In the opening moments of ``Velvet Goldmine,'' which arrives today at Bay Area theaters, a foundling is left on the doorstep of a home in Victorian England. Eight years later, the young Oscar Wilde stands up in class and announces, with grave certainty and just a trace of pomposity, that when he grows up, ``I want to be a pop idol.'' Pop idols didn't exist in Wilde's time -- at least not by that name -- but in ``Velvet Goldmine,'' a vivid homage to the era of glam- rock, director Todd Haynes posits Wilde as the original dandy, the patron saint of style and spiritual godfather to a century of queer self-determinism. How else could a movement so outrageous, so ironic, so self-consciously flamboyant have emerged, Haynes suggests, were it not for Wilde's brilliant example? In the hands of Haynes, the gifted American director of ``Poison,'' ``Safe'' and ``Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,'' ``Velvet Goldmine'' is more than a gilded valentine to glam rock, to that brief, early-'70s phenom that erupted after the molting of the hippies and before the advent of punk, when the New York Dolls and Roxy Music and T. Rex held tongues in cheek and mixed fashion, decadence and rock-star antics. It's also an investigation of identity, gender and exhibitionism --of the fickleness of pop media and souless mechanics of image making. Strangely enough, it's not all that fun. True, Haynes and his production team have lavishly re-created the earmarks of the era: the feathered boas and platform shoes, the shaved eyebrows and sequined boleros, the flowing scarves and rabbit-fur chubbies, the flared hip-huggers and David Bowie-as-rooster hairdos. But even with that riot of plumage and color, with actors who ably conjure the cocky androgyny and chintzy theatricality of the era, and a sensational, reckless performance by Ewan McGregor as a rock star named Curt Wild, ``Velvet Goldmine'' seems cold and impenetrable. One can admire it, but it's hard to get caught up in it. The film's largest problem is the central character of Brian Slade, a David Bowie-like figure who worships the McGregor character and remakes himself in the stage persona of Maxwell Demon, a direct reference to Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. Played by British actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Slade never registers onscreen: He's supposed to be a blank slate, a cipher through which the pop world is filtered and reflected, but that doesn't make for particularly good storytelling. Haynes, who studied semiotics at Brown University, has always resisted sentimentality in his films, opting for a complex, multilevel look at culture, transgression and image making -- often delivered with a austere sheen. In ``Velvet Goldmine'' he creates a ``Citizen Kane''-like structure in which a newspaper reporter, played by Christian Bale, investigates the faked assassination and disappearance of Slade from the vantage point of 1984 -- 10 years later. When Bale isn't hunting down Rhys Meyers' ex-wife Angie, an American poser played by Toni Collette (and based on Bowie's ex, also named Angie), we're seeing Bale's own recollections of being a glam-boy-in- training, or catching flashbacks of Rhys Meyers' conversion into glam icon or McGregor's electrifying stage performances. Past fades into present, dream into fact into self- serving fiction. Haynes' technique is distancing and convoluted, but whenever McGregor gets a chance, he demonstrates a stage presence so fierce and energetic that he might want to think about splitting his time between movies and music. His Curt Wild is an amalgam of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Mick Ronson of T. Rex, but also evokes grunge legend Kurt Cobain with his stringy blond hair and air of tragic inevitability. He's a wonderful actor, but he can't save ``Velvet Goldmine'' from being the emotionally chilly experience it is. And don't expect to hear any of Bowie's music: The erstwhile glam prince denied Haynes the rights to his music. Instead, we get a mix of original recordings, new songs written in the mode of glam rock (``Ballad of Maxwell Demon'') and covers of vintage glam-era tunes.

