OUR HOUSE

Time-lapse photography from the International Space Station. The Sunshine score. Done. Awesome.

APROPOS OF NOTHING, ANYTHING GOES

Just because this is awesome. Y'know, Temple of Doom is fucking great until the plane takes off . . .

RIP, ADAM "MCA" YAUCH

For a long and rich career in music and film, may you long be remembered, sir.

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: THE SURREALISTS WEIGH IN (WARNING: EXTREMELY NSFW)

Yes, the Future definitely will be Odd. Tyler, The Creator (the centaur who does all the blow in the video) may be a pretty decent rapper and producer, but he's a pretty spectacular director of music videos. What this has to say (other than fuck you), I couldn't tell you and wouldn't dream of trying. But it's something else, for sure.

A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO DAVID ROBERT JONES

The following was originally written for Tor.com, who are kicking off a whole week of David Bowie love in honor of the great man's birthday. Unfortunately, due to me misinterpreting my instructions, I had written this whole thing before discovering that a couple other writers had basically covered all this and made it redundant, so it will not, alas, be part of the Bowie fawning (I gotta say, I love working for people who are even bigger Bowie fans than I am). But, rather than just let this gather virtual dust sitting on my hard drive, I figured, what the hell. Here, then, is a brief piece about David Bowie's music as relates to science fiction:


From the very beginning of his career, David Bowie's career has had close ties to science fiction. His first commercially successful single, “Space Oddity,” a sprawling, haunting tale of the doomed astronaut Major Tom (on the literal level, at least; there were heavily metaphorical undercurrents of drug addiction as well, but that's Bowie for you, he's rarely if ever only doing one thing.)

Bowie's penchant for both vivid visuals and science-fictional themes and allusions in his lyrics was at its most consistent in the first few years of his fame, spanning multiple stage personae. After Major Tom, and a few references here and there on The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie wrote two explicitly SF-inspired songs for his extraordinary album Hunky Dory: “Oh! You Pretty Things,” which looks forward to an apocalyptic shift from the human race as it currently exists to the next stage in evolution (while also simultaneously, and more overtly, being a middle finger to homophobes), and the epic drama “Life On Mars?”, another portrait of (general and sexual) otherness where Bowie first employed the metaphor of an alien world to illuminate the separation that kind of otherness causes with the rest of society.

He proceeded to extrapolate this metaphor, most obviously and famously in his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. His next album, The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, over the course of whose 12 songs—peppered with a number of oblique non sequiturs—tells the titular story. Whether or not Ziggy and the other spiders were literally from Mars was a bit beside the point; they were sufficiently not of this earth that only an SF metaphor would do do describe them. Much, it should be noted, like Bowie himself.

The strange and, in more ways than one, alien sexuality of Ziggy combined with perfect timing and the fact that the album was really good made Ziggy Stardust a massive success. It put Bowie in a position where he was forced to either stay Ziggy forever or evolve. He chose the latter, subtly at first. His follow-up album, Aladdin Sane, featured a logical continuation of many of Ziggy's musical ideas, but with the overt SF imagery confined almost exclusively to the title track; “Aladdin Sane” being a play on the phrase “a lad, insane.” Inspired by the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies, the characters in which Bowie saw as consumed by a meaningless, doomed lifestyle that was both caused by imminent global catastrophe and at the same time the cause thereof, “Aladdin Sane” looked forward to World War III both lyrically and in its spooky, furtively experimental music, that managed to evoke both Berlin cabarets and the apocalyptic future.

For his followup, Bowie—a bit addled by drug use and the pressures of the commercial music industry—wanted to write, and worked out a few rough sketches of songs for a stage musical of George Orwell's 1984, but was denied the rights by Orwell's estate. Then he planned a concept album set in and around a post-apocalyptic city. Upon completion, Diamond Dogs would be a combination of both ideas, featuring a good deal of SF in the lyrics and a couple killer singles.

Although he had not maintained his Ziggy persona throughout this initial period—which also featured covers album Pin-Ups—his shift to “blue-eyed soul” singer was a much more significant shift, and the first such that could be described as a reinvention. This period, consisting of the album Young Americans, didn't traffic in the same SF references as before, primarily because they'd always been a mark of Bowie's sense of his own otherness, and now he was trying to assimilate. That being said, the idea of Bowie co-writing songs with Luther Vandross was sufficiently (and awesomely) strange that it seemed like something out of parallel universe SF.

Bowie would not stray long from SF, as his very next studio album, Station to Station, originated in an attempt to write a song score for the SF movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie was playing the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton. A combination of preparing for his first lead role as an actor and his debilitating drug regimen led to Bowie's arguably most fascinating—and least sustainable—persona: that of The Thin White Duke. The Thin White Duke was from another planet much like Ziggy Stardust, but rather than the former's relatively benign mission of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, The Thin White Duke was up to something far more sinister and mysterious. The music on Station to Station was forward-thinking and packed with spooky (and spooked) futurism. Everything about this iteration was less explicit, more elusive, which oddly made Station to Station and the following period—Bowie's “Berlin trilogy,” over the course of which he gradually weaned himself off cocaine and returned to relative sanity—nearly perfect soundtracks for SF cinema, both real and hypothetical.

A sane, sober Bowie was not much for the science-fiction imagery, even going so far, in “Ashes to Ashes,” to turn his back on the entire period with the line “We know Major Tom's a junkie.” Still, he didn't abandon SFF completely, turning in a haunting, beautifully rendered performance as a dying vampire in The Hunger (a movie otherwise only notable for being the feature directing debut of Tony Scott and for the legendary sex scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon; something's wrong when David Bowie isn't involved in the sexy parts of a movie) and his indelible turn as goblin king Jareth in Labyrinth, for which he also wrote the songs.

Labyrinth is an extremely important movie for reasons I'm sure I don't need to explain to anyone still reading at this point, and its soundtrack has its ups and downs, though those ups are very, very up indeed. “Magic Dance” is one of the greatest things to ever exist. Bowie takes elements of every one of his previous personae for his character and—to a lesser extent—songs in Labyrinth, ending up with a result that somehow manages to carry undertones of his old dangerous sexuality and yet still be (kind of) suitable for a kids' movie.

Still, fairly or not, the period in Bowie's career in which he made Labyrinth was one of his critically least successful. Almost a decade later, he was at a point at which his own career and shifting popular tastes in music required a “comeback” album, for which he reunited with producer Brian Eno. In trying to recapture his 70s glory, the album—written entirely in the studio—was linked by the overarching theme, detailed by Bowie in a short SF story that he included as liner notes, of a dystopian near future, with songs told from the perspectives of several different characters.

While regarding Outside as a “comeback” album slightly devalues the work Bowie had been doing at the time—among which were the under-appreciated album Black Tie, White Noise and the excellent, adventurous soundtrack to the BBC adaptation of Hanef Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia—it is nonetheless a return to Bowie's explicitly science-fictional lyrics. Being vastly more lucid than he was in the 70s (when he wasn't at all) makes Outside at once less thrilling an evocation of an SF universe than its predecessors and a far more coherent one. It's a big, long experience that evokes, far more clearly and consistently than any of Bowie's other concept albums, a science-fiction movie. The album isn't only the score but the script and cinematography as well.

Outside was Bowie's last grand statement in musical SF. His subsequent work has occasionally alluded to SF and related themes, but not to the extent Outside or his 70s period did. Still, Bowie's manifest, wondrous strangeness has led many a filmmaker, and specifically an SF filmmaker , to use one of his songs for the soundtrack, since there are certain situations where only David Bowie will do. Even in the non-SF comedy Zoolander, there was a point of debate about who was cooler than who, leading Bowie to step into frame and say “Perhaps I can be of assistance.” An expert consultant, if you will.

It was also a lovely touch in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, set so far in the future that humans have interstellar travel (and are united under one highly fascistic planetary government), that the band playing the high school prom before all the 30 year old high school students go off to war is covering Bowie's “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town.” It's at least a century in the future, and Bowie's still cool. It warms the heart.

And last but not least, one use of a Bowie song that I think speaks volumes of his supremacy not only as the last word in cool but his status as the rock star laureate of science fiction, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which absolutely beyond any doubt qualifies as alternate history SF, even if it isn't immediately apparent as such. The movie is Tarantino's typically feverish blend of literary and cinematic pastiche, lengthy dialogue scenes, and extreme violence, assembled meticulously and with intelligence. It does, at the climax, take a turn from historical fiction to alternate history, a turn that satisfies the savage wish-fulfillment aspects of the story. It still requires something to grease the wheels a bit, to mask how implausible the climactic action is, to set a tone of ultimate cool, of seductive danger, of otherworldly strangeness. It is thus that, at the perfect moment to do so, the soundtrack starts playing David Bowie's “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” featuring, at the exact moment a plot involving incinerating the entire German high command is nearing completion, the line “Putting out fire with gasoline.” Watching that scene, the movie's already been great up to that point, and at the exact moment the thought “Wait . . . that's David Bowie!” enters one's mind, it becomes clear that the rest is going to be even better. Which, at long last, brings us to the point: there is nothing that David Bowie cannot make better. Nothing. At. All.

ROLLIN WITH RICK

No, I'm not just Rickrolling you to get all misty and nostalgic about 2007 (or 1987 for that matter). This video is two things: 1) a coded message about what I was up to this afternoon, and 2) awesome. It didn't hurt that I'm replaying GTA IV for the zillionth time at the moment; that game is very special to me. But dig the choreography and editing in that joint, it'd be tight even if it wasn't machinima.

