Change Your Image
michael-427
Reviews
Forest of Bliss (1986)
Saw this years ago and haven't stopped thinking about it...
A documentary about life and death in Benares, India. I saw this movie at a small theatre in Seattle almost ten years ago; I don't believe it's been through town since.
The movie begins with sunrise and ends with sunset. There is no English dialog or voice-over in the film; everything is visual. The subject matter, Benares itself, is remarkable, shocking and dirty and beautiful: funeral processions, kite-flying children, thousands of marigolds, fighting dogs, it goes on. Watching the film - and this I loved - was like watching a story unfold. Themes would develop and be examined in-depth, and when enough was said, a new theme would take its place: when my eyes wandered from street level and started noticing the brilliantly colored kites in the sky, Gardner shifted his focus to the children playing in the steady wind by the river, and I saw where the kites came from. After so many funeral processions pass, you become curious about the thousands of marigolds covering the bodies; quickly, you're taken to the rolling marigold farms.
Watching the film is like seeing tales of a distant and strange culture being told from behind sound-proof glass, tales which fascinate and even entertain. I hope I have a chance to see it again.
Almost Famous (2000)
Oh, my misspent youth...
I totally forgot that he did Say Anything. No wonder this movie makes me feel like I skipped my adolescence, that I never got laid, that I never fell in love, that other people were falling in love all around me and somehow I was skipped; that my friends were never the cool kids and yet I spent years trying relentlessly to feel cool, allowing the slightest success to convince me I'd made it, even though it was inevitably followed by rejection, shame and loneliness; that I'd never looked at the world around me with that look, that sponge-eyed innocence that Cameron Crowe seems to nail in every one of his films, a look that is absolute adolescence.
Every time I see a Cameron Crowe film I leave certaint that I've never felt the things his characters feel, that my life has not been lived to the fullest. That look, though, that Cameron Crowe look it's an achievement. It's why people see his films, why we all die for Say Anything: because we all want to be sixteen, unabashedly in love, and not afraid to say so, out loud, to the person we're in love with. Crowe fills his films with exactly the people you'd want to be in love with - in this case: Kate Hudson playing sexy, loose, flirtatious, wild, kind-hearted,16-yr-old Pennie Lane (just the girl any uncool smart kid would be a fool to, and would, fall for); Billy Crudup playing Russell Hammond, a sexy, passionate, Jim-Morrison-intellectual rock star (exactly the kind of guy that those same girls always ended up with); and Patrick Fugit playing William Miller (Crowe as a kid), a little awkward but confident of his abilities, wanting to be cool, never quite succeeding but always wanting to hang with the cool people (which would be me, only with less drive and lacking the aforementioned `look'). I was in love with each of them. Certainly Kate Hudson wins in the long run, but they're all utterly appealing: one of them I want to be, one of them I want to befriend, one of them I want to be in love with.
I think that covers the targets of every teen-aged obsession I ever had.
Another teen-aged obsession, though (which, like the rest of them, continues to this day) is for music. Pleasantly, it's the journalist Miller's (and Crowe's) obsession with music, more so than coolness or even love, which makes this film move. There's a moment where the young Crowe discovers his older sister's collection of rock records. The camera captures the album covers reverently, one at a time: the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends, Led Zeppelin III, Disraeli Gears, Electric Ladyland, The Who's Tommy. It's a beautiful moment the discovery of rock&roll. There's a note from Miller's sister in the gatefold copy of Tommy, saying that the record, heard cover-to-cover, would change his life. His act of putting the record on the turntable and hearing the music for the first time is captured beautifully, and again reverentially, like the young man is undergoing some sort of religious conversion it's a thrill. I was reminded of the first time I heard Black Sabbath, the song and the band, with the lights off on a dark night, the sound up loud, alone in my room: the music kicked in, the slowest, simplest, and loudest music I'd ever heard, and I lay in bed squirming and kicking and smiling in ecstatic disbelief that such sounds were being made in the world. In the movie, the song the boy chooses, `Sparks' sort of a Tommy overture - is a perfect choice: simple, weird and rocking, existing solely to introduce the listener to the world of rock that's to come.
The reverence shown to rock music is a welcome one. Where other Cameron Crowe movies pummel the watcher relentlessly with the aforementioned teen-aged obsessions, Almost Famous brings a new obsession into the mix, an obsession we thirty-somethings can feel good about maintaining. Crowe's love of rock&roll is made clear by the subject matter of the film, by how well the 70's rock-band, groupie, rock-journalist lifestyle is recreated (Peter Frampton was a `technical advisor' on the film), and by Crowe's magnificent choices for the soundtrack (my eyes misted over when Led Zeppelin's `That's the Way' came on as the tour bus rolled through the California desert).
One scene in the movie did assuage my lost-youth misery somewhat. Lester Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, talks the young journalist into feeling good about being uncool (`Call me anytime. Of course I'll be home I'm uncool') and smart. I would like to personally thank Crowe for adding this exchange: not only did it let me feel a little better about never quite making it to `cool,' it convinced (who knows for how long) to turn my energies toward pursuits other than those which the rest of the movie made me feel were requirements for a fully realized adolescence. It's a pep talk for those who fail based more on foolish pursuits than on inadequacies.
At any rate, though, I chose to write about this movie because
well, because it gave me that feeling of misspent youth, and there weren't any therapists or whores in the lobby. I do feel better. And the next time a Cameron Crowe movie comes out, I'll attend but I'll be prepared.