Friday, January 29, 2010

Snow day blogging

Quick hit:

I've blogged before about Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's rose-colored-glasses romanticization of his own adolescence (adorably tongue-tied, hence cute adolescent rock-critic-wannabe stows away with early '70s American "guitar band" and eventually lands both an interview, and a cover story, for Rolling Stone), and about the greatness of Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of the more Morrison-than-Jim-Morrison Lester Bangs (and the sadness of Lester's life) and of the heart-shattering beauty of Lester's writing, and it's true that Hoffman is, as so often, the best part of the movie by several orders of magnitude.

But here's another little nugget, the other best part of the film:

when Patrick Fugit's "William Miller" (Crowe's fantasy of himself) finally lands the long-delayed interview with Billy Crudup's lead-guitar-hero Russell Hammond, and they sit down with the Wollensack cassette recorder, and "William" shoves the mic into "Russell"'s face, and says

William Miller: So Russell... what do you love about music?
Russell Hammond: To begin with?
......everything.
That about says it for me, too.


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