of the most truly effective heart-warmers I can remember.

fright night and the art of the superior remake

In the giddy aftermath of falling in love with the New World, I watched fourteen Colin Farrell films. I hated or actively disliked ten of those, although I sometimes found myself enjoying his performances whilst he swam against the bilgewater tide. My personal line on Farrell is that I prefer him playing comedy (In Bruges) or an everyman (Ondine, although I can't in good conscience endorse the film as a whole) as opposed to yuppie or studmuffin. That said, he's smokin' hot as the deadly power-vamp in Fright Night and I notice I don't particularly mind. He can also be very funny, which may be what makes all the difference. (When attacked with a crossbow by a man whose parents he killed years before: "You've got your mother's eyes. And your father's aim.") Add Anton Yelchin as the boy-next-door looking to find his way into manhood, throw in David Tennant (who may be one of my favorite humans on the planet, and I don't know why, exactly; that's the kind of sinewy charisma he commands) as a yellow-bellied vampire-slayer, and you've got yourself a party.

The original Fright Night emerged in the pre-Buffy, pre-Twilight eighties, and it marked a crucial moment in the history of the vampire film, bringing one taloned foot into comic banter and the other into modern teenage rite-of-passage. As such, we might do it homage as a big grandaddy to the vampire artform as we know and love it today. Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark is the greater film, no question, but perhaps FN made more difference, in the end.

In this remake, Buffy the Vampire Slayer magister Marti Noxon gives us a script which bows to the spirit of the original while making vast improvements. Gone is the tired "your girlfriend looks just like my first love before I was turned" plot-device. In this one, as an early victim points out, there is nothing soulful or romantic about the killer: "He's like a shark. He feeds then moves on." As such, he is an apt metaphor for a certain kind of predatory player who feeds on the sex and heartblood of his women before turning his gaze cruelly and inexorably away.

You could launch a successful TV series from this movie. It has much to recommend it, and veins of gold to be mined. I like that the "everyone thinks I'm crazy but I know that guy's a vampire" bit doesn't get too far over-stretched. By about the halfway point everyone important recognizes the monster as such, and from there on out it's all about how to get that stake angled properly through that chest-space. I like that it's extraordinarily difficult for the hero and heroine to kill even a newborn vampire, who, true to Buffy-roots, keeps up the wisecracking until the pointy end. I like that it's set in Vegas, grown-up Disneyland to drifters and nighthawks, a place where daytime can be easily circumvented. I like that a nightclub is openly recognized not as a place of safety in numbers, but of dangerous anonymity wherein the most awful crimes might be ignored in a crowd of lotus-eaters over-steeped in the opiates of their various pleasures. I like that there is a vast, implied mythology behind the vampires' history: we find out that Farrell's Jerry ("That's a terrible vampire name, Jerry.") comes of a particular and ancient Mediterranean strain of beast, one with proliclivities towards colony-living and slow-feeding on living victims over days or weeks. "Snackers," a character scorns.

The characters are likable, the end-battle is satisfying, the metaphors are appropriate. There are great images: the vampire-slayer stuck in his panic room with a writhing, undead arm, or Jerry coolly setting a cross aflame with a touch, then extinguishing it with a breath.

strong women acting well

Clash By Night: (1952. dir: Fritz Lang) The bad of it is that it's written by Clifford Odets; the good of it is that it's directed by Fritz Lang. Odets gives us one of his studies in drunkenness and misogyny and emotional crimes committed in the name of loneliness. Lang surprises us with breathtakingly unexpected shots, like when Robert Ryan stumbles into his close-up just as the wedding party roars up in the background.

Stanwyck is strong as an ox, the loveliest ox in the world. Ryan seems strangely miscast, as if he's having to geld himself in order to find his inner Odets. Then if you've ever had or raised a baby or been around one for longer than thirty seconds, the plot makes no sense because there's a cute little MacGuffin baby who exists solely as a plot device, rarely makes a sound and gets left on its own in an empty house for days and nights at a time while its parental units undergo their emotional turbulences. The good of it is that the baby seems adept at taking care of itself; the bad of it is that the ending of the film is heavily weakened by this absurdity. To compound the ho-hum factor of the ending, Stanwyck's connubial Hera instincts kick in very suddenly and inexplicably to dislodge a previously towering Aphrodite entelechy, and the final reconciliation scene is flat and unsatisfactory, reminding me of the ending of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both authors wrote themselves into dead ends in which the only possible happy endings are imcompatible with their own cynical understandings of human nature.

