Top Twenty of the Decade #16

Anita: This song explains why I’m leaving home to become a stewardess.

16. Almost Famous (2000) – Dir. Cameron Crowe

Remember that scene in High Fidelity when Cusack lists his top 5 dream jobs?

Aside from being a lame architect, he also lists film director and Rolling Stone journalist in the 70s.   Sounds pretty awesome right?

Cameron Crowe is a film director (though he hasn’t made anything good since Almost Famous) and he was a Rolling Stone journalist in the 70’s.

Lucky bastard.

With Almost Famous, he revels in both, writing and directing a perfectly realized semi-autobiographical story about those early years.  Now, he’s a lucky bastard making me laugh, cry, swoon, and wish I was born in a different decade.

Few movies make me reflect upon myself quite like this one.  It not only makes me think how great and fun it must have been to live such a life (with Phillip Seymour Hoffman as my mentor), but it also touches upon that universal obsession with talent.  Not fame like the title suggests, but that certain quality you wish you had.  We experience this obsession through the young protagonist’s virgin eyes.

I have quite a few friends who are in bands or can play guitar.  Being one who isn’t musically gifted, I’m kinda in awe of those who can create music (or draw for that matter).  This is the feeling that drives this movie and makes it special.

All this is wonderfully expressed through a coming-of-age story that doesn’t ever take the easy way out.  It never goes for the cheap gimmick or forced plot point.

But, what the film does that is truly great is present why music means so much to us, or at least me.  It makes me understand why one might leave home and become a stewardess because of a song, and it does it by being a great film.

About these ads