YOUR 20TH CENTURY BOY: VELVET GOLDMINE

You make me act real gone, you make me trawl along
I had to ravish your capsule, suck you dry
Feel the teeth in your bone, heal ya head with my own
Why if I don't have you home, we'll have to fight alone
Hang all together

Velvet Goldmine, you stroke me like the rain
Snake it, take it, panther princess you must stay
Velvet Goldmine, naked on your chain
I'll be your king volcano right for you again and again
My Velvet Goldmine

--David Bowie, “Velvet Goldmine”

Released as a B-side to “Space Oddity” when Bowie re-released it in '75, “Velvet Goldmine” had been gathering dust for a while by that point. Its original lyrics were rumored to be along the lines of “I have lots and lots of sex with dudes” and spent four minutes being totally blunt about it and not couching it in euphemism at all. Even in '71, which was Bowie's prime wearing-a-dress-on-his-album-covers period and winking at the line “Gotta make way for the homo superior” in “Oh! You Pretty Things,” the original lyrics to “Velvet Goldmine” were a little too much, so he backed off and dressed everything up in euphemism and threw in the line about “panther princess” for plausible deniability and all that. But still, “Velvet Goldmine” is totally about having sex with dudes, which is why when Todd Haynes made his movie about glam rock, he used it for his title.

Velvet Goldmine is very much a movie about having sex with dudes. There's this locket or something with that gets passed down from Oscar Wilde to the Marc Bolan/Little Richard character (the movie has that kind of poetic approach to history), to the Iggy Pop character, to Christian Bale's journalist character. One reading of the movie could lead one to believe that it has some sort of mythic power of gay, but considering Todd Haynes' background in semiotics it could very well just be a signifier of fabulousness, and it is pretty fucking fabulous. Then again, so is glam rock.

Arising as it did in the early '70s, when the gay rights movement was making strides, and when world events had gotten upsetting enough that a move from weed to cocaine was necessary to keep spirits up (and the resultant cynicism, plasticity, glibness, and obsession with surface that resulted from that shift), glam rock both informed and was informed by popular culture. It was very much about posing, looking fabulous, acting incredibly fabulous, and doing a whole fucking goddamn hell of a lot of cocaine.

In very broad strokes, it started with Marc Bolan wearing glitter and a boa and making a couple mindblowing pop records, continued and got really really big when David Bowie saw Bolan's glitter and boas and raised him science-fiction aesthetics—teasing the idea of space alien as metaphor for sexual otherness—and epic theatrical scope, and eventually split into having a visual, presentational influence on disco and a musical influence on metal and punk (while metalheads and punks fucking hated each other in the 70s, they all liked Bowie). A little over five years after arriving in its massive decadent glory, glam rock died the death, with Marc Bolan's literal death in a car crash, and David Bowie quitting cocaine, moving on from rock 'n' roll, and becoming exclusively hetero again.

This last apparently sat badly with Todd Haynes, as Velvet Goldmine is very critical of the Bowie character, Brian Slade. He's a pretty enigma who charms his way into the hearts of his tragically enamored manager, his American wife, the Iggy Pop character Curt Wild, and gay teenagers (notably Christian Bale's character) who see him perform and listen to his music and go “That's me!” Eventually, he goes crazy on blow, fakes his own death, and then emerges in the 80s as an unrecognizable pop singer whose music supports a Ronald Reagan-inspired US president.

The story is structured, a la Citizen Kane and Eddie and the Cruisers (Velvet Goldmine pretty much exactly splits the difference in quality), around a journalist trying to piece together a story about an enigmatic figure, with a series of interview subjects. Haynes does a lot of jumping around in time, and doesn't do a lot of hand-holding with regards to which character is which, instead relying on visuals and moments to evoke emotional reactions, not a bad way to approach making a movie about glam rock.

It's a fun movie. Form and content are one, as it's long, decadent, gloriously self-indulgent (I remember thinking, the scene where “Bowie” first sees “Iggy” perform live and Ewan McGregor as “Iggy” is freaking out on drugs and jumps out of his leather pants and starts wagging his dick at the audience, “I can just see Todd Haynes being like, 'Damn, sorry, Ewan, the lighting was fucked up, man, you're gonna have to wave your dick around for a thirtieth take, I'm really sorry.'”) The performances are all pretty solid. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in his breakout role as “Bowie” does a good job being pretty, inscrutable, and snotty. Ewan McGregor is awesome as “Iggy,” hiding his wounded sensitivity behind bluster, swagger, and drugs. Christian Bale is a little gnomic as the journalist, as he isn't really given much to do beyond being gay and British. Toni Collette is her usual awesome self as the former Mrs. “Bowie,” as is Eddie Izzard in a non-drag turn as the Evil White Guy In a Suit with whom “Bowie” signs and who encourages “Bowie” to fuck over everyone who got him where he is. But the most fun performances come early on, when the manager is telling Christian Bale about “Bowie” before he was a star, and there's this one scene where the manager and a bunch of middle-aged English homosexuals have a conversation in Polari with English subtitles. That scene is fucking great, and it's a sign that Todd Haynes knows his history.

Velvet Goldmine is not exactly short on similar signs (or signifiers either. Zing! Tip your waitress!) Just about everything in the movie is a reference to something. The Bowie character being named Brian “Slade” is a reference to the band Slade. His drummer has the same name as Marc Bolan's drummer. There are Stooges and Velvet Underground references all over the place (Ewan McGregor's character, though I called him the “Iggy” character earlier, has trace amounts of Lou Reed floating around as well). The “present day” stuff all takes place in 1984; Diamond Dogs, anyone?

And the soundtrack . . . oh, dear God the soundtrack. For some bizarre reason, David Bowie objected to being portrayed as a Machiavellian closet case and refused to grant permission for his songs to be used in the movie, though this actually helped the movie be more of a universal thing about glam rock, with Roxy Music and T. Rex covers standing in nicely. A couple different “supergroups” were assembled to perform those covers, one of which had Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead performing with just about everybody from Roxy Music except Bryan Ferry (though Thom does a fucking great Bryan Ferry impersonation; wonders never cease).

Despite the unfriendly Bowie euphemisms, Velvet Goldmine isn't an angry movie. Its attitude toward Bowie feels more like “you used to be all right . . . what happened?” (sorry, I can never mention Radiohead just once) and its attitude and Haynes' toward glam rock is kind of a wistful, nostalgic, “that shooting star sure was gorgeous” feeling. And of course, like any fleeting moment in the past, making a movie about it means everyone who sees the movie gets to share in that moment. Maybe some of them'll even buy some records. I know this movie is how I started listening to Roxy Music and T. Rex, and I fucking love them. And it's not like my love for Bowie's music got shook by Velvet Goldmine. It helped that the movie had no pretenses to being literal, naturalistic reportage, and it also helped that Bowie's real-life “conservative” 80s pop records were really fucking good (well, Scary Monsters and Let's Dance both were).

Velvet Goldmine may be kind of a mess, but it's a gorgeous mess. It's obsessed with surface, and scared that there's nothing underneath (okay, law of threes, now we're done with the Radiohead). And man oh man does it bring the gay. This movie brings the gay like a Jason Statham movie brings ownage. Dudes who want to fuck dudes go right ahead and fuck dudes. And in between fucking other dudes, they go full speed ahead on the fabulousness. Whether or not the gay is your thing, you gotta give it up to these cats, especially Ewan McGregor (whose penis should have won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar when he whips it out during “T.V. Eye,” just for the reaction shot of Jonathan Rhys Meyers going “Wow, I really want to suck that.”) Hell, it's not just Ewan McGregor, this whole movie's gayness has its dick out. And goddammit, Todd Haynes, you get a fucking round of applause for that. Good job, dude.


This post is dedicated to the passage last night of same-sex marriage in New York state. One love.

THE LATTER HALF OF THE PHRASE "MOVIES BY BOWES." OR AS THE KIDS SAY, SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Readers in the NYC area, take note! I will be telling a story about Radiohead (and LSD, voyeurism/exhibitionism as related to the performing arts, and all that jazz) at The Soundtrack Series, 7pm Thursday March 24th at Le Pouisson Rouge. I'm very excited to be part of The Soundtrack Series; I've been most months and literally have never heard a bad story there. The best are jaw-droppingly awesome.

Until then, acquaint yourselves with the excellent Soundtrack Series blog, where you can hear some of the great stories. And, until the 24th, I'll be waiting . . . with a gun and a pack of sandwiches.

SINCE YOU'VE BEEN GONE

Well it ain't half been a while, huh? Let's catch up: since the last post, I undertook the massive . . . undertaking . . . (coughcough) of reviewing every single Batman movie ever made for Tor. It was interesting, starting with the 1943 and 1949 serials, then moving to the Adam West/Burt Ward “holy kitschy 60s homoerotic silliness, Batman!” incarnation, then to Tim Burton, then to Joel fucking assnuts Schumacher—research revealed that he spent the whole second movie (probably) fucked up out of his head and (verifiably) screaming shit into a megaphone about not taking anything too seriously, verifying my most wild exaggerations—and then to the Extremely Serious And Fraught With Portent version brought to us by Christopher Nolan (who sure is good at casting: Anne Hathaway as Catwoman is going to be straight uncut meeeeeow). Basically, after that whole fuckin' thing was done I needed to get the fuck out of Batman world and into something wholly other.