Alongside Stanwyck there is the joy of watching the young Monroe before she'd been mewed up in her eventual Marilyn mould. In this one she plays a vivacious tomboy who likes to pick fights with her boyfriend so she can throw punches at him. She and Keith Andes as the boyfriend embody the anti-Odets health and vitality necessary for true happiness.



Don't Bother To Knock: (1952. dir: Roy Ward Baker) And speaking of Marilyn, anyone who thinks she couldn't act needs to see this low-key, small-cast little psychodrama. Richard Widmark is a playboy and a very young but already assured Anne Bancroft is the chanteuse who's broken with him not for lack of love but for lack of a foreseeable future. If that sounds cliche, you have to hear the way it's written: you've never heard it like this before. The script is a quiet dynamo. Monroe is a troubled girl recovering from a suicide attempt who gets a job babysitting and reverts back to more than a little crazy once she catches Widmark's eye. Although she's playing a sphinxlike character, and playing it well, there is never a moment when we do not know what she is feeling. Her choices are clear and plain, her grasp of the character complete. Each emotion barely touches her plastic features, grazing her face with its wings before it moves on to be followed by the mere suggestion of another. It's a lovely performance, and when the little girl is leaning out the window and Monroe says, "Don't fall," it's one of the scariest faces I've seen.




*WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD*

the Romantic Englishwoman: (1975. dir: Joseph Losey) When I was a kid I worshipped Glenda Jackson like a goddess; I'd have voted her into Parliament if I could've. This wasn't my favorite of her films, but I liked it, and I'm amazed, on watching it again, that it's not actually about the Glenda Jackson character at all. She's such a powerhouse actress that I only saw her, but it turns out the movie is really about the Michael Caine character, the cuckolded screenwriter who must fight through his baser instincts to play the noble husband, taking his wandering wife back and offering (although he never has to back it up) to try and rescue her doomed lover. It's a man's movie, for crying out loud. And all I remember are Jackson and the fantastically strong and wonderful Kate Nelligan in her three-scene role.

Helmut Berger as the young gigolo comes across more gay than androgynous, and there is no real electricity between Jackson and him. Oddly, it's not needed, as the important story is in her character finding her freedom, working through the boredom built into modern life, and she is so unfailingly intelligent that we know, even in moments when she seems fixated on him, that her obsession has little to do with any particular man, that he is a symbol, a barely tangible dream. That's why the last quarter of the film drops in quality, after the two run off together and try to form a life. At that point it becomes apparent that we are seeing the story as it is imagined in the mind of the screenwriter, who has no clue what his wife wants or is doing, really. When he steps in to save the day, it's ridiculous wish-fulfillment. By that time, the wife has become a non-character. And STILL she's brilliant to watch, because Jackson makes choices like nobody else ever has, and that's always riveting.

robert carlyle film festival: the beach

Back when I worked at the bookstore we used to hand-sell this book like mad. Smart hipsters would come in (this was Portland at century's turn) asking for a summer read and we'd head straight for Alex Garland. It's the story of a kid searching for adventure in Thailand, being given a map to a secret Shangri-la by a crazy man just before he offs himself, then taking a beautiful French girl and her boyfriend with him on a quest to find the place. This was Garland's first novel, he was still a kid, really, but his voice was already strong, his narrative well-structured, his hunger for philosophical inquiry ignited, his sensibility a little stranger and smarter than most, and he hadn't yet launched into wild-exploration mode as he did with Tesseract and Coma, worthy works but less readily accessible than the Beach, lacking in its buoyant, dangerous vivacity.

Then the movie came out, and we couldn't give the damn thing away.

I missed it in the cinema at the time, and now I wish I hadn't. It seems to me (from my far-off recollection) that it follows the letter of the novel rather exactly, while missing its spirit almost completely. The then-nascent Danny Boyle gives it the interestingly-skewed but lushly beautiful cinematography and flow of a music video, and when you're done, that's what it feels like you've seen.

