Almost Famous (2000) – DVD|Almost Famous: Untitled, The Bootleg Cut [Director’s Edition] – DVD

ALMOST FAMOUS
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
UNTITLED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Almost Famous is an odd bird. It wants to be about rock and roll but isn't, seeking every opportunity to hide from the spirit of the music that is its ostensible starting point. It strains for important insights it doesn't have, mostly centred on a teenage boy's predictable loss of innocence at the hands of a rock band. Worst of all is that it subsumes its massive subject into the flowering of a ROLLING STONE journalist, crushing both the purity of the music and the excess of its players beneath a career move for a media player. But as the film lurches from issue to dodged issue, the reasoning behind its omissions is as intriguing as the omissions themselves; as it accidentally uncovers the spaces between what gets done and how it gets done, it manages to be a revealing document of how much chicanery goes into the creation of celebrity–entirely in spite of itself.

The film deals with the misadventures of William Miller (Patrick Fugit), teenaged rock critic and outsider. Years earlier, his overbearing single mother Ellen (Frances McDormand) drove his teenaged sister out of the house; expressing her sentiments in a song by a favourite band, she bequeathed her record collection to the 11-year-old William and sparked his passion for music. While his mother has fulminated against the sex-and-drugs utopia of rock, William sends a few of his school-paper reviews to CREEM magazine and manages to snag an assignment. Sent by the great rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to cover a Black Sabbath concert, he gets sucked in on the momentum of opening band Stillwater and their camp-followers. Somehow getting upgraded to a ROLLING STONE feature story, William goes on the road with the struggling band in the hopes of a few solid interviews and a nice story to follow it up.

But the band sees possibilities in William that the young critic can't; namely, the chance for some much-needed good publicity. Doing everything in their power to show the boy a good time, the band takes him on the road and constantly eludes his requests for a proper interview. They would rather have internecine shouting matches about the rising star of the gifted guitar player Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), who may be entertaining ideas of leaving for greener pastures. Meanwhile, William nurses a crush for head groupie Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). She in turn loves the guitarist who uses her when his wife isn't around. And so it goes, as William sinks deeper and deeper into the seething corruption around him, never once securing a proper interview as they careen into New York and a final reckoning.

Right off the bat, Almost Famous walks a tightrope between the happily entertaining and the somewhat suspect. There's no denying the low-comedy value of William's mother–always on hand to be hysterical and overprotective–and the film's tone has a sunny, aw-shucks ring to it that carries you right through to William's first confrontations with Stillwater. Director Crowe has always been good at this sort of pure-and-innocent fun, and the spirit he imparts to the proceedings is intensely gratifying. To a point.

There's also a falseness to this approach, a feeling that nobody really means what they say and that nothing has any truly damaging impact on any of the characters. Even when William's sister decides that she's had enough of her mother, the conflict between them seems about as important as stubbing one's toe; neither the writing nor the direction suggest the depths of anger that would give rise to such drastic action. McDormand's character is never truly malicious beyond not being let in on the joke, and thus the rebellion of her children has no edge.

Things improve somewhat after William hooks up with the band, but even here the emotional depths are rendered in shorthand rather than in detail. We are supposed to take it as read that William will be drawn into the maelstrom of Stillwater and its hangers-on, but as our hero remains largely outside of the action, we never really have to face up to the issues that drive the band forward. We don't take them seriously as musicians, and we don't take them seriously as people; they have neither a passion for the music they make nor much personality beyond the frequent egotistical smash-ups about Russell's guitar-god status. While this has something to do with post-hippie 1973–an era on which even the great Lester Bangs has given up–it doesn't give much of a reason for anyone to care about the fortune of the band in general and its rogue guitarist in particular.

But then the movie begins to gather steam. Having junked the band as a site of reverence, the film concentrates instead on those who ride its coattails to glory–the groupies and the journalists, the promoters and the editors, the wives and girlfriends and assorted superfans who are at once utterly necessary for the band's survival, but who so negate the value of the music that they aspire to make. And as it zeroes in on the relationship between two of these camp followers–our starstruck hero William and deluded "band-aid" Penny Lane–it depicts a seldom-seen middle ground between the image of the famous and the yearning of the audience to attain the greatness of their idols. While William becomes more and more disenchanted with what he sees, and as Penny is cruelly disappointed by the objects of her admiration, the film catches them in revealing poses. They experience the same attraction and repulsion at their own burgeoning importance that their idols do, and find the status of court entertainers to be at once ill-fitting and totally irresistible.