Enter my buddy Abe, whose contagious Bollywood evangelism has led to me being that dickhead in the front pew who doesn't really know what's going on but fucking FEELS THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD. Starting a few months ago with Endhiran (which wasn't a Bollywood movie but it had Indian people in it and was a good gateway drug for me because it was really fucking expensive and had a whole lot of trippy FX) and continuing with a recent outing to see Tees Maar Khan—the subject of a splendidly popular post—I'm starting to really dig the shit out of Indian movies, because they understand a couple things that we kinda lost here in America:

(1) Movie stars are important. The guy needs to be awesome and the girl needs to be hot and that's not fucking negotiable.
(2) Stylized acting fucking rules
(3) Singing and dancing similarly fucking rules
(4) It's a movie. It's meant to be enjoyed.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what I've been saying all this time in between the cursing and the Schwarzenegger advocacy? It's a match made in geek heaven.

So, less than an hour after finishing up the Batman pieces, I hopped into the shower and on the subway and, with the Tees Maar Khan crew, took in a Bollywood DVD double feature. The first picture we saw was called Om Shanti Om, by TMK director Farah Khan. The best way I can describe Om Shanti Om is that it's about everything, and everyone is in it; neither of those is all that much of an exaggeration.

The hero is Shahrukh Khan, a man who gives you your money's worth (and who's damn near a billionaire in US bux just from acting, which is seriously badass in its own way), playing two roles. Kind of. When the picture starts out, SRK is Om, a “junior artist” (read: bit player) in the 70s who dreams of stardom and romancing Shanti, the staggeringly beautiful movie star of his dreams (Deepika Padukone, making her Hindi debut, which surprised the shit out of me, because girlfriend has movie star written all up and down her). A whole bunch of wonderful, completely non-naturalistic romantic stuff happens and it looks like Shanti likes Om back . . . only to have Om discover that Shanti is secretly married to Mukesh (Arjun Rampal), the jerkoff who's producing the movie! (Which, by the way, is called Om Shanti Om; Farah Khan is basically sitting there at the stove with a big old pot of meta saying “Oh, no, sweetie, you're so thin, you need more, you're just wasting away, have more meta, it's good for you” for this whole picture)

Om is heartbroken, because he overhears Shanti tearfully telling Mukesh she just wants their marriage to be public, forget the damage to her career (different culture, different rules; not being single would seriously fuck things up for her, but that's love for you). Mukesh flips out and, in a scene that raises the bar for villainy to Himalayan heights, totally tells Shanti that he's going to marry her on the set of the movie, and right when she gets all excited, he goes, “Actually, no, I think I'll burn you alive.” And he has his big muscle dudes guard the entrance to make sure she doesn't get out. Om, motivated by true love, makes a damn fine effort to get in and save her, but Mukesh's dudes beat the shit out of him, and with the wasted time, Shanti dies in the fire, and Om dies in the hospital. Right after Om dies, the wife of movie star Rajesh Kapoor (Javed Sheikh; also, as I understand it, “Rajesh Kapoor” is sort of like if the guy was named “Jack Stone” or something in an American movie, like a real generic “movie star” name), who hit Om with his car on the way to the hospital, gives birth. Which leads to them naming the baby Om.

Jump ahead thirty years to the present day. Om Kapoor (also, of course, played by Shahrukh Khan) is a spoiled, shallow, puer aeternus fuckhead nepotistic brat, totally career-minded in his stardom. He's starring in a movie where he's playing a blind, deaf, and dumb guy in a wheelchair, but he insists on all kinds of rewrites, that lead inexorably to this magnificence ending up in the movie:



That bit at the end, where SRK starts freaking out? It's because he's afraid of fire. Why is he afraid of fire? Because . . . HE'S THE REINCARNATION OF THE OM FROM PART ONE! Boo ya motherfucker, welcome to India. If you don't recognize how rad this is, there is no reaching you.

Om Kapoor gradually gets less and less douchey as more of Old Om seeps in, to the point where he's almost completely Old Om, to the point of reuniting with Old Om's Old Mom and Old Childhood Chum. And—this is the best part—launching a jaw-droppingly elaborate revenge scheme against Mukesh, who's spent the last 30 years in Hollywood and now calls himself Mike and speaks almost exclusively English. This gives SRK the chance to do a fucking splendid vacantly Californian airhead accent when busting “Mike”s balls.

The revenge scheme centers around a remake of Om Shanti Om, on the original set, which has been considered “cursed” since the fire. Om takes advantage of his industry cachet to get a big star to play Shanti, only he's planning to find someone who looks exactly like the old Shanti to splice into the dailies to freak “Mike” out and drive him insane (something like that, at any rate), and lo and behold he finds Sandy (also played by Deepika Padukone, conveniently), a gum-chewing, clumsy bubblehead who, wouldn'tcha know, is a dead ringer for Shanti! PerFECtion!

Events converge. Somewhere in all of this there's a party scene where literally almost everyone who's been famous in Bollywood in the last thirty years pops in to say what's up:

All hot girls put your hands up and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!
All cool boys come on make some noise and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!

Goddamn that's catchy.

Then there's this big awards show parody thing where everybody else who's famous in India shows up (in which Akshay Kumar literalizes a joke I made a few months ago about Liam Neeson in Taken and actually machine guns a bunch of guys with his dick). And then the actual movie starts back up and there's more singing and dancing and eventually, Om is the instrument of ghost Shanti's revenge on Mukesh. The end. Standing ovation.

Om Shanti Om is feverishly ambitious, and is every movie ever made. A point made in the intro to Filmi Girl's excellent “Bollywood For Beginners” series that made me realize why Bollywood makes perfect sense to me: it's an industry as old as Hollywood, evolving in direct, completely separate, parallel. If you're able to carry the one, so to speak, watching a Bollywood movie shouldn't be that difficult. Cinema vocabulary is universal, and as long as you bear in mind that what appears to be tonal inconsistency to a cinematically monolingual Westerner is actually on purpose because it's the most popular style in India (the masala picture, so called because the mix of styles is like the mixture of spices in Indian cooking). So, given all that, it makes sense that even though I haven't seen most of the specific movies Om Shanti Om might be referencing (whole subplots might have flown over my head) I know movies, so it makes perfect sense on that level. Also, Farah Khan is awesome, so there's that.

Of course, after the mind-blowing intense experience of the totality of cinema that is Om Shanti Om, we were totally gonna watch something else. Abe got out a bunch of DVDs and was like “okay, I've got this, it's a little weird, I've got this, which is something something, and this one has Salman Khan.” No-brainer, we're going with Salman Khan.

Non-initiates might not see the absolute logic of this decision, so I'll explain: Salman Khan rules. If that's still not enough explanation, let's try the opening of Wanted (no relation to the stupid, excessively-pleased-with-itself McAvoy/Jolie thing). We open, eccentrically, at a women's kickboxing match, where a badass gangster type takes a call wherein it's explained that he has to come back to Mumbai at once. Some guy tips someone off that the badass gangster type is on his way back to Mumbai, and the badass gangster type cuts the guy's throat and leaves him to bleed to death in public. We then flash back to Mumbai a couple months before, where due to circumstances that presumably include suicidal impulses, a warehouse full of guys decide to antagonize Salman Khan. He proceeds, in Statham-esque fashion, to fuck each and every one of them up with extreme prejudice. But the capper is that after he owns the living fuck out of every single henchman within a five mile radius, Salman Khan stops the movie to sing a song about how awesome he is.



That's swagger, my friends. (Side note: I love how in every single Bollywood movie I've been watching lately, Anil Kapoor shows up with a shit-eating grin on his face to hang out for a dance number; that guy must be having a lot of fun) The rest of the picture alternates between Salman Khan getting goofy over the lovely Ayesha Takia (though the way he neurotically fucks with her heart after it becomes clear she likes him back is a little weird, but hey, weird is better than boring) and owning the bejesus out of the entire Mumbai criminal underworld, with a few not bad songs, a whole lot of tonal inconsistency (I don't mean that as a critique, it's just the way these pictures are; as Abe, an avowed Bollywood lover, put it: “Tonal inconsisency, thy name is Bollywood”) and, at approximately where the third act break would be in an American movie, one motherfucker of a plot twist.

Turns out Salman Khan, badass criminal, killer of many men, lover of many women . . . is an undercover cop. And though there's been no apparent mention of it the whole picture, his girlfriend's yoga teacher is not only an ex-cop but his dad. This is the point when Wanted stops fucking around and says, “You want ownage? Okay, here you go.” The gangster from the first scene is summoned back to Mumbai to stop Salman Khan from owning everybody (hey, they wouldn't be bad guys if they weren't fucking stupid) and makes the horrible mistake of killing Salman Khan's dad. Before he checks out, though, Papa Khan out-Dennis Hoppers Dennis Hopper and reminds the baddie that he ain't no motherfuckin Christopher Walken by laying shit out for him: My son is going to find you and fuck you up. Which is hardly a surprise at this point, it's like telling someone “Oh yeah the sun's going to rise in the east and set in the west tomorrow,” but the way he lays it out is just badass. I wish I could find the exact quote, but take my word for it, it rules.

Following his father's murder, Salman Khan openly reveals his policeman status and has the corrupt rapist shitbag cop on the bad guy's payroll take him out to the Final Action Sequence Warehouse. To set the tone, Salman Khan decides to jump out of the moving police car, spin in midair, and start walking up a flight of stairs in one motion for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer swagger. About twenty henchmen deaths in a row consecutively win “most stylishly and brutally violent henchman death of all time.” At a crucial point, Salman Khan removes his shirt by basically flexing his pecs. This lead to the following conversation:

Female friend: You know, not to be a girl, but that's why his package is kind of small. All those steroids, doesn't do well for you there.
Me: Yeah, but metaphysically, he's packing serious heat.
Female friend: Yes, metaphysically, that's true.