That's too harsh, though. It has more to offer than I thought. Boyle is intrepid at the helm, albeit navigating down an ill-chosen canal; Tilda Swinton gives Sal, the island's Big Kahuna, a bold and cryptic turn which is entirely appropriate and delivers her with such lucid comportment that the character feels full and true despite limited screen-time. DiCaprio, on the other hand, misses plumbing that deep well of inner darkness the hero needs to plumb in order to carry the story.

All in all, the movie loses the book's creeping, Lord-of-the-Flies sense of menace and we wind up with a cadre of Euro-narcissists in their own private seaside resort, making it difficult to care about outcomes.

Robert Carlyle plays the catalytic trickster who calls himself Daffy Duck, takes a shine to the serious young hero (a hero more thoughtful in the book than the film, in which he seems less introspective than the plot requires) and leaves a map to paradise as a parting legacy before opening his veins in a squalid Bangkok bedsit. He has only one scene then a sort of reprise as a dream-character later, and brings to it all his psychotic intensity, which is considerable. Boyle lights him well in his early scene, eerily and strongly, because this instigating moment is crucial, and if we don't buy it, the movie is a goner.

But we do buy it, against the odds, since the script seems, well, daffily lightweight in its logic, having lost in translation the truth of yearning communicated in the novel. When Daffy speaks of the perfection of the beach, a perfection which has driven him somehow mad, the weight is in the delivery, not the words themselves. Carlyle has once again so thrown all his heft into his role that he drags the script up a notch with him through sheer torque and will-power.

His magic doesn't stretch far enough to save the film, of course, which is, however, not the catastrophe I was always led to believe. And sometimes even a bad movie leads to good things: in this case, the later fruitful pairing of Garland and Boyle in 28 Days Later and Sunshine.

last night's history of filmmaking double feature: shadow of the vampire and safe conduct

Shadow of the Vampire begins with a question that we've all asked ourselves at one time or another: what if Max Schreck wasn't an actor at all, but really was a vampire? Director E. Elias Merhige takes us onto the sets and locations of Nosferatu as FW Murnau (John Malkovich) creates the original classic vampire film with the help of a real vampire. It sounded like some kind of heaven to me, but there are really only two reasons to see it: to hang out on these German film sets in 1921, which feel marvelously real, and for Willem Dafoe's fantastic performance as Schreck. He's genuinely chilling, he's surprisingly funny, and sometimes both at once. Some of the supporting cast is inspired, like Cary Elwes as the cameraman/dispenser of pharmaceuticals, but Malkovich is, as usual, a little annoying most of the time. And the script makes very little sense, particularly in the final scene of madness when Schreck demands his promised tiend and a ridiculous battle ensues between heartless vampyr and heartless filmmaker.


Safe Conduct is funny and smart and very well-paced, which, at nearly three hours, it must be to survive, starting off at a fast clip and later mellowing so that we may spend more relaxed time with our hero (Jacques Gamblin). This is the life of a filmmaker in Paris under Nazi domination. Does one work with the Hun? or abandon one's craft for the duration? or secretly work against the oppressor from within his own system? The questions are hard, the caveats appended to any answer offered are troubling, and director Bertrand Tavernier doesn't shrink from the complexity of it, although he is also not averse to sprinkling a little sentimental fairy-dust, either.

It has Tim Piggott-Smith in it, always a good thing, in a wonderful late segment in which the hero, having spontaneously stolen some Nazi documents, finds himself bundled off to England by the French Resistance to convince the chummy, hard-nosed, tea-drinking Brits that he is no German spy trying to pass off false information. The best of it is that good and evil are not simple: every seemingly heroic act is going to rebound against somebody, either the perpetrator or an innocent, and the perpetrator must choose whether to confess his crime or watch an innocent suffer for it. It's beautifully filmed and the details feel true. It's a little pat, a little too well-tied-up, a little too much an encomium to France's Greatest Generation to feel completely satisfying, but for an exercise in tribute and sentiment it succeeds remarkably well.