Oh, god - "Almost Famous"

Movies are movies and rock is rock, and they are best when kept apart.

I cannot believe I have been at this blog bidness for this long and have failed as yet to mention how Almost Famous is a pox upon humanity.

I think I've only seen it once. Unless I saw it on video at some point, loaded, as the characters should have been, now that I think...

So many things wrong:

1. Lester Bangs as "conscience" to young reporter kid. Nice treading on the memory of the Greatest Rock Writer of All Time, just for added gravitas

2. The safe choice of having the band on the rise play Eagles/Poco mishmash of Trans Am-driving 70's cokehead pabulum, as opposed to, I dunno, ROCK? Eagles-fan dads all over the country could take oblivious kids to this atrocity to see "what it was like," and then say how said balding peres et fils "really connected" over it.

3. The dearth of any danger: people are all looking out for the Little Dude, instead of pumping him full of drugs when he passes out after one too many (three?) swigs of "Jack."

4. I dunno - I just remember having bottomless vituperation toward this steaming pile - although the spinning Decca label on the vinyl copy of Tommy was okay - but the worst, I mean the pull-the movie-seats-out-of-the-floor-and-screech like John Waters moment in this thing...and I shudder even thinking about it - was the scene where all these assholes wake up one by one, and drivin' [sic] into the mornin' [sic] sun, they all have a massive singalong to motherf-cking "Tiny Dancer!" I mean, HEY!, it's all going to be okay. PUKE. If they got done singing along, and someone was getting a cold morning Coors from a cooler in the back of the bus and a roadie was DEAD or something:"Hey, man, Sal's...like...not BREATHING!" and they had to debate about whether to call the fuzz or just bury him in the desert so as not to have to get rid of their (conspicuously absent) stashes, all underscored with, shit, who knows, "Orchid" by Black Sabbath or maybe "Simple Sister" by Procul Harum (sp, prolly) - well, then, just then, one might have a movie that accurately scratches the surface of the scumpool that is the business of rock.

Um, HATE.