Because if they had steroid testing in movies, SK would be in some trouble. On the other hand, American action movies were awesome when the heroes were all on steroids and haven't quite been the same since (just like baseball).

By the time he gets to the main baddie and the rapist corrupt cop, Salman Khan is so intense the screen vibrates when the director cuts to his reaction shots. No shit, there's like eight shots in a row where they cut back to Salman Khan and the whole movie goes BWOMWOMWOMWOMWOM for a couple seconds. Final ownage is dealt. Fin.

Sure, Wanted's a little long (about two hours and forty minutes). Sure it'd be almost an hour shorter if it was made in America (or England or Europe or wherever) with Jason Statham. But if you're seriously sitting there whining about that shit you have no soul. Consider that extra hour an extra hour you get watching Salman Khan swagger, watching Ayesha Takia's smile (and, though I'm not a fake tit guy, hers are kind of spectacular), and all those songs. More on my nascent Bollywood fandom as it unfolds.


In other news, playoff football and my Tor duties kept me from doing up a Golden Globes post. The republic will not collapse. I had planned to do some snarky shit about the bribery scandal as a preview, but time didn't permit. Afterwards, the only thing worth writing about was Ricky Gervais' hosting, which has been written to death since then, so I won't pile on too much except to say this: what Ricky did out there was straight up Friars Club style, which has been around forever and is an institution in comedy. People were whining about him being mean, being a dick, so on and so forth, but seriously. If I was nominated for something and Ricky made fun of my weight, substance abuse, frequently gender-indiscriminate crushes, or foul mouth, I wouldn't be thrilled but I wouldn't whine my balls off about it like everyone there. Robert Downey Jr. makes a crack about shit being “mean-spirited” before doing a bit where he pretends to have shtupped all the Best Actress nominees? No. The spirit is one and the same, dude, you just got away with it because all five of them actually would fuck you given the chance (and when applicable, a waiver from her husband/significant other). Both jokes are in-bounds. Lighten up.

So that basically brings us up to today. I'm back on my regular irregular schedule, and have a couple things in store for you this week, including an in-depth look at the Lethal Weapon series in honor of Warner Bros' craven, avaricious announcement that they plan to reboot the series. So stay tuned.

One last note: next weekend, a project in which I had the privilege of being asked to take part is being unveiled: Piper McKenzie's Dainty Cadaver! Everyone in the NYC area is advised to come by and behold its majesty, and everyone not in NYC is advised to get your plane ticket now. Check out this “interview” about the play. Happy Sunday, y'all!

IT'S ABOUT THE MUSIC!!!

As a movie lover, I find myself torn between being terribly frustrated at squandered potential and cutting movies and their makers enormous amounts of slack for having ambition. There's enough shared ground in that Venn diagram—ambitious movies that succeed—that the outlying, non-shared parts aren't too annoying, but periodically I see a movie and go “Movie . . . why can't you have succeeded in your aims?” One such is Eddie and the Cruisers.

The story of a popular, groundbreaking rock 'n' roll band torpedoed by the untimely death of its saxophone player and disappearance (and presumed death) of its frontman/musical mastermind Eddie Wilson, Eddie and the Cruisers is immediately in a gigantic hole dug by co-writer/director Martin Davidson's decision to appropriate Citizen Kane's structure; journalist Ellen Barkin's investigation of the story by interviewing the remaining band members serves as the picture's skeleton (and the interview with Eddie's girlfriend and backup singer is almost shot-for-shot the bit where the guy interviews the Marion Davies character in Kane, but without the flair). While the decision to bite Citizen Kane displays impressive ambition, you've got one big condom to fill if you're going to rip off Citizen Kane. And Eddie and the Cruisers just ain't quite packin' that much heat.

Apart from the derivative structure and occasionally stiff performances (though Michael Pare, in spite of some clunky line readings, is absolutely perfect as Eddie), the biggest problem the picture has is with the music. John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band, who wrote and performed the original songs, had a couple moderately successful singles on the soundtrack with “On the Dark Side” and “Tender Years,” the Cruisers' two big in-movie hits, but the reason for this is that the soundtrack dropped in the mid-80s, and Cafferty et al's sound bore an immense similarity to a certain Mr. B. Springsteen and the merry band of E Street, who enjoyed some success at the time. For what they were—Bruce-y mid-80s Jersey rock—“On The Dark Side” and “Tender Years” are not bad at all; in fact they're just as good if not better than Bruce's shittier stuff of the period. On its own merits, it's one of the better original (except for a couple covers by Cafferty et al) song score soundtracks you'll find.

Only problem is, music in 1963 (when the movie takes place) sounded fuck-all like music in 1983 (when the movie was made). Not only is two decades a long time, the first of those two was The Sixties. And we all know that during The Sixties . . . Everything Changed. Boomer hyperbole aside—if there were as many fucking people at Woodstock as those one-rusty-brain-cell-havin' ass motherfuckers claim, Abbie Hoffman would have been elected God—popular music basically has to be divided into pre- and post-60s, and not just because of the Beatles, but the ensuing Brits, and Dylan, Motown, drugs, the Velvet Underground, drugs, and drugs and a few other individuals, genres, and movements I'm probably forgetting. (Ed. Note: coughcoughdrugscoughcough). Not only all that, but then there was the 70s, with even more shit.

Something I remember faintly, that scared the living shit out of music nerds like my dad (who, rest in peace, was a massively accomplished and passionate music nerd) was that in the late 70s and early 80s so few people actually gave a shit about the history of music that whole genres were in danger of dying out. Steely Dan griped about this in “Hey Nineteen,” with Donald Fagen's kvetch that the teenager he wanted to fuck killed his boner by not knowing who Aretha Franklin was. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, two music nerds in good standing, formed the Blues Brothers and exhorted audiences to buy rhythm and blues records. These noble efforts—and others with other endangered genres—eventually paid off, as while the study of music history remains a niche interest, it does exist.

But there was another problem, that plagued every single movie made about music during that no-giving-a-shit late 70s/early 80s period. No one paid any attention whatsoever to the fact that recording and amplification technology took just as massive a leap during that same time span. You don't need to be a sound nerd (even an amateur one like me) to tell the difference between a Beach Boys record from 1963 and a Duran Duran record from 1983. Even if you don't know a mic from a mixing board, they just fucking sound different. This brings us back to Eddie and the Cruisers: no visible (or, more appropriately, audible) effort was made to make a record made in 1983 sound like it did in 1963. It doesn't even sound like a conscious choice to highlight how revolutionary the Cruisers were, either: the early part of the movie sounds like Springsteen covering Dion and the Belmonts, the middle part where the Cruisers get big sounds like Springsteen road-testing future B-sides, and the later part where they get “weird” sounds like Springsteen paying homage to the Doors but making the fatal mistake of not getting high first. It ultimately reads as pandering to the Bruce-mad masses rather than giving a fuck about getting it right.

It's a shame because the character of Eddie Wilson is a very promising one. They got the perfect actor, in Michael Pare, to portray Eddie: he's stunningly beautiful (yeah, that's not a typo, fuck off), wears a leather jacket like a god, looks perfect miming guitar and lip-syncing, and projects the necessary simultaneous emotional vulnerability and insecure intellectual and artistic ambition necessary to make a proper Rock Star. He makes a plausible type for an ambitious blue-collar artistic type from the early 60s—someone who likes rock 'n' roll and doo-wop but read some poetry books and has a burning urge to try something new. He's two hits of acid, a bottle of Scotch, and a more privileged background away from being Jim Morrison. It might have made for a more interesting story to follow Eddie Wilson a little further into the 60s to see how the changing times shaped his music, outlook, pharmaceutical experimentation, and so forth. It is, however, plain fact that with the paradigm shift made by Western popular music in the middle 60s, there is no way whatsoever that the singer from a bar band never seen playing a concert outside its home state, with a total of two hit singles in 1963, would suddenly be #1 and the biggest rock star in the world 20 years later. He would need to have been famous for longer, and to have had a national profile. That the movie attempts to sell us what it does is a similar lack of attention to detail.

Oddly, in spite of all this ranting about the flaws, I do rather enjoy Eddie and the Cruisers. Martin Davidson's lack of attention to details that would have made his movie better seem more like things that never occurred to him due to intellectual and aesthetic limitations rather than deliberate oversights made out of pure commercial venality. That is to say, his idea to make his fictional band equal parts Dion & The Belmonts, The Doors, and Bruce Springsteen (his own professed vision) is not the problem. That that mix of influences is a paradox of anachronisms, impossible due to the laws of cause and effect, is. But, weirdly, I cut Davidson a bit of slack for not realizing that the whole thing was a Kobayashi Maru, partly because he does understand the genuine excitement inherent in loving music, and comes very close to being able to articulate it, despite his limitations.

I also give Davidson a lot of retrospective credit for refusing to have anyfuckingthing to do with the sequel. The original, for all that was wrong with it, was still a real movie. It had the consistent solid performance you get out of Tom Berenger that you always get. Ellen Barkin managed to make a character that was kind of a dipshit interesting by being Ellen Barkin. Michael Pare wasn't particularly polished but he was exactly right as Eddie. Joe Pantoliano plays creeps so well that anytime a movie has within it a creep of that particular high-pitched amoral “don't leave your daughter alone with him” rodent-like variety, it should be called “the Joe Pantoliano character” (this will be applicable when he's no longer in ten movies and three TV shows a year playing the part himself). And the last scene, where Eddie watches Ellen Barkin's TV report through a store window and smiles, is actually kind of a cool twist; after the whole thing where Joe Pantoliano faked being Eddie and that was supposed to make us think that Eddie was dead, having him actually be alive and living in quiet anonymity was kind of cool. Kind of. Mildly. Like the rest of the movie.