I hasten to add that these revelations are made entirely in spite of the writer-director, who never truly understands the implications of his material. While Almost Famous goes out of its way to point out the corruption of the band, it somehow sidesteps the fact that this corruption is the stuff that magazine sales are made of, making the protagonist's ultimate act of subversion less lustrous than it might seem. Despite the band's horror at what William actually writes, the symbiosis between the two is never really broken, and so William's ultimate moral victory seems a half-measure at best.

The film is ultimately about becoming a professional parasite rather than a teller of truths. No matter how often it invokes Lester Bangs's rock-nerd piousness, it never really evokes what it means to love rock and roll enough to demand the best and the most from it. In defining the barriers between the music and those who love it, the film loses sight of what ought to be the ultimate goal: the communication between performer and fan, which is often ruined by bad faith on both sides of the divide.

But as the film careens to its ending, it charts something that most rock films tend to avoid, which is the middlemen that make the illusory direct address of the musicians possible. That Cameron Crowe can't really see anything wrong with his hero's absorption into the industry that obscures what he loves is certainly a stumbling block, and his happy, sun-dappled style seems almost wilfully stupid in light of the moral ambiguities afforded by the material. But by finally unmasking the strange bedfellows who find themselves in alliance, it inadvertently shows the culture industry at its ugliest and most enticing. It's a small but real victory for a film, as a rock band once put it, that doesn't know what it wants, but knows how to get it. Originally published: September 23, 2000.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers At least the video and audio presentation of Almost Famous on DVD does not disappoint, though the disc itself might, as it contains the theatrical release and not the oft-promised director's cut. (DreamWorks and Cameron Crowe say it's on the schedule, but won't be ready for some time.) Meanwhile, feast your eyes on the dazzling 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced video transfer (the opening credits, which look poor (they appear to be of digital video origin), are more severely letterboxed). I've never seen double-exposed images so flawlessly compressed as when pre-teen William spins his sister's copy of "Tommy" by candlelight. Colour and contrast require no monitor adjustments.

The 5.1 mix that turned moviehouses into concert halls last fall is presented here in both bodacious DTS and righteous Dolby Digital. The DTS version is tight and clean, which is to say I prefer the DD audio, at least when Stillwater's on stage–it's better at replicating the inarticulate bombardment of noise one experiences during live guitar-rock performances. (Either way, this is one non-action film that really utilizes the six-track environment.) Elsewhere, Almost Famous is dialogue-driven, and DTS is a bit better at controlling the stew of mumbles and squeals. Perhaps we should call it a draw.

Supplemental material is slim pickin's, the most worthy extra being seven unabridged articles (about The Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Peter Frampton, Fleetwood Mac, Van Morrisson, and Joni Mitchell) from Crowe's own rock-reporter days at ROLLING STONE. Each is prefaced by a new text introduction from the director; despite the potentially blinding proposition of reading off a television screen, I indulged in several of them in their entirety. (Crowe wrote better at 16 than most of us could ever hope to.) Less useful is HBO's behind-the-scenes featurette (like many of those affiliated with DreamWorks' pictures, its structure is wonky), a mock music video for Stillwater's tuneless "Fever Dog", a couple of theatrical trailers for Almost Famous (in 5.1!), and cast and crew bios. Originally published: March 13, 2001.

THE DVD – ALMOST FAMOUS: UNTITLED, THE BOOTLEG CUT
Having been touted for a while now as a film that was stronger before the proverbial "they" got their hands on it, Almost Famous is at last available in a longer form for public consumption–under a new name, Untitled, so as to distinguish itself from the theatrical version and avoid the increasingly cynical "Director's Cut" label. Is Untitled superior to Almost Famous? As with last summer's Apocalypse Now Redux, the answer is probably subjective. Despite 35 extra minutes of running time, brevity remains one of the film's inadequacies: Jeff's climactic unleashing of bile on Russell is still only backed up by a moment in which Stillwater shirts are revealed to favour the guitarist; "Band Aids" other than Penny Lane and Anna Paquin's "Polexia" continue to be silent bystanders; and Philip Seymour Hoffman has the same number of scenes, i.e., not enough. If anything, it's a shame that some stuff didn't go out the window in addition to footage being added back in–Crowe's crutch is cheap humour and he uses it once too often to defuse the tension here.

