Velvet Goldmine - Page 2

Wait. Shudder to Think is in this?

I think I'll blind-buy this.

The Wylde Ratttz' "original" version of TV Eye —*the one with vocals by Mark Arm (Mudhoney) instead of Ewan McGregor —*mysteriously appeared on the soundtrack to School of Rock. I've never understood how that happened.

The full "Wylde Ratttz" band cut about a dozen songs, many of which leaked to the internet over the years. Mike Watt played most (if not all) of the songs on his radio show last month.

They're not in it, but they recorded two songs for the soundtrack, both of which are featured prominently in the movie (can't remember if Jonathan Rhys-Meyers lip-synchs to both of them, but he does to at least one). Basically, they and Grant Lee Buffalo tried to emulate Hunky Dory/Ziggy-era Bowie and managed to come up with three highlights of the soundtrack, which is probably even more essential than the movie.

Songs from this soundtrack leak over nearly every mix CD I've ever made. It's great, and makes you glad Bowie refused to license his music to the film. And they hit you with one song after another out of the gate in the film.

Rhys-Myers' vocals replace Shudder To Think's on one song in the film.

Y'know, I just looked the two songs up on YouTube, and I think he redid the vocals on both. It's more noticeable on the one that Craig Wedren originally sung ("The Ballad of Maxwell Demon"), but Rhys-Myers does such a good job mimicking the Nathan Larson-sung tune ("Hot One") that I don't think I'd previously noticed. What's weird is that Rhys-Myers sounds more like (early 70s American glam almost-ran) Jobriath than Wedren on "Maxwell Demon." I wonder if that was deliberate...

Listening to this conversation once again reminds how non-existent my knowledge of music is.

Also, I should mention that the glam rock cover band I've been playing in gravitates toward the soundtrack even when we're not trying to - it's a wonderful primer on the bands of the era. Plus, it's just fun to play "Virginia Plain," "20th Century Boy," "Baby's on Fire," etc.

Okay, it is both; I wasn't sure, as I'd completely forgotten about "Ballad of Maxwell Demon". He's really kind of shrill on that, but his voice fits better on "Hot One". Now that I'm thinking about it, he also did his own vocals on "Baby's On Fire" and "Tumbling Down", but it might also be his actual vocals on the album versions...

Grant Lee Buffalo does the best Bowie impression on the album.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, the S2T songs are kind of like early 70s Bowie updated and reimagined, but "The Whole Shebang" could pratcically be a Hunky Dory outttake.

"Hot One" seems to be riffing specifically on Mike Garson's Aladdin Sane stuff. I love Ziggy, but the piano stuff on Aladdin Sane took it all someplace special.

I have to believe it was ... Rhys-Myers might have been dressed like Bowie, but the music sounded more like Jobriath's glam rock/cabaret style in Space Clown or Morning Star Ship.

I had overlooked the film when it was first released, and one day walked into the living room while my daughter was watching it, and stopped dead when I heard "Baby's On Fire."

Enjoyable film, well-acted, but I'm another one that likes the soundtrack more than the movie.

I'm not as up on my Jobriath as I should be. But this is pretty fun. And here's some background. Jesus - I thought the Maxwell Demon album cover was riffing on Diamond Dogs, but it's right there in that clip as a Jobriath album.

I watched this a few days ago, based on the AV Club article and this thread. I loved it, but I now get a lot why a lot of people called "I'm Not There" too dense at points. I'm less familiar with this era than I am Dylan, or even the era depicted in "24 Hour Party People," so while I was engaged in the movie as a story and interested in its characters, I felt like there were so many references going over my head. There were ones I recognized -- I'm more familiar with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop than I am Bowie, so I was able to get a lot of the stuff going on there, particularly during the Berlin period -- but in a way, I found it really intoxicating, because now I'd like to research that era a little bit more and understand it better.

I'm kind of annoyed that there was no commentary on the DVD though. I've sort of done a reappraisal of Haynes recently, because I was really dismissive of him in college. That makes me an asshole -- he's fast becoming one of my favorite directors.

I've mentioned this before but apparently there's a behind the scenes featurette on the european dvd release. All I could find was interview with Rhys-Meyers who had to have been 20 at the time. Let me tell ya, it really kills the mystique because surprise the guy tries to sound brilliant but really REALLY isn't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKug3kY2N_0

Edit: The whole DVD doc from Europe in 3 parts.

You can blame the absence of a commentary track on Harvey Weinstein.

More actually that the film came out in 1998 and wasn't a hit. The current DVD release isn't anamorphic.

This was around the same time that Existenz was shit out by Buena Vista Home Video. I instead bought the Alliance Atlantis edition of Existenz, packed with extras. I kept hoping for some magical Canadian edition of Goldmine.

I hadn't noticed that. It's been years since I've seen Velvet Goldmine, and I discovered Jobriath relatively recently. Just looked up the fictional album cover, and damn... Haynes wasn't even playing around with the imagery there. It's a direct lift.

According to Down and Dirty Pictures, the bare-bones DVD was a product of Weinstein's feud with Haynes over the content/box office performance.

We're saying the same thing, basically. Had the film come out in 2001, it would have had a bunch of shit on it, even as a bomb. The DVD market in 1998 was a totally different world, in terms of what content would be put on things. From inception until about 2001, the format was not really solidified.

Gotcha. I wasn't trying to start an argument ... but they have a habit of springing up around me, despite my intentions.

I liked this movie, though found it to be flawed, for reasons stated earlier (kind of deflated or became less coherent as it went on).

