“He Got Too Rich…”
I just had a conversation about how being hungry has always been a great incentive to do good work and being too well fed has always had the opposite effect. Nothing new in this, but when I mentioned the curious case of the once-great Cameron Crowe and how he seemed to go off the rails after Elizabethtown, the guy said “I think he got too rich. Too comfortable, too much luxury, too many friends in the same position with the same comforts, and after a while the fire just simmers down.”
Friedkin put it best when he said it was hard to keep your street cred when you’re taking tennis lessons. Or something like that.
Crowe’s problem is he isn’t a genre filmmaker. Most director’s who lose their mojo usually go back to what gave them their start in the first place. Stripped-down, back-to-basics, no-pretention kind of projects. Crowe’s problem is he’s never made anything other than delicate, highly personal dramedies and they are (arguably) the hardest kind of movie to pull off. He needs to let himself off the hook and direct somebody else’s script. Or at least start with someone else’s idea and re-write it. (But please not another Vanilla Sky. We’d never pay to see James L. Brooks make a thriller, why would we pay to see Crowe do one? What was he thinking?)
Looking forward to his Pearl Jam documentary – will be fantastic.
Yup. His problem is that he makes movies that studios don’t want to release anymore. Could James L. Brooks become an A-list filmmaker these days?
Crowe should start producing some indie mumblecore shit and parlay that into a Marshall Herskovitz-style TV career.
It’s a shame that such a great script like ‘Almost Famous’ almost got completely ruined as a movie by Kate Hudson’s acting. Everything in that movie was top notch (Hoffman, Crudup, Lee especially) except when Kate showed up onscreen and acted like she was in a high school play.
Lets have some Internet nut create an ‘AF’ where Hudson is completely edited out, like fanboys did when they removed JarJar Binks from ‘Star Wars’.
kind of like pro athletes. always bring it in their contract year and then often get fat and happy once they sign the big deal
same kind of lethargy here – just creative and not physical
He was never really much of an auteur, was he? Which is not to say he hasn’t made some good films, but he got into film tangentially (through music, writing Fast Times, etc.). He obviously has always loved music, so the Pearl Jam documentary should go over pretty well.
How about writing another book? Even interviewing another filmmaker or artist, a la Billy Wilder.
He needs to do something. Elizabethtown was an abomination (I saw the infamous TFF cut); a real creative and artistic dead zone. Orlando Bloom certainly didn’t help, either.
Not always the case:
You can argue Spielberg and Scorsese used to be “better,” but they’re both still technical masters and stay at or near the top of the game, Spielberg in particular trying new material and film stocks and visuals and always using the best actors. Obviously his status allows him access to the best and brightest, as does Scorsese’s rep, but consider:
Altman did some great work in his last decade or so. Frankenheimer had a nice late-career rennaissance and even if he did a couple junky potboilers here and there, most of his stuff was pretty true to his icy action sensibility.
Ridley and Tony are love-or-hate directors, but both guys are over 60 now and still direct with the energy of a hip-hop video kid, still prolific and stylish… same goes for Mann, all packing his movies with legit street sensibility and hip-hop flavor.
I think Jack South above was on to something, then, that it’s middle-of-the-road, non-genre guys who fall particularly into this trap: Brooks, Reiner, Crowe, Levinson… all HUGE names 15 or 20 years back, but they don’t really do material that plays to action audiences or “the kids,” but rather pink-fleshed-toned, 1.85:1 Castle Rock-style “relationshio” movies, and as such they’ve been semi-usurped by the Apatow stuff…. which seems to be the kind of thing that could follow right in its predecessors’ footsteps when the new quirky-humanist-romcom voice comes along.
Basically what I’m saying is, if Apatow wants career longevity, he should do hip-hop action movies in 2.35:1 with grainy skyscapes and more visual pizzazz.
kind of like how Eminem was no longer the “poor angry white boy from the hood” after he became rich, famous and notorious for his raps. After he became a millionaire, he was no longer the poor angry white boy from the hood and his angry raps weren’t as sincere anymore.