-----------------------------7d415715801b6 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="userfile"; filename="C:\Documents and Settings\God Zilla\My Documents\VG Files\Venus\articles\sacramentobee.html" Content-Type: text/html Velvet Goldmine

By Joe Baltake Bee Movie Critic Rating: Three and a half stars Todd Haynes, perhaps the most singular of today's young filmmakers, is a contradiction in progress. He's a movie fantasist, not unlike someone such as Tim Burton or Joe Dante, but instead of making jokey comedies or loopy adventure films, Haynes specializes in art-house/message films. From his first film, the suppressed "Superstar," an unauthorized biopic in which a Barbie doll played the late Karen Carpenter, to his omnibus film, "Poison" (based on stories by Jean Genet), and "Safe" (in which Julianne Moore starred as a housewife allergic to the environment), Haynes has carved out a niche for himself, making the kind of bracing films that no one else does. "Velvet Goldmine," his latest, comes with the same brand of controlled craziness that has motivated his other features, but this one is much more ambitious, with a bigger budget and more glitz to make his strange pop-mythological fantasies all the more dazzling. Structured as an investigative piece along the lines of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" but visually closer to Ken Russell's biographies of composers ("The Music Lovers," "Mahler" and "Litsztomania"), "Velvet Goldmine" takes on the rock-opera form as it revivifies the sights and sounds of Britain's glam rock era. It projects us back to the 1970s when costumed, sexually ambiguous rock stars such as David Bowie, Elton John and Brian Eno reigned. The film examines with some bravado the way these men brought elements long confined to the gay underground to the screaming masses. Haynes is an openly gay filmmaker and all of his movies have been clever allegories about homosexuality and how society deals with it. But "Velvet Goldmine" is his most direct movie to date. Seesawing back and forth in time, the film is about a young journalist named Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) assigned in 1984 to do a story on the rise and fall of a long-lost glitz rock star named Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), whose career came to a numbing halt after Slade faked his own assassination on stage during a concert. He got the attention he wanted, but when it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, Slade was ostracized by betrayed fans and associates and went into hiding, disappearing. Haynes obviously modeled Slade after Bowie, and the character comes replete with an onstage alter ego whom Slade calls Maxwell Demon. Rhys-Meyers, who is excellent, suitably petulant and vague in the role, plays Slade as a practicing bisexual, married to Mandy (the riveting Toni Collette), an American woman with British pretensions, but not beyond sleeping with his American, Iggy Pop-like counterpart, Curt Wild (played with wild abandon, in keeping with his character's name, I guess, by Ewan McGregor). As Welles did with "Citizen Kane," Haynes keeps all this artistically askew, as his film jumps around as madly as his large cast of characters do. Faces pop up, are made to seem important and then are dismissed by the director, disappearing (like Slade) ... only to surface again later. This is especially true of another rock star named Jack Fairy (Micko Westmoreland), who is introduced in the film's crucial first scene as a little boy inspired by the ghost of Oscar Wilde and who later, as a professional, would pass on Wilde's influence to Brian Slade and others. As Stuart interviews Mandy and Curt and a whole slew of others, recalling how much he idolized Slade as a youth and how much he was inspired by the dubious revolutionary politics of his music, he starts to question his own sexuality. He's a walking metaphor for a closeted man waiting for a revelation, for a sign to come out. "Velvet Goldmine" takes the subversive, unpopular stance that, yes, celebrities do operate as role models -- that we are as influenced by their irresponsible behavior as we are by their "art." It's about people who made decadence commonplace. This time, Haynes powers his message with a lot of music, some of it old, some of it new, all of it brilliantly staged (and sung by its stars, with no dubbing). And all of it is aptly hallucinatory, man. The glitter of glam rock is gloriously over the top in "Velvet Goldmine," writer-director Todd Haynes' visually intoxicating look at a fictional group of people swept up in the early '70s musical movement. Technically, Haynes' concepts are often astonishing. He stages elaborate, otherworldly musical numbers at various points within the film -- sometimes to propel the action, sometimes just because he feels like it. In almost every case, the glitter and lipstick sequences are perfectly in sync with the free-wheeling direction of the rest of the film. Haynes' concepts are a bit far-reaching at times, most notably in his claim of Oscar Wilde as the original glam-rock god. More often than not, though, "Velvet Goldmine" rides a sinfully delicious balance between historical fact and sparkling fiction. Joey Guerra Houston Chronicle "Velvet Goldmine" is a camp classic about classic camp, or would be if it had that kind of energy level. As it is, it's about nothing much, namely glam rock. Todd Haynes's film about the flare-up of the in-your-face artifice of the '70s is easily his most ambitious, but he runs smack into the limitations imposed upon him by the intrinsically glitter-deep subject matter. Given that, and the fact that his druggy protagonists spend liberal amounts of screen time comatose, perhaps you will see why the film derives most of its entertainment value from the