Almost Famous (Crowe, 2000) is available in a on 4K UHD
I have been reviewing – on and off – for over 35 years and I’ve always chosen screen material for my subject matter.
With rare exceptions.
I tried theatre reviewing when I was at Radio Active in the late 1980s but an angry response from a cast of people who I considered friends disavowed me of the notion that I could work in theatre and review it at the same time. Impossible to keep clean hands.
And, despite the fact that I love music and couldn’t live without it, I have never written music reviews. I simply don’t have the knowledge to be able to write about it with any authority.
Even when music doesn’t quite work for me it still feels like alchemy, making all those elements come together and and arrive at the listener with some coherence. Even bands simply starting and finishing a number at the same time seems to me to be a remarkable achievement so the world is better off without my thoughts on the subject.
But I do love a film about music – documentaries as I mentioned the other day – and fiction about music.
One of the best examples is Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical feature about a rock journalism prodigy (Patrick Fugit) touring the mid-West with a mid-level 70s rock band called Stillwater.
From his vantage point on the bus and in the motels, young William Miller gets a front row seat at the transition from the freedom and optimism of the 60s to the corporate rock era of the mid to late 70s.
I hadn’t seen this since it first came out when I, like so many other critics, saw it as a charming coming-of-age picture. This time around, I appreciated what Crowe was doing with his female characters: Frances McDormand as Miller’s concerned mother, Zooey Deschanel as his flight attendant sister, Anna Paquin as lost soul groupie Polexia Aphrodisia and, especially, Kate Hudson as the lead “band aid” Penny Lane.
The unseen sacrifices made by these women in service of the careers of self-centred men was palpable this time around, but all the characters are shown to be losing something of themselves in their dedication to the gods of music.
The version of the film on the new ViaVision 4K disc is the extended or “bootleg” version which is over half an hour longer than the original theatrical cut but I couldn’t tell you from this distance what was different. It all worked just fine.
If you are not like me – still dedicated to physical media – you will be pleased to know that the original theatrical cut of Almost Famous is also available as PVOD (Premium Video On Demand) aka digital rental from AroVision, Apple or Neon, and as a streaming title on Amazon’s Prime Video for the next 24 hours.