But the sequel. Whoa. Fuck.
Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! is a staggering feat of retardation. It is bad in just about every way a movie can be bad. Every time I've seen it—and, oh, do I love returning to it and sipping from its exquisiteness—I end up spending the entire movie screaming in agony, laughing hysterically, and generally scaring the shit out of any civilians in the room. Let us count its glories:

--It's a cash-in on a movie that barely made back negative costs
--None of the famous people who were in the first one returned
--They had to cut around Berenger in the flashback scenes because he refused to let his likeness be used.
--They doubled down on the anachronism and had a “lost recording” of Eddie Wilson jamming with Bo Diddley and an all-star team of black musicians that sounded like a fucking deep cut on fucking Phil Collins' 1985 No Jacket Required. This was not only totally anachronistic but five years late to a record that wasn't even hip when it was new. Though “Take Me Home” was great in that one scene at the end of the Calderone two-parter on Miami Vice.
--The rest of the new songs are goddamn awful, but everyone oohs and ahhs about how great they are, much like everyone talking about how beautiful that potato-faced twat in The Room is.
--It was shot in Canada because it's cheaper to shoot in Canada.
--There are “non-union” Canadian equivalents (they're probably in Canadian SAG, I'm not calling them scabs, I'm just being mean) for Rosanna Arquette, Billy Dee Williams, and River Phoenix, all of whom they probably could have gotten fairly easily if it had been a real movie.
--Even though Eddie is supposed to be the biggest rock star in the world, talked about in the same breath as Elvis, no one notices when Michael Pare is walking around Montreal with that stupid fucking mustache. That stupid fucking mustache is not only fucking stupid, it's the flimsiest disguise since Clark Kent's glasses.
--Furthermore, even if we posit that everyone in Canada is either retarded or blind, we're supposed to accept that they're so fucking tone deaf that even though Eddie is fucking touring and playing fucking gigs where he's the fucking singer, no one notices that he sounds exactly fucking like the biggest fucking rock star in the world until that chain-smoking broad talent booker at the end of Act Two. Child please.
--Rick Diesel

This last is particularly special. Bernie Coulson's turn as Rick Diesel in Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! may well be the most schizophrenic, confusing performance in cinema. There are isolated scenes that Bernie Coulson plays fairly well; there's one band rehearsal fight late in the second act where he and Michael Pare actually do a decent, organic job of yelling at each other, but it's brief. Most of the movie leaves us to revel in one of the worst-written parts ever committed to page in any medium, a character with inconsistent, changing motivations based in no one's most feverish delusions of real life, played by a young, energetic actor whose inexperience led him to rocket around the movie like a pinball coated in nitroglycerin, overacting fiercely. His accent is equal parts Canadian, Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and not-half-bad New York, but frequently braying in an overwhelming Phil Spector Wall of Sound (wall of Canadian/Californian stoner/surfer drawl?) way that drowns all else out.

Also complicating things is the fact that Eddie, posing as Montreal construction worker Joe West, might be the most emo fucking fagbasket ever. (Ed. Note: the barrage of superlatives and the frustration-induced homophobia are things you need to have seen this singular motion picture to understand). In a direct contradiction to the end of the first movie, which showed Eddie mildly pleased that people were finally hearing and appreciating his music, the Eddie of the sequel—and it's not even altogether clear whether the audience is supposed to know it's Eddie; the people who made this piece of shit were such dumb, cynical, incompetent profiteurs one never knows—starts practically sobbing in public whenever someone on TV starts talking about him or the Cruisers. He leaves a liquid lunch with his construction buddies to drive from Montreal to New York City just because an Eddie Wilson lookalike contest is mentioned on TV. Rather than enter and win (which would have been awesome) he mopes around the periphery and then drives back to Montreal. And doesn't get fired for missing half a day of work at the building site (they specifically mention it being lunch).

Contrivance brings an “artist” into Eddie's life (Rosanna Arquette's non-union Canadian equivalent), and some of the worst dialogue ever written about the arts (Ed. Note: there's more hyperbole to come, I'm telling you, this movie really is that bad) ensues. Nothing about Eddie's new girl, or the snooty, baselessly elitist Montreal art world to which she aspires rings true at all. Her paintings are awful. She comes across more like a white-collar executive type, and after a certain point is only there to say stuff like “What are you talkin aboot, Joe?” and “You need to do what you believe in” and “Tell them who you really are” (this last after Eddie, tears in his eyes like every other scene, confesses his true identity).

Plot necessity draws Eddie back to music, in the form of a mildly wanky but extremely polished bar band, featuring one Mr. R. Diesel on lead guitar and Billy Dee Williams' younger non-union Canadian equivalent on saxophone. Eddie, in a candid moment, tells the sax player he reminds him of Wendell Newton, the sax player from the Cruisers (whose smack OD was an inciting event in Eddie flipping his shit and going Brian Wilson in the studio for an off-screen year in the first movie). The sax player—the only smart person in the whole movie—immediately goes to himself “Is this Eddie?” Eddie and Rick Diesel talk a little trash, leading the sax player, who sees an opportunity to test his thesis that this is Eddie, to suggest that Eddie sit in with the band. In a ludicrous scene in which Eddie jerks off shamelessly with a guitar, he improvises a slick, professional recording of a terrible white blues song, and convinces Rick Diesel to start stalking him to get him to join his band. After a shameless and interminable bout of Hamletting, Eddie agrees to join and assume control of Rick Diesel's band, retaining Rick Diesel—whom Eddie accuses, hilariously, of excessive guitar masturbation, when all Eddie does is jerk off with his guitar whenever he picks one up—and the Billy Dee sax player, 86ing the rest of the group. They hire a shirtless butt-rock drummer (for some bizarre reason), an Australian bass player with hair like the middle Heather in Heathers (the one with the football player boyfriend), and River Phoenix's non-union Canadian equivalent, a classical pianist. They proceed to rehearse the shit out of Eddie's terrible new songs (and holy fuck are they bad), and start touring under the name Rock Solid. Yes, Rock Solid. Yes. Wow.

Eddie, on top of being so emo it's like he stepped out of some alternate world remake of The Outsiders by Douglas fucking Sirk, is a fascist asshole with the band. He barks nonsense about being “in the pocket” at them when they're like “dude, we're miming along to the slickly produced, hideously mixed pre-recorded track, ease up.” He throws gigantic shitfits about everything from playing gigs to going on tour to playing some Montreal music festival to recording a demo—I guess because he's scared to face the world or something exasperatingly stupid like that—but always goes along with it.

The whole movie, two record company reptiles (one of whom is supposed to be the one who refused to release Eddie's Brucian Wilsonsteen album in the first movie, but played by a different actor, making all the flashbacks confusing) have been ruthlessly exploiting Eddie's music in ways that involve cameos by everyone from Martha Quinn to Larry King to the above-mentioned Bo Diddley. After Rick Diesel surreptitiously sends them a covertly-recorded demo tape, they jet on up to Canada.

Eddie shaves off his mustache and begins to confront his past, first in a scene with Sal—his boyhood chum and bass player from the Cruisers with a nauseatingly self-effacing streak—that is the gayest thing in existence that doesn't involve one guy's dick going inside another guy. Every shot looks like they're going to jam their tongues in each other's mouths. This would all be fine except Sal's kids are standing ten feet away out of frame, which makes it hilarious: “Mommy, why is Daddy making out with that man in the leather jacket?”

So the big concert happens, complete with repeat performances of Rock Solid's two terrible songs and some jaw-dropping editing (they frequently cut from Eddie holding his guitar by his side to a shot of Eddie strumming like hell and then back to him holding the guitar) followed by Eddie revealing his true identity to a cheering crowd. This brings up the best part of the whole shitty movie: it ends right at the interesting part! What the fuck happens when someone whose most interesting feature was the mystery surrounding his disappearance and presumed death returns? I DEMAND ANSWERS!

There are all kinds of other stupid/terrible things in Eddie II. There's this amazingly bad scene where Eddie and his girl are sitting by a stream on a snowy winter day (neither of them are visibly cold at all) talking in refried Springsteen lyrics about New Jersey and then, randomly, Billy Dee the sax player starts playing his sax—which sounds like he's playing in a recording booth in a studio—and posing on top of a promontory. Eddie points this out to his girl, and the camera pans over to watch him posing, in one of the most hideously photographed shots ever (the white off the sun hitting the snow is blinding, and not on purpose). Rick Diesel barges into a date Eddie's on with his “artist” girl to, obliviously, talk about the band (in another parallel to The Room, with Rick Diesel playing Denny). The whole mythology of the missing tape is laughable to anyone who knows anything about music; Eddie summoning the likes of Bo Diddley and King Curtis to a jam session in the middle of the night in Lakehurst, New Jersey is fucking absurd, not to mention the song they “improvise” sounds like, and is just as over-produced as, a bad Steve Winwood solo track (Ed. Note: the phrase “bad Steve Winwood solo track” is meant to inspire every last bit of cold, horrified disgust as you just experienced).

And yet . . . there's no such thing as not watching Eddie II whenever it comes on cable, or not clicking play when you see that it's on Netflix Instant (which it is, not that I'm suggesting that you watch it or anything). Live-tweeting it the other night was a blast. There really is something about a gloriously, legendarily bad movie. Good movies, genuinely good movies, are a wonderful thing to experience, but so are their counterparts on the opposite end of the quality spectrum. Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! is just about as bad a movie as you'll ever see. It has no reason to exist. It has Rick Diesel. It is, as an experience, a delight of the kind only the greatest superlatives can describe.