The clearest, most obvious example is 1970s George Lucas vs. 1990s George Lucas.
And I’m not writing Crowe off after one only-average film. (I loved Vanilla Sky).
Also, side rant:
ISN’T CROWE TOO OLD TO BE SO INTO *MUSIC*?
I love music as much as the next guy, but at 36 I realize I’m too old to be going to concerts and shit. Like, everyone there is 18 years old. Don’t “rock critics” and “music critics” feel a little silly being all 55 years old and talking up the poetic lyrics of Arcade Fire, then going to review shows where it’s all 15yo scene kids?
Crowe is more from the classic rock era, but still, like that Greg Behrendt routine used to go, isn’t there an age where “you’re too old to rock”?
Music is a very young man’s game, and outside of dino acts or just seguing into classic, I don’t know– I just bristle when Stephen King writes his column about rocking out to Black Eyed Peas or Avril Lavigne in his truck.
People over 30 should be banned from buying or downloading current music. It’s just absurd.
rr3333 … seriously what is your beef with Kate Hudson. You show up on every Cameron Crowe thread with the same tired line. Did she steal something or someone from you? A man or a movie role? Are you jealous, because your rant makes no sense.
Granted Hudson has shown almost no taste in projects since Almost Famous, but in that she is luminous and wonderful, and you’ll find very few people that disagree.
I’m waiting on MilkMan’s take.
I’m not sure if it’s a question of wealth, but maybe it has to do with the people you surround yourself with once you acquire wealth. Once you start listening to the hangers-on constantly kissing your ass, you’ve got nothing left to prove. I think post-Elizabethtown Crowe has taken such a beating that maybe he’s ready to buckle down again. We’ll see.
Pearl Jam: The “rock” band that doesn’t rock.
Christ, dudes, PLUG YOUR GODDAMN GUITARS IN, and stop with the folksy shit. I liked the first couple albums, but the jangly acoustic sound is BORING.
LEX’S LAW OF MUSIC: (Take notes):
If it’s possible to make a guitar sound like PANTERA, why would you play anything else? And who would listen to anything that isn’t hardcore metal or rap?
LexG wrote:
Brooks, Reiner, Crowe, Levinson… all HUGE names 15 or 20 years back, but they don’t really do material that plays to action audiences or “the kids,” but rather pink-fleshed-toned, 1.85:1 Castle Rock-style “relationshio” movies, and as such they’ve been semi-usurped by the Apatow stuff…. which seems to be the kind of thing that could follow right in its predecessors’ footsteps when the new quirky-humanist-romcom voice comes along.
Semi-usurped is the correct word. Reiner’s THE BUCKET LIST did connect with a fairly large audience and Levinson’s WHAT JUST HAPPENED? was at least a partial return to form.
In terms of Brooks and Crowe, the jury’s still out.
Lex G:
You can rock out at any age, just ask Dylan, but he’s so rock and roll he doesn’t give a shit about your opinion. same with Pearl Jam, and yes Cameron Crowe.
I think Elizabethtown was so awful because he actually didn’t care about it, “Freebird at the end?” Why not, fuck it.
Geez. Maybe everyone over 30 should be banned from expressing their opinions about music, too, eh Lex?
P.S. PJ’s latest album was pretty hard for them. Which admittedly isn’t very hard at all. But still.
Is this the Pantera you were talking about, Lex?
http://cdn-www.cracked.com/articleimages/wong/panterapast2.jpg
They don’t acknowledge their glam era, but they should have. Glam and hair metal is still harder than Pearl Jam.
Crowe is still too old to rock.
As Baba Booey once asked Stern when Howard was talking up some new, flash-in-the-pan band (Skunk Anise, actually): “If you went to a concert, would anyone there be your age?”
LexG, why should anyone care what you think? If they’re in their 50s and they still love rocking out to music, then by all means, they should go to concerts, rock their heads out and not give a fuck what anyone thinks.
fuck society’s norms of how old people should act and dress.
