Velvet Goldmine (1998)

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

A glam rocker quits 'the life' in a spectacular way. He then disappears. Years later a journalist is assigned to find out where the rocker is today. Good premise thus far, then come the flashbacks - how he came to be discovered, how he went off the deep end, etc. We learn the journalist has some relationship with some of the principal characters. The musical scenes were well done, but that's the last good thing I can say about the film. Unless you're really into glam rock or have an unusual ability to concentrate on the banal, I warn you that you may not be able to figure out what the incessant flashbacks and portrayal of debauchery is adding to the plot. I suspect I'm not alone is asking why you'd want to try?! By then end I didn't care if Christian Bale figured it out.

It may be because they made Curt so similar to David Bowie, but the overall way the movie was done makes it seem so real. It literally had me searching for Venus in Furs like it was a real band (and then extremely sad that it wasn't). Other than that, if you enjoy movies about the rise and fall of rock stars (real or fake), this film is for you. Watch it even if you don't listen to Glam rock or David Bowie or any other pop culture thing related to this film, the movie in its own right is just that satisfying.As far as finding the music by Venus In Furs, you can find it on the Velvet Goldmine Soundtrack.

I happened to be reading Marc Spitz's fanboy bio of Bowie when I saw Velvet Goldmine, and did so because it was mentioned in the book. This movie feels almost like reading a chapter from that book. Bowie is a creation built from the outside in. If I squint a little and doze off slightly watching this film, the correspondence to the preposterous truth and emphatic construction of a façade in the film is just about right. There are videos on YouTube of Bowie interviews which are as much performances as this portrayal. Many details seem to be directly out of the record including the styles of music managers and their demands on venues. Since the subject matter is Bowie, its about right that this world is all Technicolor and Trickle. It's about right. (The impersonation of Iggy is about as good as it gets.)

The Citizen Kane of rock & roll movies, almost literally - even the framing sequence evokes Kane, with a present-day reporter charged with the task of rediscovering the rise and fall of a long-gone Ziggy Stardust-type rocker. Christian Bale is the closeted reporter, seen in the present as living in an almost monochromatic world, while his 8-track flashbacks to the tri-sexual '70s are painted on a palette of liquid LSD.The story was originally intended as a sort of Bowie bio-pic, but ended up a mix of urban legends cut from tales of Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain, Bryan Ferry, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Jim Dandy, David Johansen, and others. The soundtrack mixes classic glam tracks by Lou Reed with new songs done for the film, performed by various super groups with members of Placebo, the New York Dolls, and others."Follow the brooch" to trace the reincarnated spirit of Oscar Wilde, the world's first pop star, through the movie - (SPOILERS ALERT)First, Jack Fairy finds Wilde's brooch as a boy, seeming to be guided by Wilde's own tendency toward bawdy bacchanalia and pop creativity. Fledgling rocker Brian Slade steals the brooch from Fairy during a love tryst, and thus takes Fairy's place in the pop culture zeitgeist.Slade gives the brooch to Curt Wild and subsequently finds his own star falling, as Curt takes on the task of epitomizing a modern day Wilde. However, Curt implodes (much like his historical antecedent), and ends up giving the brooch to - who else? - the Writer, Arthur Stuart, in search of what really happened to the glittery-glam world he once thought his generation had (re)created.Wilde's life rather than his work seems to be the story template. Curt only becomes (briefly) articulate and dandy-fied after he gets the brooch, and in fact is wearing it at the staged press conference where he and Brian Slade essentially dance a gay minuet, dressed as French royalty and announcing their personal and professional pairing - with a public kiss, no less, Curt now living out Oscar Wilde's unrestrained and in-discrete libido alongside Slade.When a similar sort of public brou-ha-ha landed the real Wilde in prison, that all but broke him for the rest of his life, the same way fading punk-star Curt Wild seems to lose all inspiration and muse, withdrawing from bravado to whimper to "whatever happened to....."I like to think Arthur Stuart ends up with the story of his career after the movie wraps, and that he eventually becomes a well-known and respected writer.If he ends up far more celebrated in death than in life, well, then he will have lived out Wilde's own final chapters --- Arthur was probably buried wearing that effin brooch ---Maybe it's not the REAL story of '70s glam rock, but it represents that scene better than any ten eps of VH1's "I Love the '70s" ---- I've played the entire soundtrack album at least once a month since I saw this flick on its first video release ----