Eddie indeed lives, but that is his greatest tragedy. This ridiculous movie is the most perfect example yet that, the Rolling Stones exemption notwithstanding, rock stars are not meant to ever be old. They are supposed to be frozen in time, perfected by the lens of memory. There is no value in a comeback, in returning to reality, other than by making the version from the past seem even better, and that is the greatest achievement of Eddie II and the proof of its timeless shittiness: it makes the first one look really, really good.

THE ONLY TRUE CURRENCY IN THIS BANKRUPT WORLD IS WHAT YOU SHARE WITH SOMEONE ELSE WHEN YOU'RE UNCOOL

The title is my favorite line from a movie that dropped ten years ago this month, Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. Based on a variety of experiences Crowe had as a teenager in the 70s writing for Rolling Stone, Almost Famous is only partly about what it's about. The story, yes, follows a kid who bullshits his way into a freelance gig at Rolling Stone and goes on tour with a band, but it's not about the rock 'n' roll scene, it's about, as Fairuza Balk's “Band Aid” character puts it, “truly [loving] some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much it hurts.” Almost Famous is, ultimately, about its sincerity and being unafraid to look uncool.

This was why, upon its release, most of the negative reviews gave Cameron Crowe shit for not putting in enough scenes where everyone sat around wearing sunglasses and shooting heroin or some such bullshit. If you'll recall, September of 2000 was a very low point in music. Rock 'n' roll was on life support, and what few rock stars were left were not a whole lot of fun: the last paradigm shift in American rock 'n' roll, the largely media-created Seattle thing circa 1991-2 (one of the major cultural artifacts of which was Cameron Crowe's own Singles), had established the role of the modern rock star as a sensitive, humorlessly progressive mumbler (see Vedder, Eddie). Drugs were taken, if at all, in moderation—and even when a Kurt Cobain came along to keep the proud tradition of heroin addiction alive, he fucked everything up by being genuinely tortured instead of milking minor emotional slights to make cheesy, lighter-in-the-air ballads. The British had a pop music renaissance in the mid-90s but only produced one good God Almighty coked-out-of-their-scrotum rock 'n' roll band—Oasis—and they went full retard on their third album, before breaking up for the first of about thirty times and ceasing to make epic rock 'n' roll. It was thus that a considerable number of American music fans began to turn nostalgia for the 70s into a fetish: the days when Led Zeppelin made groupies fuck sharks, Keith Richards got busted for heroin every week, Rod Stewart gave so many blowjobs he had to have his stomach pumped, et cetera (Ed. Note: none of those things actually happened). Making a movie about rock 'n' roll, set in the 70s, was thus expected to be wall-to-wall sex and drugs, and Cameron Crowe not delivering on everyone's grimiest fantasies was considered to be an artistic and moral shortcoming; Almost Famous bombed at the box office and was treated condescendingly at best by the hipper, more pretentious critics (though their mainstream, square counterparts all dug it).

This is a failure of criticism of any kind, and a very common one—blaming the work in question (movie, or play, or book, or album, or video game, etc etc) for not being what the critic wants it to be, rather than evaluating what it is. Movies about music are really asking for it from critics—people who love movies can be total jagoffs about their favorite movies (ahem), but the hundred most obnoxiously sanctimonious subjective opinions declared to be objective fact have all been about music. These two loci of masturbatory douchiness collide and form the perfect storm of being an asshole. I, clearly, have forgotten to duct-tape my windows (so to speak), and I'm digressing.

The reason I get so bent out of shape about people knocking Almost Famous for somehow lacking balls because it wasn't just three hours of people doing drugs and fucking is that it is much, much harder to be sincere that it is to be cool. I would maintain that Almost Famous has more balls for not succumbing to the temptation to throw tits and lines of coke all over the place. It's a story about the Cameron Crowe character (Patrick Fugit) managing to keep his sincere, innocent love for music despite the best attempts of musicians to make him a bitter old cynical bastard (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Love for music has no objective connection to tits and cocaine.

Fittingly enough, the movie opens with the event that made Patrick Fugit—as a little kid—a music lover. His sister (Zooey Deschanel before she was Zooey Deschanel), tiring of the ascetic, kooky leftie lifestyle enforced by mom Frances McDormand (who is ridiculously good in this), leaves home to be an airline stewardess, and leaves her records with her brother. Records like Pet Sounds and Blue are found therein (the collection he leafs through are Cameron Crowe's own from when he was that age).

Fast forward a few years and Patrick Fugit is an earnest nerd who listens to a radio interview with legendary critic and editor Lester Bangs (the above-mentioned bitter old cynical bastard P.S. Hoffman) where Bangs spouts off about how the Doors suck and how he likes The Guess Who more because they aren't as pretentious and about how Iggy Pop rules. Fugit senses a kindred spirit and sends writing samples to PSH/Bangs, who sees some promise and sends Fugit off with some cynical, pragmatic advice to go review a Black Sabbath concert. However, the advice is all he gives Fugit; the kid has no ticket or backstage pass or anything. It is here that he meets a group of young women who share his love of music, but whose love of musicians is a bit more, shall we say, tangible: the “Band-Aids.”

Care is taken to differentiate the Band-Aids (Fairuza Balk, Anna Paquin, Bijou Phillips, and Kate Hudson) from the stereotype of the groupie. In this story, which is about the love of music, theirs is but another way to show that love. Sure, they go on tour with rock stars, get high with rock stars, and fuck rock stars, but their claim that it's about the music is not disingenuous. The way Fairuza Balk bellows that stupid Robert Plant “Does anyone remember laughter?” line, you know she means it. (Almost Famous embraces the apparent contradiction of recognizing how ridiculous rock 'n' roll can be while at the same time loving it unconditionally).

Though his meeting the Band-Aids will prove fortuitous (and result in falling head over heels for Kate Hudson), Fugit still isn't allowed backstage without a pass or ticket until opening act Stillwater shows up, massively late. Fugit, desperate, compliments the band on a song of theirs. The band, won over by his enthusiasm and eloquence, invites him backstage as their guest.

Fugit's eyes get wide as he befriends both Band-Aid Penny Lane (Kate Hudson in, it must be said, a deliriously overrated performance) and Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). He ends up turning in a piece on Stillwater to PSH, who gets worried and warns him about the dangers of getting seduced by the cool.

However, his piece on Stillwater brings Fugit to the attention of Rolling Stone, whose editor hires him to do a piece on Stillwater for them. The catch is, they don't know he's only 15, because Fugit took the liberty of bullshitting them so they'd take him more seriously. Whoops. Frances McDormand lets him go with extreme reluctance, and so young Fugit joins the circus.

The band is a bit uneasy about having Fugit around. Singer Jason Lee calls him “the enemy” while simultaneously going off on hilariously vacuous self-important rock star monologues that he, on some level, hopes Fugit will transcribe and make him look cool. (Even the cool people in this movie aren't cool). Billy Crudup is much more diplomatic with the kid, but still resists all Fugit's efforts to sit down with him and do a proper interview.

The tour unfolds with gentle emphasis on the drudgery of it all (and one hilarious scene where Frances McDormand starts lecturing Billy Crudup over the phone and eventually concludes by giving the speechless Crudup an inspirational quote from Goethe and telling him “I'm glad we talked”). Gradually we see some internal band conflicts come to the surface. Most rock 'n' roll bands worth their salt have tension between the singer and the guitarist, but Stillwater's problem is relatively novel: this time it's the guitarist who's the good-looking one and gets all the attention and the chicks, and it's the singer who's jealous.

Tensions come to a head in Kansas when the band take delivery of a few boxes of t-shirts with their likenesses on the front. Except Billy Crudup is the only one in focus, and he's massively larger compared to the rest of the band. Jason Lee, as a cursory review of his other roles will attest, does not suffer slights quietly, and the band has a big screaming shitfit that concludes with Billy Crudup storming off in a huff looking for something or someone “real.” Fugit, half looking for something interesting to write about and half looking to protect him, follows Billy Crudup.

They end up at a house party thrown by a bunch of high school kids who are all like, “Whoa, shit, a portmanteau of Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Peter Frampton, Glenn Frey and Allen Collins just showed up at my house, far out.” Billy Crudup happily accepts a tab of acid and proceeds to very urgently tell the kids at the party how real they are, in a way that bizarrely reminds me of the way John Turturro carries on about “the common man” in Barton Fink, except the kids don't pull a John Goodman and start fucking up his trip by bellowing about the life of the mind, they offer to let Billy Crudup watch a snake eat a mouse. Patrick Fugit, in a panic, calls up Stillwater's manager and asks him what to expect from someone on acid.

“I AM A GOLDEN GOD!” —Billy Crudup, on the roof of the house (haha he's peaking while standing on the peak of the roof . . . haha . . . ha . . . coughcough)

Well, that solves that mystery. Billy Crudup, convinced this is his last night on earth, tells Fugit to record his last words for posterity (the final candidates are “I'm on drugs!” and “I dig music”) before splashing unceremoniously into the swimming pool. Stillwater's manager arrives to throw a blanket around the half-naked, shivering, extremely embarrassed Billy Crudup and shleps him onto the tour bus, promising the kids a return to Topeka on the next tour.