Dylan never really “rocked” that hard.
They talk up that mind-blowing Monterey set where “Dylan went electric!” like he was gonna be laying down some fucking Mercyful Fate riffs or something. When I saw/heard it, it was just some jangly reverb folk. Not hardcore at all.
since when does a single event signify a trend? Vanilla Sky was a fine little examination of the nature of reality, which as Chuck Klosterman will agree, is the only apt question following the internet boom. And then he fell on his face. Speilberg followed Amistad w/ Private Ryan, so why not wait for one or two more falls before giving up on the guy?
That said, Crowe could also be out of relevent things to say. I wonder if Funny People is Apatow’s peak. Fame, fear of death, and scoring Leslie Mann, and then what else is there that he has any original idea about?
Josh Massey: I agree completly.
It’s not at all that Crowe was too rich; its that he didn’t have an editor. EVERYONE needs an editor to participate in the creative process, to bounce ideas off of, to test a direction, to be told to tighten up. Or just when an idea itsn’t working. Hell, even we here act as that to Wells every so often. I think this was the first time Crowe didn’t have a strong arm there to temper him studio-wise or actor-wise. Maybe he earned too much freedom with his GREAT previous work.
Think the Wachowski Bros on the second and third Matrix, totally off the rail of what was entertaining of the first (who cared about the cave people). Or Micheal Douglas’ writer character Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys, crippled by too many ideas and craming them all in.
I loved the esseence of Elizabethtown (after I forgot about the excersize-knife) but there were too many ideas that Crowe didn’t hone together properly . And the idea barf of Ashton Kutcher to Orlando Bloom was poor casting twice over.
But because of Vanilla Sky, Maguire and Almost Famous, I’ll still see anything he does the first Friday of release.
Vanilla Sky and Jerry Maguire = his two masterpieces.
Because CRUISE IS GOD.
Raygo: You’re right. I rag on Hudson with every Crowe thread. i cant help it.
Why? My love for music started in the 70′s, and ‘Almost Famous’ was a love letter for 70s classic rock & could have been a top 10 ‘all-timer film’ for me, but, as cute as Hudson is in ‘AF’ (and she is beautiful in it), her performance was so amateurish, it affected the way i thought about the film overall.
In essence, Hudson ruined a ‘Hall of Fame’ film for me, and that pisses me off.
I was totally with Vanilla Sky until that goddamn elevator ride at the end. Talk about intentionally stripping an interesting film of any and all ambiguity. Note to any filmmakers attempting a cerebral metaphysical thriller: please don’t end your film with a character explaining everything that happened.
What Mark said. Crowe has a hollow skull. Blew his wad w/ Almost Famous. He has nothing to say. If he had any balls, which, judging from his movies, he doesn’t, he would make that, a man who finds that he has literally nothing left to say to anyone about anything, the subject of his next montage, er, I mean, film. He so obviously wants to talk about important things in his films, but he has none of the life experiences to go along with them. Or maybe he should just make a nice movie about a nice man who has a nice life with his nice wife in a nice house driving around town in his nice car to meetings with people who are nice to him because he is nice to them and no one says a mean thing to anyone and it’s all scored to Fleet Foxes or Joanna Newsom or whoever is currently the hot Barbeque Rock act du jour. I for one can’t stand Cameron Crowe. The only thing I like that he was associated with was Fast Times and thank god they didn’t let him direct it. That’s it. That’s what he should do. A remake of Fast Times. Except this time Stacey doesn’t have an abortion. She gives birth to a cute little tyke who speaks exclusively in Elvis Costello lyrics.
“We’re not groupies… We’re BAND-AIDs”
Most. Embarrassing. Shit. EEEEEEEVVVER.
Also, MilkMan rules. His post above is the TRUTH.
Milkman sucks. Fuck him.