I don't mean this as a homophobic slight, but it was gayer and less androgynus than I thought it would be. My interpretation of the glam I listen to, thirty years removed from its inception, was more towards its themes of alienation and everything in life putting on a costume, whether you are a doctor or acting out as Ziggy Stardust. So the fuck scene was a surprise - perhaps because of my own orientation, when I found out Bowie and Pop collaborated on an album I just thought it was a case of career appreciation/revitalization (The Idiot is a fucking great album I think). Unless this film's approach to it is fantasy or metaphorical - the film succeeded in blurring these things quite well.

So the Bio Channel is doing a piece on Bowie, airs Thursday. I found the promo amusing.

*Views ad*

I got nothing.

HINT! I did not post the ad in a David Bowie thread.

I know that, I saw they slipped in Maxwell Demon. Whether that's an injoke or ignorance is beyond me.

Oh bullshit.

Ignorance it is.

Ovation (The Gay Channel, from what I can tell) has been running Velvet Goldmine all week, and it looks fucking atrocious. Have the master elements to this goddamn movie been lost forever? It looks like they filmed it with my fucking phone.

I liked Velvet Goldmine. I only watched it once, back when it came out on video. I was on acid, so my opinion of the film is literally colored. But I enjoyed the music and the drama, even though I was thinking critically enough to find it uneven and over the top at times. The soundtrack led me to the discovery of one of my favorite songs, the original version of 4HB by Roxy Music. And it engendered a lot of good will for me toward Christian Bale, which he hasn't quite squandered yet.

Holy crap, this thread isn't new and I already said what I said. Maybe a little too much of the old LSD back in the day.

And you got the name of your favorite song wrong. It's okay, Chris.

My god, this transfer. I actually couldn't tell what was happening in some scenes. I'm here, I'm not queer, but I want a blu-ray.

Ha, 2HB. I fail much today.

Thanks, Phil.

BTW, Phil, found Ovation and I'm watching it right now. The transfer looks fine on my SD TV. I guess this is one of the few times I'm not getting shafted for not yet up-converting.

Could be. In which case the shit, non-anamophic dvd would still work out all right for you. I just think it's a shame that such meticulous art direction is lost in SD purgatory.

I agree. I actually can't even watch any of my DVDs anymore. I'm only a paycheck away from an HDTV, though, so I'll soon have a whole new raft of hypercritical nitpicks to offer. Sorry for the derail.

EDIT: "SD Purgatory" has inspired me to create a thread on that, I think.

So I went ahead and watched it on TV last night, not on drugs. It held up well. Some of the stylized bits that would have bothered me when it first came out came off much better now that I'm about 10 years older and more mature: I can see how the film is sometimes, and suddenly, intentionally absurd, as if to capture the type of performance videos and acting styles of the era. It makes more sense since I've read about Bowie and the way musicians were marketed in those days. And the music is still killer. If anything, I liked the music even more, having since opened up to artists from that time.

More than likely it's me being too literal minded, but Brian sees Curt Wilde at that outdoor festival, is inspired to create Maxwell Demon, signs with Eddie Izzard, and is asked who he wants to meet in America, and it's this big moment when he says "I want to meet Curt Wilde." But Curt Wilde is IN the first Maxwell Demon performance film we see a bit earlier, right before he signs with Eddie Izzard.

And on this last watch, I started to think "Okay, I came at this movie the wrong way back then. It's the reporter's story, and I was probably expecting the story of the singer." But then Bale disappears for what seemed to be about an hour while the movie does turn into this chronicle of Brian Slade and Curt Wilde. Really hurts the reporter's story to me.

But it's about the transition from the 70's homosexuality to essentially 90's homosexuality.

But I don't think it tells that story successfully either. It doesn't really handle the transition at all. We see before, we see after, but not how or why that transition occurs. There's no depth or insight as to how 80s Tommy Stone came to be. He's just there in the "after" and there's a bit of posturing about this mystery, but it's a pretty shaggy journey from one place to another.

I think that his transition is a bit of the mystery, and also speaks to the movies setting --- it's not set in 1984 solely because the Regan-era is appropriate for the 80's Bowie transition metaphor; there's a weird Orwellian vision going on in the finale as well, with giant video screens of homogenized images that dwarf pedestrians wearing toned down clothing in ugly, gray settings. The ending suggests that images (like words, history, math, meaning in 1984) can be changed and altered, past identities deleted, and what once was freeing has now become horrifying and restricting. We're not meant to know Tommy Stone anymore than we're meant to know Charles Foster Kane at the end of Citizen Kane; the sad image of a broken man exists only for us to recognize the contrast between the younger Kane we loved for all his hopeful ambition and the older Kane we despised for his stubbornness and greed.

Wild says to Bale's character that they set out to change the world but only managed to change themselves. "What's wrong with that?" the journalist asks him. "Look at the world." But Slade's attempts at changing the world existed only through changing (or reinventing) himself, a reinvention that at first pointed a mirror at himself and what he wanted, but slowly grew to cover a larger canvas, a larger audience, the world. In order to fit that vision, he needed to change himself to the point where the younger, bolder, freer version of himself was restricted. I feel like if we see this transition, we're missing the point. By not seeing it, the movie is more unsettling and the violence of transition from Slade to Stone would be blunted.

I just re-watched this movie on Netflix Instant and it held up more than I thought it would. It's really under appreciated I think, one of the best movies of the 90's. Also, this thread was a terrific read and one of the many reasons CHUD has always been one of the best places for film discussion. Thanks to all got this thing going.