Todd Haynes takes a cheeky look at glam rock by Shawn Levy Velvet Goldmine, the latest film from itchy writer-director Todd Haynes (Poison, Safe), is nothing if not ambitious. The film is, to list some of its various parts, a history of British glam rock, an indictment of the conservative economics of the American 80's, a paean to sexual freedom, a shaggy-dog mystery story, and a speculative fiction that surmises, among other things, that Oscar Wilde was a space alien. Naturally, a scattershot approach like this will tend to produce mixed results, and Haynes doesn't make things very clear with the films multiple time-shifts and unreliable narrators. In short, for all its laudable reach, for its handful of impressive performances, and for its delightful and delighted play with fashion, makeup and decor, Velvet Goldmine is a lot like the glam rock that it celebrates: garish and shrill and outr, if undeniably sexy and cheeky. The film tells the story of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a character modeled on the likes of David Bowie, Brian Eno, Marc Bolan and Jim Morrison, a god of glam rock who rejected his fans in the mid-70's by faking his own death and then, when caught in the fraud, disappearing altogether. A decade later, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a young Briton working at a New York newspaper, is assigned to find out whatever happened to Slade. In a string of sequences cribbed (almost, in some cases, exactly) from Citizen Kane, Arthur, who went through his own youthful fascination with the fashions and sexual ambiguities of glam rock, tracks down some of Slade's old circle to try to find the reclusive star. Despite all the good filmmaking here, Velvet Goldmine finally falls from its own dispersed energy. The film juggles the memories of Slade's ex-wife (Toni Collette) and his first manager (Michael Feast) along with Arthur's own personal recollections, some set pieces (rock concerts and assorted happenings) and some pure fantasy (one scene, alluding to Haynes underground classic, The Karen Carpenter Story, is acted out by dolls). Slade is the object of the quest, but the soul of the film rests in the persona of Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), the Iggy Pop-ish dervish whose music and way of life lack Slade's craft, perhaps, but are also free of his guile and self-serving calculation. Wild and Slade were once partners -- lovers, even -- and the split between them helped drive Slade into ducking his public. (Arthur, too, has had a close-up brush with Slade, but the addled old rocker can't recall it when Arthur finally tracks him down.) All of this is played in a kind of sensual swoon by Haynes and company. A good third of the film is given over to musical numbers, some exceedingly elaborate. These are occasionally thrilling, conveying the giddy excitement that drove Haynes into the project, but they don't exactly tie things together. The acting, too, is infectious, although not quite uniformly. McGregor conveys Wild's rage viscerally (and, coincidentally, is a spitting image, during a scene in a recording studio, of Kurt Cobain). Collette shows more worldly depth than ever before, playing sexy and bitter and worldly wise with great skill. Rhys-Meyers, on the other hand, is mostly petulant -- just try to suppress the urge to smack him -- and comedian Eddie Izzard plays Slade's gaudy manager a la Keith Moon (heaven help us). Despite all the good filmmaking here, Velvet Goldmine finally falls from its own dispersed energy. Its so busy trying to drink in a lost era that it never really makes the case that the eras passing is worth mourning.

-----------------------------7d43a932801b6 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="userfile"; filename="C:\Documents and Settings\God Zilla\My Documents\VG Files\Venus\articles\out.html" Content-Type: text/html TODD HAYNES & CHRISTINE VACHON