I think filmmakers often have one most personal, most deeply felt, most “autobiographical” film in them, and once they’ve made that one, they’re spent. The interesting thing is that such a pivotal film is often not their biggest or most successful or most well known. Sometimes they go through their entire career without ever making that film, and sometimes (e.g., “Citizen Kane”) it’s their first film. For example, for Lucas, it was “American Graffiti.” For Coppola it was “Apocalypse Now.” For Spielberg it was probably “Schindler’s List.” For Scorsese it was “Last Temptation of Christ.” For Fellini it was “8 1/2.” For Kubrick it was “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For Ford it was “The Searchers.” For Hitchcock it was “Vertigo.” For Wes Anderson it was “Rushmore.” For Tarantino it was “Pulp Fiction.” For Chaplin it was “City Lights.” For Billy Wilder it was “Sunset Blvd.” For Clint Eastwood it was “Unforgiven.” For Cameron Crowe it was “Almost Famous.”
Graffiti was great, but I think Lucas worked himself close to death on Star Wars and was never the same again.
First off – Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
Not ever director can be Norman Taurog and have so many hits toward the end of their career.
Did Crowe get too rich? Or is he merely snakebit after the utter failure of Elizabethtown?
One of the exceptions to my rule: Ron Howard, who keeps turning out solidly directed Hollywood craft pieces. He’s the Howard Hawks of our era: a director who can work in almost any genre, with top-notch technical credentials and a very gentle hand making make solid genre films.
LexG: You have shit for brains. Seriously.
kind of like how Eminem was no longer the “poor angry white boy from the hood” after he became rich, famous and notorious for his raps. After he became a millionaire, he was no longer the poor angry white boy from the hood and his angry raps weren’t as sincere anymore.
Lex, aren’t you always saying just the opposite? That it’s sad when guys give in to age and quit keeping up on new music and fashions? Make up your mind, you’re making my head hurt.
I also feel exactly the opposite about Pearl Jam. I don’t much like ‘em either way, but they’re utterly unconvincing as rockers, no matter how hard Vedder yells. He has a folk/country voice, and should stick to that kind of music. He’s jean jacket, not leather. Anyone who liked them better than Nirvana is, well…I’ll be tactful and mature for once and just say that I politely disagree with them. And also that they’re morons with no taste.
You’re never too old to love music. But after a certain age, the way you love music changes.
The groups you love and listen to at age 15 mean more to you then than someone listening to the same groups, but 10 to 15 years older.
I may like Kings of Leon as a 33 y/o, but a 15 y/o has a vastly different perspective when it comes to liking or loving the same group.
…
Vanilla Sky sucks. It’s entire conceit is that a spoiled white boy gets a scare on his beautiful face and wants to be put in the freezer because he “can’t deal.”
Which, to me seeing people coming back from the Sandbox missing limbs, can only engender one response: F—. You. Cracker.
Worse than E-Town, which was pretty vile. (the movie and the place)
Are we really writing him off after one failure? And whatever you think of Elizabethtown, it wasn’t a monumental artistic disaster on the scale of, say, The Happening.
Why not apply this argument to someone like Coppola who’s made a string of absolute dogshit and was held in higher esteem than Crowe ever was? I mean, to go from the heights of Jerry Maguire to the depths of Elizabethtown is nowhere near as big a plunge as The Godfather to Jack.
And Vanilla Sky was better than the Spanish original, despite what pretentious language students at college will claim.
Same goes for The Departed and Infernal Affairs.
Here’s what money ruins: one’s ability to make a stranger cry. Speilberg may still be successful, but hasn’t made anyone cry since E.T. (See Schindler’s “this ring, three lives” speech, the bookends to Priivate Ryan, and all of Amistad.) He’s now just a technical master who knows how to stage action in a more coherent way than anyone else
Directors like Crowe, who depend on this powerful ability, such as during Regina King’s breakdown during MNF in Jerry Maguire, are done once they lose it. This is also why M. Night is ruined. He’s no less capable of delivering a twist, but he’s too separated from basic needs to deliver the necessary emotional scene before the twist, such as the “Do I make her proud?” car scene in 6th Sense.
Clint Eastwood deserves all the credit in the world for still being able to successfully deliver sentimental material.
