Worst of the 2000s: Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS

Day one of a look back at the most damnable detritus from a decade rife with detestable doozies.

ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)
WRITER/DIRECTOR: Cameron Crowe
CAST: Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Billy Crudup, Jason Lee, Frances McDormand, Zooey Deschanel, Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Okay, let’s get one important stumbling point out of the way pronto.

Yes, formerly pubescent/permanently pudgy Rolling Stone scribe Cameron Crowe did write Fast Times at Ridgemont High, both the book chronicling his undercover investigation into late-’70s California teenage wastedness, and the screenplay for the classic 1982 film comedy upon which not enough praise can be heaped and which, therefore, needs no further addressing here.

Probably ever.

So Cameron Crowe does have Fast Times going for him.

That, and nothing else.

Almost Famous isn’t the most heinous Cameron Crowe crime-against-stomach-lining to date—that honor goes to Elizabethtown (a dementia-inspiring atrocity that you must not miss)—but it does perfectly embody everything despicable about this mega-drip whose goopy sentimentality can not even be dwarfed by his Abominable Cro-Magnon Man jaw.

Worse, and more importantly, Almost Famous perfectly illuminates the awfulness of those who don’t properly despise Cameron Crowe and all his mawkish oozing.

You know who they are: adults who see John Cusack hoist that boom-box in Say Anything and then don’t automatically erupt into lust for prison-rape (“In Your Brown Eyes”, indeed … just the brown one) or, worse, those who invoke the name “Lloyd Dobler” while reminiscing about the impossible standards the characters set for all “us guys”, haw-haw-haw.

These are grown men and women who can swallow Crowe’s claim that Tim, The Replacements’ first 100-percent worthless album (in a series), represents “emotional perfection”; who suppressed blubbering when grooving to the “You Had Me at Hello” mix of Bruce Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” from Jerry Maguire; who can abide by a rock reporter only being summoned to Seattle circa 1991 in the wake of Pearl Jam (of fucking course!) and then sums up the entire grunge moment as belonging to “these children of Led Zeppelin and pro basketball and Black Flag and Cheap Trick and Kiss.”

(PRO-BASKETBALL?! Jagoff: there was only one band of that era that once named itself “Mookie Blaylock” and they weren’t even on Sub Pop.)

Circa 1984, piss-licks of this order probably even tried—vocally and repeatedly—to aide Crowe’s attempt to invent a cultural catch-phrase via his piddling Fast Times pseudo-sequel, The Wild Life: “It’s casual!”

There sucks Cameron Crowe and there, sucking his crippled crank, are his people.

They are also the cretins who cooed and gurgled rapturously upon the arrival of Almost Famous, Crowe’s autobiographical phantasmagoria of being a candy-ass zilch in an interesting place at an interesting time and turning the whole thing into candy-ass zilchness.

Ping-pong-ball-peepered Patrick Fugit stands in for Crowe in Almost Famous, playing a 15-year-old dorkus who crosses paths with filthy scribe Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymour Hoffman provides the movie’s sole seconds of bearableness, and not just because he mentions The Raspberries).

Junior then ends up on tour with an arena-rock combo that, reportedly, commingles elements of Zep, The Who and Peter Frampton’s ensemble.

To call Fugit’s performance unprofessional is to call it a performance, which would be incorrect. This muppet-mouthed cipher does serve as the center of the film, but negatively—in the sense that a black hole is negative space.

But Fugit’s anti-impact comes off more like someone spilled White-Out all over wherever he turns up on-screen.

Frances McDormand plays the kid’s zanily progressive college professor mother and is flawlessly charmless.

Zooey Deschanel is his sexy stewardess sister who passes along what she insists are consciousness-expanding LPs that includes The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

The eternal awesomeness of Brian Wilson notwithstanding, this represents a gross anachronism as Almost Famous takes place in the early ’70s, at least two years before the Endless Summer compilation hit and Those in the Know reevaluated of the Beach Boys as, at the very least, groovy.

Cameron Crowe’s sister was ahead of that curve, huh? Not bad for a “waitress in the sky,” eh? (Bleccch.)

Another glaring omission indicative of selective (absence of) taste:

Where is even a mention of one-time Crowe profile subject Alice Cooper (that’s the two of them with Mick Jagger at right)?

That the weirdest, most inventive and flat-out greatest rock star of the movie’s time setting gets ignored speaks volumes as to Crowe’s commitment to the Rolling-Stone/Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame hegemony wherein only rock music’s dullest and most bloated corporate unit-movers receive proper canonization (I mean, post-Them Van Goddamned Morrison, for the sake of fuck).