The Velvet Touch By Lisa Kennedy

They don't complete each other's sentences--well, not always. But Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon have finished, in a sense, each other's films for seven years now. Poison, Dottie Gets Spanked, Safe. Add to this list, Vachon-produced movies like Tom Kalin's Swoon, Rose Troche's Go Fish, as well as Postcards From America, I Shot Andy Warhol, Kids, and Stonewall, and you get the big picture: As director and producer, Haynes and Vachon have teased the meanings of queer cinema. This month sees the release of their latest collaboration, Velvet Goldmine, coauthored with Haynes' former boyfriend and longtime editor, Jim Lyons. Vachon's frank and shockingly readable book about producing low-, lower-, lowest-budget films, Shooting To Kill (Avon, cowritten with film critic David Edelstein), is already in stores. As visually lush as its title promises, Goldmine delivers the glam-rock era a clef-style. A journalist (Christian Bale) is sent to uncover, 10 years after he disappeared, what happened to singer Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, embodying a slinky amalgam of David Bowie and Brian Ferry), who fled the spotlight at the apex of his and glam-rock's popularity. (Likewise, Ewan McGregor, as feral American rocker Curt Wild, channels absolute Iggyness even as he eerily evokes, with his blond tresses, a Kurt of a different, grungier moment.)It's a headturning journey through 70's Londong at its most resplendent, when boys could be boys in high heels, sequins, and feathers. Goldimine's denizens are Cabaret's grandchildren frolicking and fucking (up) beneath the long (eye)shadow of history. For all its big-budget beauty, Velvet Goldmine remains resolutely a Todd Haynes film. As in his other movies, identity--sexual and otherwise--is interrogated; narrative pleasure is seduced and thwarted and engaged again. Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax films and a burly and charismatic spinner of fine and effective buzz, recently copared Haynes to Martin Scorcese. Sure, Weinstein hopes Goldmine , like its title, reaps one at the box office, but he's on to something. Haynes has an abiding love for film language, and like Scorcese, who's worked for years with producer Barbara De Fina, Haynes has a tenacious and visionary partner in Vachon.
	OUT: Velvet Goldmine is the kind of film where people will ask, "Isn't that Bowie? Bryan Ferry? Oh, that must be Iggy." But Goldmine is not a biopic, right? TODD HAYNES: What I hope is that those kinds of questions would ulimately reflect back on what those artists were trying to do at the time. Bowie was already constructing himself as David Bowie before he began a series of other changes that define, really, what made him Bowie. Similarly, Iggy Pop constructed himself, named himself. ALthough it was a much more raw, violent performance (than Bowie's), it was still an act of theatrical excess. OUT: But you weren't even a teen when glam rock, well, rocked. Why the fascination with that point in time? HAYNES:What I love about that period is that the notions of authenticity and truth were really the first things to go. It really was an examination of surface. Unfortunately, in our culture that sounds like such an evasion. But in fact, if you read Oscar Wilde, surface can also liberate us. If anything speaks to the changes that teenagers go through on a minute-to-minute basis, this era was such a brilliant articulation of that: It's all right to dress up, find what's right for you, experiment. OUT: Do either of you feel any pressure, as original mavens of what has been dubbed the New Queer Cinema? CHRISTINE VACHON: I don't make movies with an agenda in mind, although a movie might have its own independent agenda. But you have to acknowledge, looking at all the films you've produced, that your work almost constitutes a chapter-by-chapter examination of gay history--from Genet to Stonewall to (activist artist) David Wojnarowicz to glam rock to Halston.
VACHON: And there are also movies that don't fit into that. And Halston isn't made yet! (laughter) No, it's true, I'm attracted to movies that are provocative or that I would want to see. They tend to be more edgy than not and deal with gender, which is endlessly fascinating. OUT: But you no longer have to be voices of a community? VACHON: No, especially now. If you want to go see a so-called gay movie, there's so much more choice than there used to be. HAYNES: Or less choice. (pauses) Sorry. Though it's sort of an accident, I'm happy that Velvet Goldmine poses some of the same questions being asked in queer theory, some of the healthy antigay ideas that have been coming out both in the U.K. and in the States; questions targeting the complacency of a very comfortable gay culture, which is now reflected in mainstream Hollywood films. The whole question of a fixed sexual orientation was definitely being explored in the '70's, and there are echoes of that going on today. OUT: How so? VACHON: Like, the kids who work for me. They call themselves queer, which ends up being a catchword for a kind of fluid sexuality. But friends of outs, closer to our age, have dared to transgress and go out with a member of the opposite sex. OUT: Speaking of transgression, Velvet Goldmine is not that easy a film, narratively. HAYNES: I watched it last night, and it really does operate like a musical. Although there are ideas in the film that I feel are provocative and resonant, I feel like they're couched in something that makes them not completely sensible. Musicals can be incredibly moving, but not really because of the plot. They become emblematic of something else--though they're often kind of silly. OUT: Do you have a favorite musical? HAYNES: I know Christine does. VACHON: What's mine? HAYNES: Jesus Christ Superstar. VACHON: Oh yeah, but that's more of a rock opera. HAYNES: What about The Sound of Music? Or Mary Poppins? OUT: There's something about Mary Poppins... HAYNES: It was the first movie most of us saw. It probably made me want to make films. VACHON: I tried to watch Mary Poppins with a bunch of nieces and nephews, and they were fine. But those bank scenes. I was like, Okaaaaaay! Dick Van--what's his name? HAYNES: Uh...Dyke. VACHON:...is really really irritating. OUT: Not to reduce you to the sum of your parts, but as a lesbian and a gay man collaborating... VACHON: Well, I wasn't a lesbian when Todd and I started working together. HAYNES: And I wasn't a fag. (with mock seriousness) We found our identities working together, and we're sticking with them. Actually, the thing I'm proudest of is how incredibly independent we've stayed. I never felt that I had to compromise my work to get it made, which is really unheard of today. OUT: One last thing: What's the deal with Ewan McGregor's pecker, which pops up yet again in Velvet Goldmine? He's fast becoming the Harvey Keitel of his generation. HAYNES: And thank God for him.