Bosh: Elizabethtown is as bad as The Happening. Really. It might be worse, actually. I would say it is one of the most grating, syrupy, gag-inducing movies I have ever seen. I sound like one of the reviewers on Netflix.
LexG, why should anyone care what you think? If they’re in their 50s and they still love rocking out to music, then by all means, they should go to concerts, rock their heads out and not give a fuck what anyone thinks.
fuck society’s norms of how old people should act and dress.
I think Crowe and Levinson have the exact same dilemma: they both based a large part of their work on autobiographical material, and strip mined their youth to give us some great films. But after the well went dry, and they didn’t have any more memories worth turning into movies, they were stuck spinning their wheels.
I get shit from a younger friend of mine all the time because of the music I listen to because it’s young and vital and not fucking Jack Johnson 24/7 but I don’t give a fuck about the rest of the world because I’m going to my grave listening to the best stuff available. Am I supposed to watch nothing but goddamn Sam Mendes movies for the rest of my life too? Fuck the fogeys, fuck the kids, fuck what other people think about songs I listen to, FUCK THAT SHIT, SON.
The crap you get from a guy who can’t even keep his eyes off jailbait actresses…gee, THAT’S age appropriate, Lex.
Elizabethtown is probably worse than The Happening. And I’ve never even seen TH. It’s really hard to underestimate the suckage of that movie. And, as usual, Milkman’s right: Crowe’s never really had anything interesting to say.
Have any of you guys actually gone back and watched one of his films 5 years after it was released? They don’t really hold up at all, even most of his “good” ones (I’m looking at you, Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire). Just a real slog to sit through. I thought I remembered liking Singles, but after seeing part of it again recently I’m convinced it must have been Reality Bites.
I actually think Ben Stiller is a better director than CC. The Cable Guy got an enormous amount of critical bird-droppings when it was released (a lot of it prob. due to Carrey’s paycheck), but there’s a movie I find really underrated. Gets better almost every year.
A lot of people were making ridiculous Taxi Driver comparisons when Observe and Report came out (I know, I know…plot similarities are present) even though the tone was all wrong. Well, TCG’s tone actually isn’t that far-off from Scorsese’s angsty, post-cocaine period of the early ’80s. I’m not going to be so bold to say that it’s the new King of Comedy, but I don’t think the comparison is too far out of bounds, either.
So let me get this straight, pm…Welles, Lucas, Scorsese, Fellini, Kubrick, Ford, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Wilder, Eastwood (I sort of refuse to list Crowe here; I think he’s out of his league) are all “spent” after making their one great autobiographical film, but the exception to these filmmakers is Ron Howard? Really?
I am being a bit facetious, I guess your point is that the former filmmakers keep tackling the same themes and obsessions over and over again in their pictures. But I take issue with the Hawks comparison. Howard may make a lot of different kinds of films, but I don’t think most of them are very good — most aren’t even enjoyable within the genre. One exception I would say are his ’70s period pieces (Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon), which are fairly successful at recreating significant historical events.
“I think filmmakers often have one most personal, most deeply felt, most “autobiographical” film in them, and once they’ve made that one, they’re spent.”
I’m not sure what you mean by “spent” if you’re saying that, for instance, Hitchcock was “spent” immediately before doing ‘North by Northwest’ and ‘Psycho’ back to back… or by suggesting that ‘Pulp Fiction’ is more autobiographical or deeply felt than the other Tarantino movies [I think 'Jackie Brown' is the only one that has any sort of deep feeling to it].
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that you have a vaguely defined theory which is true enough after a fashion, but you’re trying to apply it far too broadly to too many directors.
Well, I don’t suggest one can apply it rigidly, but as the years go by, Vertigo clearly stands out as the Hitchcock film to end all Hitchcock films. It may not be your favorite, but it is the one film of his that best encapsulates his world view. “North by Northwest” is brilliant genre filmmaking, but it’s not Hitchcock baring his soul. And “Psycho”,” as Hitchcock admitted, is a twisted little exercise in narrative subversion. As for Tarantino, I would argue that yes, “Pulp Fiction” is the ur-Tarantino film. Again, it may not be his BEST film, or his most successful, or even his most emotionally satisfying one, but it is the one into which he seems to have poured the most of himself.
