Sitting through movies has always been especially hard for me. Now that I’ve conquered that obstacle thanks to prescription medication, I’m faced with another difficulty: deciding what the hell to watch.
After all these years of aimlessly scrolling Netflix, a new strategy occurred to me. Between the self-help books I read in 2022 and through general cultural osmosis, the concept of “healing one’s inner child” is a phrase that seems to be recurring around me. Let me tell you: my inner child is still pissed off that all of the movies at Blockbuster looked cool as shit, but I wasn’t allowed to watch any. My parents were pretty strict about what I could and couldn’t watch, so while my peers were renting the cool PG stuff, I was stuck in the kid’s section renting every consecutive Land Before Time. And so my strategy was born: I decided to watch all of the weird and shitty movies that I wanted to rent as a kid, but wasn’t allowed to.
So, what was on an eye-level shelf for a 4-foot-tall 10 year old at Blockbuster in the late 90s? What were these forbidden, tantalizing fruits of Hollywood craftsmanship, these highest expressions of the cinematic arts that until now, were locked away behind PG+ ratings? Well, in 1997, there was a horror movie called Jack Frost, which had a freaky 3D shapeshifting cover depicting a snowman with fangs. This of course, is not to be confused with 1998’s Jack Frost starring Michael Keaton, which I thought was the same movie until about three minutes ago. Next was Scary Movie, which to continue the theme, I thought was the same movie as Scream until I was in my mid-20s. In the drama section, I really wanted to watch Where the Heart Is, Anywhere But Here, and Autumn in New York, since I was convinced that I’d grow up to marry either Natalie Portman or Winona Ryder. Turns out I dodged a bullet, since all three of these movies have pretty rancid ratings on IMDB, and obviously these women are way too old for me.
Winona Ryder couldn’t save Autumn in New York, and she couldn’t save 1999’s Girl Interrupted either, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about renting it. What could a movie called Girl, Interrupted be about, I wondered? At the time I assumed it was a sort of Fight-Club-for-girls movie with a shoegaze soundtrack and at least one scene with girls interrupting their heterosexuality for one another — how disappointed I ended up being. The real Fight Club came out in 1999 as well, but because the cover only showed a very badly photoshopped Brad Pitt holding a bar of soap, my imagination had no idea what to do with that info. Were they washing a lot of cars or something? American Beauty was another 1999 arrival, not to be confused with American Psycho which hit the shelves in 2000: both wholly inappropriate a 10 year old for completely different reasons.
But of all the Blockbuster movies whose covers I remember with vivid clarity and which piqued my imagination the most, Almost Famous comes in at #1. Oh yes, what an iconic cover. I’d say that American Beauty has the true iconic movie cover from the era, but for some reason, Almost Famous was the one that stuck with me. I find it interesting that just as with Girl, Interrupted, my imagination was creating a detailed assumption of what the movie was about, what kind of soundtrack it would have, who that girl was, and what did it all mean? Strangely, I always thought it was Alicia Silverstone on the cover. Add that to my stack of assumptions, I guess.
If I look at the cover of Almost Famous again now, after having watching the real movie as it actually exists, I can still get the essence of what I assumed back then: a movie about a woman, maybe it’s a road trip movie. She’s mysterious, probably in her mid-30s. There’s at least one scene in a desert, and one in a diner. Is she like the Mona Lisa? Does she have a secret that she’s about to tell you? Whatever the secret is, it’s ultimately very tragic and depressing and she’s probably going to die in the end.
As a blow-by-blow list of plot points, sans desert and age-range, I wasn’t too far off as a kid. However, the problem with having such a longstanding fantasy about a movie is that real, human people already wrote it, and sadly, they didn’t consult with me in order to make it to my specifications. A list of plot points is pretty meaningless without any consideration for tone, pacing, soundtrack, or cast. Imagine Almost Famous, directed by David Lynch, or Stanley Kubrick. Both of those movies would be bizarre as hell, and potentially delightful. The thing about those directors, however, is that they’re both interested in showing hidden, subconscious truths at the edges of what passes for reality. Cameron Crowe is…not. He’s not interested in that at all, which makes the Almost Famous that exists even more bizarre.
Almost Famous is a movie about a child prostitute/groupie that overdoses on quaaludes after she’s traded to another band for $50. That’s it. That’s the main gist of the movie. If you’ve never seen it, you might think, “wow, that’s really dark,” and you’d be right. “Rock and roll” is a phenomenon which exists in the public imagination specifically because it was dark, subversive and frankly frightening to the people who encountered it for the first time. The movie doesn’t seem to be interested in reckoning with that though, and the whole thing comes off like a Disney Channel Original Movie about how aces and neato it is to tour with a real-life jamboree posse groovy RockTM band!
I guess, at the end of the day, it would be pretty neato, but there’s something alarming about the overwhelming schmaltzy positivity of this movie. Really. Nothing bad happens to ANYONE in this movie. Everyone gets a completely happy ending, just like real life! There’s almost no mention or conversation about rock’s troubled relationship with drugs or alcohol: the band members are constantly seen with beer and whiskey in hand, but on only one occasion is a band-member depicted in a drunken/drugged state and even then, it’s comedic and cool. Then, there’s the tacit acknowledgement that sleeping with groupies is bad — not because they’re children, but because the bandmates have other girlfriends (hopefully adults?). Later, the band dumps their old manager for more money, which turns out awesome for them and they get a sweet deal, no hard feelings to that other dude. They almost die in a plane crash, but they don’t. The guitarist gets shocked in an ungrounded mic incident — it’s cool, he gets up and walks it off. Even the mysterious young woman on the cover wakes up slightly worse for the wear after having her stomach pumped in a hotel bathroom — all good here, no party foul! It was all for the best because if she hadn’t almost died, the main character child couldn’t have kissed her, since he had to do it when she was passed out.