Then, another scene a lot of people rolled their eyes at that I will defend to the death. Largely due to that weird scene in Magnolia where everyone sings the Aimee Mann song, people were walking around rolling their eyes when Almost Famous came out and saying “God, every movie has a scene where everyone sings some song, God, it's so tired.” These people, of course, can suck my dick. Two movies are not every movie. The other thing is, the scene in Almost Famous is an illustration of the movie's central theme: love of music. It does so perfectly, in that it uses a song that is both extremely uncool and magically fucking good: “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John. Let the record reflect that I have slow-danced in a bar to “Tiny Dancer,” I have made amends with previously antagonistic colleagues to “Tiny Dancer,” and by God, I have had sex to “Tiny Dancer.” My relationship with this song is not unique. It's just one of those songs. Everyone—except Elton fans—has the same progression with it:

Curiosity—“Hey, this song is awesome, who is this?”
Shock—“This is Elton John?”
Denial—“Get the fuck out of here, it can't be Elton John, this is actually good.”
Acceptance—“God damn . . . this song is really good.”
Nirvana—“Hey, did we just spontaneously start having sex because this song is so awesome? We did? Wow, this song rules.”

It's true. You can make fun of me all you like; I'll just give you the finger.

The way the scene unfolds is especially nice. Everyone's sitting there goofing on Billy Crudup, then someone starts singing the song. Then another voice joins in. Then another. Eventually everyone's singing, a way of being like, “Hey, man, we have our differences, but we love you. Join us.” And right at the best fucking part of the whole song, Billy starts wailing along with everyone else. Game, set, match, Crowe: music brings people together. Conclusive proof.

But all this harmony will, inevitably, be short-lived. A new manager comes in, played by an unrecognizable (because he doesn't suck) Jimmy Fallon, to introduce a more professional influence into the band's midst. He gives them all a proto-yuppie speech about the industry being a business and blah blah blah and, in one of Cameron Crowe's cutesy little reminders that he's telling this story 25+ years after the fact, drops the priceless line “If you think Mick Jagger will still be out there trying to be a rock star at age fifty, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken.” See, you know Mick is still a rock star at age 67, I know Mick is still a rock star at 67, but Jimmy Fallon doesn't. Because he's a dipshit! Bahahahahaha! Don't forget to tip your waitress!

There's another complication: Kate Hudson, who is—contrary to her own best instincts—deeply in love with Billy Crudup, has to leave the tour before his actual girlfriend shows up. Billy Crudup, looking to appear cool in a poker game with the road managers of several popular bands, starts flexing his nuts and “bets” Kate Hudson, losing her kind of sort of on purpose. Fugit, who witnesses this, is disgusted, and tells Kate Hudson (who he's madly in love with). She's devastated and welches on the deal to go with the band to follow Stillwater to New York.

This, of course, ends badly. Kate Hudson confronts Billy Crudup, who pretends not to know her. She goes back to her hotel to OD, but Fugit saves her. In gratitude, she tells him her real name that she never tells anyone.

Fugit returns to the tour, and their plane (a sign they've hit the big time and are going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone) promptly hits shitty weather and it looks like, in grand rock star tradition, they're all about to die in a plane crash. This prompts a round of truth-telling: Jason Lee confesses he fucked Billy Crudup's “real” girlfriend (who's there with them), and Billy Crudup gets all indignant, and Jason Lee is all like “you were the one fuckin around with that groupie [Kate Hudson] for the whole tour!” at which point Fugit jumps in, outraged, and lectures them about the shitty way they treat their biggest fans, concluding with a passionate declaration of his love for Kate Hudson. This shocks everyone speechless, then the drummer, in his only line in the movie, chimes in:

“Fuck it . . . I'm gay!”

At which point the turbulence immediately ends and everything's fine.

Fugit leaves the tour in San Francisco, and Billy Crudup tells Fugit to write whatever he wants. Fugit turns in a piece to Rolling Stone that acquiesces to the band's desire to “make us look cool” (there's that yearning again . . .) but that the editors consider weak and sycophantic. Fugit asks Phil Hoffman for advice, which is “be honest and unmerciful.” Since he's still stratospherically pissed about the way Billy Crudup treated Kate Hudson, Fugit tears the band a new asshole, putting in every last embarrassing (but true) detail. This is more what Rolling Stone is looking for. Unfortunately, during their fact-checking process, the band flatly denies everything, putting Fugit in the shitter. He runs into his sister, now a stewardess, living the dream, and, dejected, Fugit heads home to San Diego.

Fairuza Balk runs into a guilty Billy Crudup in Miami, and piles on some more guilt telling him about Kate Hudson's OD and so forth, and how Fugit saved her, and about how shitty it was that the band dogged Fugit like that. Crudup, looking to fix things, calls up Kate Hudson and asks for her address so he can visit and fix everything by saying I'm sorry or something retarded. Kate Hudson plays a trick on him, giving him Fugit's address instead.

Billy Crudup shows up to a flabbergasted Zooey Deschanel, a gently scolding and weirdly awkwardly star-struck Frances McDormand (man she's good in this; the character's well-written and everything but she knocks it outta the fuckin park), and one pissed off Fugit. Crudup explains that he's called Rolling Stone and told them the truth, so Fugit's piece is going to run, and expresses remorse for mistreating Kate Hudson. By way of accepting, Fugit sits him down and finally does the interview he's been trying to get for the whole movie.

Fugit: “What do you love about music?”
Crudup: “To begin with . . . everything.”

And there's your movie, right there. Sappy, perhaps, but unabashedly sincere. Unafraid to seem uncool. Yet, somehow, through the sincerity and the passion that comes with it, all the cooler for being uncool.

Cameron Crowe's critical legacy has suffered a bit in the last ten years due to having directed Vanilla Sky, which started off kind of promising, then stumbled around the beginning of act two and faceplanted at the beginning of act three, and Elizabethtown, which had no such promise and sucked start to finish. Fortunately, he will always have the script to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which is amazingly good. As a director, he'll always have the iconic John Cusack/boombox/Peter Gabriel moment, as well as the underrated Jerry Maguire (underrated primarily because all anyone remembers is the scene where Cuba hollers “Show me the money!” over and over, and they forget that it's actually a really well-constructed story about Tom Cruise's self-discovery, and that Tom Cruise is really good in it). And Almost Famous.

One wonders whether Almost Famous wouldn't have been a bigger hit if Brad Pitt—for whom Cameron Crowe wrote the Billy Crudup part—had agreed to do it. Then again, Brad's been in a flop or two his own self (remember, Fight Club didn't turn a profit til DVD) and he dropped out of the movie because he didn't get the character or the movie, so it was probably all for the best. Instead, the movie ended up with no stars, no desire whatsoever to appear cool, and no hobbits or lasers. It did, however, find a second life on DVD and cable, so all was not lost, and Cameron Crowe won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (the classic consolation prize Oscar).

Kate Hudson's performance, which owed most of its acclaim to a well-written part and Crowe's camera being in love with her, did not take home a statue, thus sparing the Academy the indignity of having to hear the words “Academy Award winner Kate Hudson” in the trailer for How To Confuse Matthew McConaughey with Josh Lucas in 10 Days.

Patrick Fugit caught some shit for his ponderous line readings—and he certainly hasn't done much since—but in this picture he's exactly the right nerd for the job (maybe because he grew up with people teasing him by pronouncing his name “fuck it” . . . trust me, as someone whose name is uncomfortably close to “bozo” I feel the cat's pain).

Almost Famous is not in any danger of being forgotten. It doesn't quite fit the usual definition of “overlooked gem,” what with the Oscar and the omnipresence on cable there for a few years. On its tenth anniversary, all I'm saying is let's celebrate a picture that isn't lighting its pants on fire trying to be cool. Let's hail the (regrettably rare) proverbial good “write what you know” picture. Fuck it, let's celebrate music. Hold me closer, tiny dancer. Lay me down in sheets of linen. You had a busy day today.

(Ed. Note: Fuck you, that song is awesome)

THIS AIN'T NO PARTY, THIS AIN'T NO DISCO, THIS IS JUST AWESOME

Evangelism, bitches.

The difference between theater and movies is that in live performance is that both performer and audience are physically occupying the same space, and both need the other for a performance to be truly memorable. While this is true for theater, it's especially true of live music. Thinking about the memorable concerts in one's life, the experience of the evening is likely far more than the set list the band played, it's more about who you were with, those girls who were smoking a joint in front of you and offered you some, those guys who kept shouting “Free Bird,” and their eventual assassination at the hands of a guy in a Bill Hicks t-shirt, and your thought to yourself—aided by the joint the girls passed you—“Heh, Bill woulda dug that if he was still alive.”

These musings originated from two places: one, the fact that, for the better part of this past week, I've been reviewing theater (here are two samples, if you're interested), and two, when I haven't been off doing that, I've been watching Stop Making Sense repeatedly.

There has, quite simply, never been a concert picture this good. Ever. In the history of music or movies. The only peer Stop Making Sense has is Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, and while The Last Waltz is balls-out fucking amazing, it still has long periods of The Band talking. This led to other bands developing the fatal delusion that they were as interesting as The Band were, which resulted in a lot of shitty fucking movies about a bunch of stupid fucking musicians talking about awesome they are, complete with worshipful shots lingering on their every caesura, genuflecting before every tautology, and hammering home every mangled quote from the Eastern religion du jour as if it were the most brilliant insight of all time. (All those bands and docs would eventually get their asses handed to them by This Is Spinal Tap). It's not really fair to blame Marty S. or The Band for that, but hey, them's the bricks.

Stop Making Sense, like The Last Waltz, has the two elements any concert film needs to be good (obviousness alert): a great band and a great director. In 1984, Talking Heads were five albums in, each one a masterpiece. They'd just had their first top 10 hit with “Burning Down the House,” making them that always rare—and now unheard of—band embraced equally by music critics and the general public. And, thanks to the staggering work of genius that is the video for “Once In a Lifetime,” I (at six) even knew who they were.