music by the likes of Brian Eno, Gary Glitter, Brian Ferry, and Iggy Pop. Jay Carr The Boston Globe With all the drugs, glitter and pansexual lovemaking in "Velvet Goldmine," England does, indeed, swing like a pendulum. It's about the '70s glam-rock scene. It's about how much writer/director Todd Haynes loves sequins. But, mostly, this mind-blowing visual feast is about the glory of music -- back before it was institutionalized, back when you could still go to a big concert and be surprised, back when it was vital and spiky and fun, as if they'd just discovered the electric guitar (which, come to think of it, isn't far from the truth). It doesn't make much sense to talk about the "Velvet Goldmine" characters. They're mostly pretty things on whom Haynes hangs his stunning images and cheeky swipes from the structure and characters of "Citizen Kane." Instead of dialogue, the virtually nonstop songs express the feelings of freedom and release that propelled the glitter-rock era. Chris Hewitt Knight Ridder Newspapers

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THE HEADY YEARS OF GLITTER ROCK ARE RECREATED IN TODD HAYNE'S 'VELVET GOLDMINE'

"For all the actors, there's a spirit of going for it," says director Todd Haynes, who is making his own departure from the astringent world of his last film, 1995's Safe, a critically acclaimed study of one woman's growing inability to live with the toxins of daily life. In Velvet Goldmine he has created a lush paean to a fleeting but revolutionary moment in '70's pop history, when a largely British group of musicians pushed back the cultural boundaries of sexual identity, freedom, and performance art. " Glam rock, from the very beginning, acknowledged its artifice," says the 37-year-old American director, who was peripherally aware of the the movement as a youngster but didn't really respond to it until his late teens, when glam had given way to punk and disco. "It brazenly lied, and it maybe ended up being more honest than the more earnest, heartfelt movements that surrounded it."

EWAN MCGREGOR HAS JUST DROPPED HIS BLACK LEATHER hip huggers, and he's not wearing any underwear. Although he's done it beforeÐboth Trainspotting and The Pillow Book feature full-frontal nude scenesÐaudiences have never seen anything quite like the frenzied display of bouncing private parts and energetic mooning the that Scottish star is summoning for his role as platinum-wigged glam-rocker Curt Wild, in Velvet Goldmine. Drenching his torso in oil and sprinkling himself with gold glitter, McGregor belts out the lyrics to "TV Eye" by Iggy and the Stooges. (Iggy Pop was one of the inspirations for Wild.) "I thought this would get me over the hump of wanting to be a rock star," the actor later says, laughing. "But it's just fueling my need."
"It's about freeing yourself from conventional morality," agrees Christian Bale, (Little Women), whose character turns to glam's heroes to overcome his miserable adolescence. "And it wasn't just the sex. The whole era was about letting rip and releasing everything and having a fantastic time." Told through a circuitous, Citizen KaneÐlike structure (a source of confusion for some who saw its first public screening, at this year's Cannes film festival), Goldmine traces the rise and fall of androgynous rock star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his stage persona Maxwell Demon. Ten years after Slade fakes his own assassination and then disappears, a journalist (Bale) is assigned to do an investigative feature on the singer. He seeks out three people who hold pieces of the puzzle: Slade's ex-manager, his embittered ex-wife (Toni Collette), and the self-destructive American rocker (McGregor) who had been Slade's inspiration and torment.
Along the way, Goldmine indulges in a CaligulaÐesque feast of decadent cinematic taboo,k including orgies, pansexual couplings among the grossly superficial characters, and a cornucopia of drugs. The costumes alone (by Sandy Powell, an Oscar nominee for Orlando and The Wings of the Dove)Ðwith their multihued satin flares, crushed velvets, feather boas, and platform heelsÐare worth the price of admission. "I would have paid to come to work dressed like this," says Collette (Muriel's Wedding), whose Mandy Slade has undergone a wig-to-toe makeover every time she appears onscreen. Although the film's heady atmosphere has clearly been influenced by the look and tone of such movies as Performance and A Clockwork Orange, much of Goldmine's plot, characters, and situations have been lifted directly from glam history. Iggy Pop and David Bowie are the film's two most obvious inspirations, but echoes of the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry, and T. Rex's Marc Bolan abound (see below). Finding the right actors to portray these flamboyant, preening creatures sent Haynes on search missions back and forth across the Atlantic. Nicole Kidman expressed interest in Mandy Slade, before becoming imprisoned on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. And several prominent American actors were after the role of Curt Wild, but Haynes didn't bite. "The new generation of American actors, they're all like Johnny Depp: brooding and internal," he says. "There's no live wire. I wanted someone who could fly off the stage and just be aflame." After catching a screening of Trainspotting prior to its U.S. release, he made his live-wire connection. McGregor would not accept the part, however, until he was assured he would be allowed to do his own singing in the film. "Then I came to do it, and I was just so fucking scared," says McGregor. "But in fact it's worked out really well. I've always sung, but I've never done stuff like this, screaming and shouting. But I find it all comes out in thrashing around the stage. It all makes sense-hopefully."