I’m sort of at a loss for words with this movie, which isn’t great, considering that I’ve chosen to write about it. But still though, there is actually something compelling about it in a morbid way which makes me want to write about it, particularly because it isn’t morbid at all. If I were to be charitable to this movie, one could easily interpret the events as being witnessed through the lens of real naiveté. The main character is a grade-skipping 15 year old boy suffering under the excessive authority of his presumably narcissistic mother, and his Golden Retriever personality isn’t capable of seeing anything dark or negative about the situation at all. The drunk people don’t act drunk because he doesn’t understand anything about drugs and alcohol besides “woo, acid is wacky!” and the groupies seem like consenting adults because everyone older than him looks the same age. (As a person who watched Reality Bites in high school and thought Winona Ryder’s character was a really whiny 35 year old, I fully understand that phenomenon). Crowe even alludes to this in an interview, saying “…I never really felt there was some kind of predatory experience going on. Maybe that’s because I was 15 and 16, and people just knew that I had some rose-colored glasses on because I just loved music.”
Even then, it doesn’t change the fact that adult Cameron Crowe wrote this movie. It doesn’t do to make assumptions, but I would say that most of us make some general strides in maturity between the ages of 15 and 43, which is Crowe’s age at the time of the 2000 release. Yup, a man in his 40s wrote and directed this movie, unironically. It seems that somewhere along the way, he might have taken the time to reflect on the difference that 30 years’ hindsight can make, and used this to craft a nuanced account of an immature young man thrust into an explicitly mature situation, reckoning with the realities of rock-almost-stardom with all of the seedy danger and questionable conduct that entails in three dimensions. Instead, he writes a movie that says: “dear rock-metal music, you are so cool that I could almost crap my pants! When we were on tour, there were a lot of hot, weird chicks hanging around which was cool, and I promised my mom I wouldn’t smoke pot, so I didn’t.”
After about the first 20 minutes, I found myself thinking, “Gee, I’m glad they didn’t bother to lie about this movie being based on a true story,” since obviously the premise is so silly that it could never happen. Here I was, stunned again. Not only is this based on a true(-ish) story, but Cameron Crowe himself really did write for Rolling Stone as a 15 year old and tour with The Allman Brothers and their real-life child-groupies. I think it’s a testament to the sugary tone of the plot that even when this guy is writing a true story about his own, real life, it feels so fake and unbelievable that I assumed it was fiction.
There are some parts of this movie that work well, actually astoundingly well. The problem with them is that they almost seem yanked out of another movie, and all feature Kate Hudson. Wait, Kate Hudson? The girl who makes all of those horrible rom-coms with Matthew McConaughey? Yes, that was my only experience of her before this movie – I didn’t even know she could really act. And wait, how old is she in this movie, 12? Well, luckily for Cameron Crowe, she was “of age” at the time of filming, so he could do a ton of extra, super excessive wide angle shots of her staring into the camera like Alex Borstein’s Mad-TV Bjork or spinning around on the floor so that you can tell that he–I mean–his write-in, William, is falling in love with her. Before I did my double feature and watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I actually found these sequences kind of sweet and endearing. I mean, who hasn’t fallen in love with a somewhat eccentric, blonde, Piscean woman with a substance abuse problem and low-self esteem? Anyone? I’ll explain later how this was spoiled, but I do think he accurately captures what it feels like to be drawn to someone, whether a healthy attraction or not is debatable.
I’m going to make one defense of this movie in an otherwise rude review, and it’s a defense that I’m surprised to find myself making. The interview I linked above features a question I knew would appear if I Googled this movie: “Is Penny Lane from Almost Famous the dreaded manic-pixie-dreamgirl?” I think not actually, and I was sort of pre-figuring this as I watched the movie. Crowe is able to skate cleanly out of this criticism because this is a character based on a real person. Yup, apparently there was a real Penny Lane, who chose to spell her version Pennie Lane for bonus originality points. I think it’s fair to say that there are real human beings who fall (or fling themselves) into the manic-pixie-dreamgirl mode without having it done to them by wistful male writers. I have certainly met a few, ranging from downright delightful to tolerable in small doses. I think his explanation does stand though, since the character and her motivations do feel real and plausible in an otherwise un-real and un-plausible movie. I feel that if one were to experience this era, there would be groupies who behaved and dressed and polarized people the way that this character does. This in contrast to other manic-pixie-dreamgirls who seem to show up in plots and situations where they’ve clearly been written in to make a statement. Besides, I don’t find the Penny Lane character to be too manic. Just…you know. Childish, since she’s a child.
That’s all I have to say about this one. My rating is “Crank it up to a 4 out of 11 because I thought it was crap, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it”. I’ll round off the double feature by explaining how Fast Times at Ridgemont High makes Almost Famous an even shittier movie in hindsight.
sigilhouse 