So how do Untitled and Almost Famous differ? Mostly in terms of pace and beats. Extending the proceedings are fleshier glimpses of William's childhood and a few more hangin'-out-with-the-band bits, such as Stillwater being interviewed by a drug-addled disc jockey (Kyle Gass of "Tenacious D"), plus improved transitions (including that between Lester and William's first encounter and their meeting over coffee) and an interminable birthday party for Penny Lane. (Kate Hudson's performance lacks the mythic quality that's assigned to her character through dialogue and inferences; additional screen time does nothing to change that.) William's plight, his desire to return home, is that much more sympathetic now since the "Almost Famous" tour feels like it could linger on into infinity. Overall, Untitled coheres a little better than Almost Famous, but it's not any deeper. Reactions will surely vary depending on which cut you started with.

The Untitled DVD–officially and laboriously, "Almost Famous: Untitled – The Bootleg Cut (Director's Edition)"–is a completist's delight. In an audio introduction on both platters of this 2-disc package, Crowe (who actually introduces almost all the supplements–be sure to click on the microphone icons) hopes you're reminded of those great box sets that record companies stuff with every thinkable morsel of arcana on a given group or artist; to that end, copies of Untitled come with a bonus CD of six Stillwater songs. (Not a one of them suggests 1973 rock & roll to me, but I might be in the minority.) Later, in his commentary, Crowe apologizes for Untitled's very availability–he wishes it could have made its way out as a genuine bootleg item. Said yak-track, by the way, is very pleasant: Crowe is joined by his mother Alice (after whom Elaine was modelled) as well as Vinyl Films' Scott Martin, Andy Risher, and Ivan Carona, and Dream Works' Mark Atkinson, though the Crowes do 99% of the talking. Cameron Crowe seems to take special delight in discussing his pubes and saying "fuck" in front of Alice (and letting slip that Fugit fell for Hudson off-camera), but there's more to this track than baiting, chiefly a kind of infectious nostalgia for the events that inspired the film(s).

Also on Disc One, a terrific 2+-minute interview with Lester Bangs himself–he makes a lot of enemies in a short period, and incidentally looks nothing like Philip Seymour Hoffman; Cameron Crowe's "Top 10 Albums of 1973," with Crowe narrating his choices (aside: one would be hard-pressed to list ten good albums from this year); former Heart frontwoman Nancy Wilson's "man voice" (Crowe's words) demo of the Stillwater tune "Love Comes and Goes", accompanied by video of the cast fooling around; the seven ROLLING STONE articles that were on the initial Almost Famous DVD (see below); and "B-sides," a weird shaky-cam rehearsal of the aforementioned outtake with Gass. If you're so inclined, hunt down the following Easter egg: a dud take with an unsettling backstory supplied by Crowe, one of the many hidden treasures on board.

Moving on to Disc Two, we have the theatrical cut of Almost Famous (whose picture and sound are identical to last March's DVD release of the film; it features the crisp DTS mix that had to be dropped from Untitled to no great loss); a 15-minute, multi-song mini-concert by Stillwater that ostensibly took place in Cleveland; "Small Time Blues," an acoustic song performance that just didn't fit in either Untitled or Almost Famous; "Stairway," the infamous–and I'm sorry, but too damn long–12-minute scene that was to contain "Stairway to Heaven" unexpurgated–have your copy of "Led Zeppelin IV" handy; the seemingly abridged Academy Award-winning screenplay, with easy-to-read onscreen text; production notes; cast and filmmakers bios; and the Almost Famous trailer in 5.1 Dolby Digital. Finding fault in Almost Famous and now Untitled, I've downplayed my enthusiasm for this DVD set; it's all happening, as the hipsters say–an embarrassment of riches I did appreciate.

• Almost Famous
  123 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; DreamWorks
• Untitled
  162 minutes; NR; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1; CC; English subtitles; 2 DVD-9s + CD; Region One; DreamWorks