The Almost Famous band, Stillwater, features Jason Lee, who convinces not for one second as a lead singer who could move 20,000 dopers to put down their roach-clips let alone rock with him and, as Jimmy-Page-esque guitarist, Billy Crudup doing a remarkable job in pitiable circumstances.

Really, when it comes to Crudup, all one can do is quote what David Hess says of Franco Nero on the DVD for the 1977 thriller Hitch-Hike: “Look at him. He’s gorgeous!”

What similar physical allure may be possessed by blonde monkey Kate Hudson somehow only makes her more loathsome in what stands as the most disgustingly phony Perfect Dream Dolly part ever concocted for the movies.

I find almost nothing more revolting art than when a dingus creates a heroine based on his dismal longings left over from high-school.

Linda Cardellini on Freaks and Geeks, with her tough veneer and gorgeous body bedecked in an Army jacket that’s got a Styx cassette in each pocket, is one such impossible fetish made (fictional) flesh.

And as foul as I find her, nothing’s going to compete with the wispy waif who introduces herself as “Penny Lane” to which oblivion-for-brains Fugit responds, “Like the song?”

“Yes! Penny Lane,” says Penny Lane. “Like the song.”

Now I am a man who composed the screenplay for Animal Instincts III (1995) in which a groupie is named “Lolly Pop” and even I, back when I wrote that piece of crap, would have blanched at “Penny Fecactuh Lane.”

As sick-making as the character is, from her name to her junkie-ballet around an empty ballroom to the (legitimately transcendent) strains of “The Wind” by Cat Stevens in Crowe’s horrific attempt to “BEGUILE”, what’s worse is knowing that men exist who survived this tripe and sighed: “Ah, yes! Everybody has a Penny Lane in their lives!”

I only wish that they had a thousand rounds of machine-gun bullets in their lives upon speaking such a nakedly calculated lie.

Same as when they fake-laugh to the mustachioed drummer blurting out “I’M GAY!” when the band’s plane nearly crashes because—ho, ho!—everywhere you go, all the time, there’s at least one secret homo you can expose for a guffaw!

The most dire nadir of Almost Famous is, naturally, most often lauded as the film’s highlight: when the band and its entourage ease back in the tour bus and simultaneously become moved to belt out Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

When Almost Famous initially opened and resoundingly tanked, commercials for the movie switched from Simon and Garfunkel’s brilliantly melancholy “America” to “Tiny Dancer” and desperate-to-be-formatted culture drones proclaimed how swept up they felt by that scene, that feeling, that song.

Literally moments prior to this change in programming, those self-same suckoids would have groaned, rolled their eyes and bellowed, “THAAAAANK you!” if you switched off a radio that had been playing “Tiny Dancer.”

I write this as a fanatical devotee of Elton John’s ’70s output and as the poor sap who experienced a black-clad New York theeah-tuh enthusiast, post-Almost Famous, break out into “Hold me closer, Tony Danza!” while hoping none of us knew he’d copped that gag from the sitcom Friends.

I knew. And I swear to Baby Buddah, I didn’t even watch Friends!

So what most infuriates about Almost Famous is what most infuriates about so much of the 2000s quasi-highbrow pop entertainment, from Lost in Translation to McSweeney’s Publishing to the entire Wes Anderson canon, from Arrested Development to to Superbad to castration leakage like Wilco being mis-filed as “rock” music.

In essence: the sort of audience that considers itself “above” cheap sentiment desires to be manipulated and massaged in the most outward fashion by the most obvious treacle, but they want to have it disguised somehow—most often by not-actually present “irony”—as the exact opposite of what it is.

Almost Famous is a film I hate so much I have seen it dozens of times. I can recite long passage of excruciating dialogue from memory. I even bought Untitled, Cameron Crowe’s cut of the movie on DVD, which features commentary by his real-life mother.

And, as noted earlier, Elizabethtown is even worse.

In fact, “worse” is not the word for a film where a Hobbit gazes awestruck at the balcony where Martin Luther King got offed while “Pride in the Name of the Love” blares on the soundtrack, just underneath Kirsten Dunst intoning: “His death was just the beginning of his victory!”

Next up for Cameron Crowe is a Pearl Jam documentary. I have the feeling that that might be just the beginning of his victory, as well.

Browse Timeline

• « The 2000s: Horrible Times, Wonderful Horror (Except for the Goddamned Zombies)
• » Worst of the 2000s: The Complete and Utter Goddamnable Castration of Mainstream Rock Music

Comments ( 3 )

Add a Comment