Featured Movies
Partners
Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe's charming semi-autobiographical tale of early Seventies rock, sex and maybe a few drugs. Scooped two awards at the 2001 Golden Globes
Rock 'n' roll, so they say, is a young man's game and few have demonstrated this quite as dramatically as Cameron Crowe. He started work as a music journalist on 'Rolling Stone' while most of his peer group were still experimenting with different types of acne cream. In fact, by his early twenties, Crowe had already wearied of hanging out with rock's coke-erati and began carving himself out a career in Hollywood directing acclaimed movies like Say Anything, Singles and, most recently, Jerry Maguire. Almost Famous, however, effectively fuses these two columns of his CV for a film which nominally tells the story of fictitious early seventies rockers, Stillwater. The movie's real focus, though, is Crowe's alter-ego, William Miller (Fugit), an under-aged music reporter who defies his mother (McDormand) to hit the road with the band where he learns about life, love and the dangers of taking acid in close proximity to a swimming pool. By turns touching, tragic and downright hilarious, the film's charm owes far more to its creator's brilliant writing than to his anonymous direction. The whole shebang is, however, pretty ruthlessly hijacked by Philip Seymour Hoffman's fabulously deranged turn as Crowe's real-life mentor, the legendary rock biz hack, Lester Bangs. If nothing else, though, Almost Famous' pounding Led Zep-heavy soundtrack makes it pretty much the ideal picture for those people who, like Homer Simpson, believe that music achieved perfection sometime around 1973. |