As for Ron Howard, I would put him and John Hughes in the same category: maligned directors of what most people dismiss as Hollywood froth, but which some day will be re-evaluated as insightful filmmaking. Laugh if you will, but I think Howard is the Hawks of his era, and Hughes is (please hold the vicious attacks) the Preston Sturges of his era.
I am so sick of hearing how filmmakers trying to emulate James L. Brooks – sorry, but the guy has not done a good movie in over 20 years! Broadcast News was excellent, but since then…..Spanglish, As Good as It Gets, and I’ll Do Anything. Wow, talk about cloying, pretentious crap – did you REALLY care about Adam Sandler’s family, did Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt have any chemistry, and could you really get into a musical with all of the setup scenes for musical numbers, but then NO musical numbers???? Brooks will always get a pass from me for only helping create The Simpsons, a show that has ten times more depth and humor than most of his movies.
As for Cameron Crowe, he is a good actor’s director, I’ll give him that – he got career best performances from Tom Cruise, Bridget Fonda, Jason Lee, Kate Hudson, Rene Zelwegger, and Cuba Gooding and WOW, these are actors that can actually be fingernails-on-chalkboard irritating in most movies and yet he makes them appealing. So I’ll give him enormous credit for that. But….
He has not really done an exceptional film since Say Anything; every film since then seems to have some great scenes and some good emotional beats, but bloated and just overstuffed. This guy does not know when to quit….why the hell should Jerry Maquire have been over 2 hours? It’s about a freaking sports agent, not a saga about the rise and fall of a criminal mastermind!
And I love Apatow, but I hope he’s not heading in this direction – his films are already too long, but at least they’re damn funny. If he keeps his films over two hours and they start to take themselves too seriously, that’s going to be dangerous.
Why bother reading anything LexG writes? Fuck him – if he wants to be taken seriously, then dispense with the the BS posts. He manages to be an assclown on two sites under the same name.
Crowe – prettty much went off the rails BEFORE Almost Famous (Hudson isn’t the only off casting in that film – look up pics of Crower from his youth and compare with Fugit).
BoshBarnet….wrote:
Are we really writing him off after one failure? And whatever you think of Elizabethtown, it wasn’t a monumental artistic disaster on the scale of, say, The Happening.
Why not apply this argument to someone like Coppola who’s made a string of absolute dogshit and was held in higher esteem than Crowe ever was?
When you’re Crowe or James L. Brooks or Kubrick, the slimness of creative output can count against you if you don’t hit it out of the park every time.
iamjoe wrote:
I loved the esseence of Elizabethtown (after I forgot about the excersize-knife) but there were too many ideas that Crowe didn’t hone together properly . And the idea barf of Ashton Kutcher to Orlando Bloom was poor casting twice over.
To my mind, a big dramatic deficit with ELIZABETHTOWN was Crowe’s having the father be dead, instead of, say, having the protagonist come home to a family reunion and be wary of facing his father after the running-shoe crisis and pinkslip in the beginning.
Perhaps another deficit was the feeling that, as filmmaking, Crowe seemed to be willing to shoot dozens of takes to, perhaps, let the right cloud pass over an exterior scene or until Orlando Bloom could come up with an expression that suggested inner life.
Nothing…I repeat nothing by a mainstream filmmaker will ever be as bad as The Happening. I hated Elizabethtown (why the fuck would you trust your two leads to two terrible actors?) but compared to The Happening it’s a fucking masterpiece.
I think Crowe is just out of inspiration. It happens. seems to have happened with Lawrence Kasdan. Kasdan was never gritty, but he wrote some terrific stuff in the 70′s and 80′s.
At least neither of them is selling out and making assembly line bullshit for Hollywood.
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