Jonathan Demme, at that point, hadn't yet had a commercial hit, though he'd directed a couple fanfuckintastic exploitation pictures for Roger Corman and one of the all-time great “How in the hell is this so good? Holy shit this is awesome” pictures Melvin and Howard a few years previous. He was then as he is today: a force to be reckoned with behind a camera. But to make a great movie about music, it's not enough to be a great director, you have to be a great director who knows, understands, and feels music.

This is one thing Jonathan Demme has in common with the aforementioned Mr. Scorsese: the soundtrack is always, always, always (well, except for Philadelphia, Beloved, and maybe one or two other aberrations) bangin'. When Charles Napier is doing Michelle Pfeiffer's hair in Married to the Mob, that's “Bizarre Love Triangle” playing in the background. Because why stop with casting Charles “It's hard to eat corn on the cob with no fuckin' teeth” Napier as a hairdresser when you can bump New Order? Jodie Foster got chased around the basement by Buffalo Bill to the fucking Fall. That crappy remake of Charade may have been crappy, but it had Asian Dub Foundation and it, pornographically, had Anna Karina singing Serge Gainsbourg (heaven is not, as David Byrne mistakenly asserts, a place “where nothing ever happens,” it's a place where Anna Karina sings Serge Gainsbourg.) And holy shit, that wedding sequence in Rachel Getting Married divides by zero—a bunch of square-ass white people dancing around to Brazilian/Indian music and it's GOOD???? Okay, let's recap:

Mr. Demme, do you know your music?
Clearly I do, sir, peruse the above paragraph for proof.

Mr. Demme, do you understand music?
Well, without speaking immodestly, I must say I use music that is appropriate for the given scene, rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and in this regard I stand head and shoulders above every director in the history of cinema, including, with all due respect, Mr. Scorsese, who is himself no slouch by any reckoning.

Mr. Demme, do you feel music?
Lo siento, baby.

Note that Jonathan Demme is this dope and we haven't even fucking mentioned Stop Making Sense for like eight paragraphs. Here's the opening. “Psycho Killer.” Recognize.

Now, the opening titles being in the Strangelove font is no accident. Oh, I'm sure David Byrne turning to his nearest minion and saying “Bring me Pablo Ferro or taste my wrath” was probably motivated by nothing more profound than “The opening titles of Dr. Strangelove looked cool, let's do that for our movie.” But I submit that accidental synergy is just as valid as that by design: David Byrne comes out after the Strangelove titles and drops the motherfucking BOMB. David Byrne is fucking amped to be out on that stage playing music, and he fucking manages to kill shit by himself.

Then Tina Weymouth comes out. Oh, Tina Weymouth. On “Heaven,” when it's just her and Dave out there, you get to hear just how off the chain fucking awesome bass player she is. Oh, Tina.

“Thank You For Sending Me An Angel.” Add Chris Frantz. Watch Chris Frantz remind everyone, “Oh yes, ladies and gentlemen, I can play my ass off, too.” That shot of him when he starts playing, he looks like a guy who knows he's in the best band in the world, and who, if you gave him the choice of doing anything else in the world at that moment, he'd probably think about it for a second then say, “Nah, dude, playing drums in Talking Heads is a pretty goddamn good deal.”

“Found a Job.”
Add Jerry Harrison. Jerry's playing it cool, but he ain't foolin' anyone, he knows this is where it's at.

“Slippery People”
Okay, I've been trying to resist the urge to post the whole fucking movie, but bear with me here, this song features some serious white-guy rock alchemy.

Every single other white guy who tries to act hip by having black chick backup singers ends up looking like a fucking douchebag. Okay, Mick can pull it off. Bowie kind of gets away with it, but only because of the Bowie Exemption (to wit: everything David Bowie has ever done, with the exception of Tin Machine, Never Let Me Down, and his and Mick's retarded “Dancing in the Street” cover, is not allowed to be criticized by mortals). That's about it. The key to Talking Heads pulling it off is that they're not trying to be cool. They know they're dorks. The side musicians are there because they can fucking play.

“Burning Down the House”
Okay, I gotta do it again. Sorry, this music is so fucking good my hands are shaking.


FAQs

Does David Byrne own the universe with that “Anyone got a match” line?
Yes.

Has anyone who ever complained about this song being played out ever heard this version?
No.

How much do Talking Heads rule?
Man's understanding of cosmology has yet to develop the concept of sufficient size.

“Life During Wartime”
By this point in the concert(s)—by the way, minor aside: how in the hell did Jonathan Demme stitch together three different concerts this seamlessly? Allegedly there are some continuity errors, but if you can spot them you're watching on mute, drinking the tears of children, and reminiscing about a puppy you kicked last week—the energy of the live performance has short-circuited the rational part of my brain. I am there. Demme is a god, by which I mean both omnipotent, and completely invisible.

The fact that music is capable of being this good makes me cry with joy. I'm not kidding.

“Making Flippy Floppy”
Visuals: random words rear projected. Wait, when did the techies finish building the set? WAIT HOLY FUCK: THIS SONG!!!! The reason this song is called “Making Flippy Floppy” is clearly because turns your fucking brain into a dolphin jumping out of the Pacific Ocean at sunset. Jesus Christ, Tina is on point. Byrne's solo! (Ed. Note: the author screamed random, possibly verbal, noises for about five minutes while jumping up and down in ecstasy).

“Swamp”
Phew. Time to chill. On this one the Heads are just layin' in the cut, casually brilliant, catching their breath. Hiiiii . . . hi hi hi hi hi hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii . . .

“What A Day That Was”
Solo Byrne (solo as in not a Heads song, the whole armada of badasses is still out there). Hot shit. The fact that rational thought is possible should not be taken as an indication that the concert is letting up. If anything, the visuals are even fucking cooler with all the shadowy lighting. As the one commenter on Youtube said, “Everything from about 3:15 onward is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.”

“This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)”
Man, everything from Dave turning on a lamp at the beginning and the projection of the bookshelves. This is just nice. That's not meant to be condescending, or to imply in any way that there's something not nice about the rest of the picture. There are many different ways of feeling positive. Full-throttle manic sobbing (see a couple songs ago) is one. That's a little intense though. Sitting around with a smile on your face while watching David Byrne bob his head like a chicken is another. Lot mellower too.

“Once in a Lifetime”
Wow. Just . . . holy fuck.

Now, yes, the version on Remain In Light is better (perfect beats awesome). Yes, the whole shit with the glasses and the weird dancing is shtick. But let's be clear: David Byrne is above reproach. This is why Talking Heads eventually broke up, because he started believing that too and the other three told him to blow it out his ass, but let's not get distracted. No criticism of David Byrne's glasses and herky-jerky dancing will be tolerated in polite society. As your Minister of Culture, I shall sentence you to the gulag for your blasphemy.

“Genius of Love”
Understandably, Byrne needed a break after having epilepsy for five minutes (the Minister of Culture can say whatever the fuck he wants, na na na na na na). Among the manifold attributes of Talking Heads, let us not forget that when David Byrne needed to run offstage to take a piss, they could kill time with a Tom Tom Club mini-gig. Now, anyone who says they like Tom Tom Club more than Talking Heads is probably a fucking communist, but Tom Tom Club were solid. Sure Chris Frantz raps like a dork, but this counts as the single most stylish filler track ever.

“Girlfriend is Better”
Houston, we have Big Suit. Did you seriously think we were done with the genius? Foolish mortal.

Okay, brief but relevant memoir digression: this song nearly broke the souls of four able-bodied potheads one night, when they released the Talking Heads download on Rock Band; we had at it, and in spite of the four or five beers I had to try to sober up (your Minister of Culture is a wise man indeed), I was flunking the fucking vocals (usually impossible to all but the utterly tone-deaf), and my friends—if you're reading this, you remember how fucking frustrating that was?—were breaking their hands trying to play the guitar and bass parts. When we finally made it through the damn song intact, sub-70% accuracy be damned, the sense of accomplishment was profound.

Now, Talking Heads being dork superheroes, they make this song sound easy. This is why Talking Heads were so cool. They didn't try. They just were. Name one other person who puts on that Big Suit and doesn't look like a fucking choad. David Byrne does it and it's awesome. And holy fucking shit the band is cookin' on this one.

“Take Me to the River”
I ain't gonna lie. I love me some Talking Heads (as I may have subtly conveyed), but I like the original better. The Heads version is good, but Al Green's Al Green. I like his better. Hell, I like the Commitments' version better. But I ain't gonna lie about this either: the version in Stop Making Sense is kick-ass. The fact that Dave's singing it in the Big Suit for the first couple verses is really what puts it over. And something feels right about doing the whole “introduce the band during the song” to this song. All the pieces matter, and if you will have perfection, all the pieces will be perfect.

Actually, fuck hierarchies, this version of “Take Me to the River” is great. Perfect choice for penultimate song, and when David Byrne puts on that red hat with just the pants from the Big Suit, he looks like Mario.

“Crosseyed and Painless”
Boo ya. If you want to blow the crowd out of the fucking auditorium, it helps to have a song like this in your repertoire. Leave 'em dancing. The best part is, at the end of the song, Byrne brings the movie crew (who we've been seeing holding up lights and shit) up onstage to take a bow, which closes out an exhilarating movie/music experience.


When Stop Making Sense is over, the overwhelming feeling is “Yes. I am fucking alive. Life will never be dreary and mundane as long as something this good is in it.” The Heads' eventual decline and breakup over David Byrne being difficult doesn't exist. The movie ends with them at the peak of their reign, when they held mighty sway over music and very simply had no peer. This is real superhero movie.

That's the greatest thing about movies. The story ends where you want it to.