Rhys Meyers, who also sings in the film, had doubts about his role too. "Everybody would think that my apprehension would be about these sex scenes, that I have to snog Ewan," says the then-nineteen-year-old actor between takes. "That's the last thing I'm worried about. It's actually a perkÐyou know, he's a very good looking boy. [But] it's a difficult thing to doÐconvince people that you're a rock star." His anxiety on the set is palpable: "I'm not happy with any of the stuff I've done up to now. I feel incredibly insecureÐI look in the mirror, and I've got blue hair and crazy makeup and crazy clothes and platforms." That the self-flagellating actor has become romantically involved with the ebullient Collette is one of the more interesting developments of the shoot.
The soundtrackÐmasterminded by R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, who was also an executive producer on Velvet Goldmine ("Todd's my favorite American director," he says)Ðfeatures a combination of original recordings and cover version of tracks by Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Steve Harley, R. Rex, and Iggy and the Stooges, plus new material written and performed by Shudder to Think, Pulp, and Grant Lee Buffalo. For the mythical bands in the film, Stipe assembled then-and-now parings, such as former Roxy Music sax-and-oboe player Andy McKay and Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood and Thom Yorke. Conspicuous by his absence is David Bowie, the godfather of glam, whose Ziggy Stardust persona is an obvious model for Brian Slade's Maxwell Demon. His only (unintentional) contribution is the film's title, which Haynes took from an obscure track on the 1990 reissue of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust "He didn't control the title, somehow," says Haynes. Bowie did, however, control the rights to his back catalog, and rebuffed Hayne's and Stipe's requests to use six of his songs, including "All the Young Dudes," which Haynes had always envisioned as being the pivotal track of the film. The reason that Bowie has given for the refusal is that he has plans for his own film based on Ziggy Stardust. Comments in recent interviews, in which he has labeled Velvet Goldmine a "competitive" project, also suggest that he wasn't entirely happy with the way Haynes appropriated a seminal chapter in his life. "I don't want to comment on that," Haynes demurs. "This film comes too much from the desire to pay tribute to him, and what he did at that time, to start getting into that." "The era left lasting marks on an entire generation, including myself and Todd," says Stipe. "A door opened with glam rock, and shut shortly after, concerning sexuality and the idea of a very clear division between different types of desire. People just got very narrow-minded again." "Glam is still kind of a shock," agrees Haynes. "More than punk isÐthe safety pin really doesn't do it anymore. But something about [glam's] androgyny and skinniness and the sort of death-mask quality of it all is still really powerful." Matt Mueller is Premiere's London editor.

Golden Years HOW MUCH OF 'VELVET GOLDMINE' REALLY HAPPENED? ZIGGY played guitar. So did Iggy . But Iggy never got onstage and jammed with ZiggyÐand certainly not doing an Eno song with a guitar solo by Robert Fripp.
	Rock 'n' roll trainspotters are going to have a field day picking out the points at which Velvet Goldmine converges with and diverges from the wild-and-wooly history of glam rock. Goldmine's Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is an obvious stand-in for David Bowie (although his costumes are often more reminiscent of those worn by the failedÐand deadÐwould-be American Bowie, Jobriath). Slade concocts an alter ego, Maxwell Demon, not unlike Bowie's own Ziggy Stardust, and finds inspiration in the unschooled but galvanizing figure of Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), an American rocker with a lot of Iggy Pop in him; Wild, like Pop, has a trailer park in his past and enjoys exposing himself onstage (although Wild never performs some of the more extreme '70's antics Pop indulged in while fronting his group The Stooges, such as carving up his chest with a steak knife or laying his exposed member on top of a cranked-up speaker and watching it vibrate).
Wild's black fingernail polish will remind observant viewers of the similar '70's stylings of Lou Reed, another American rocker whose career got a boost from Bowie. Reed's songwriting with the Velvet Underground was a huge influence on the glam-rock movement; indeed, Reed had been singing about such decadent topics as receiving fellation from a transvestite as far back as 1967.
Slade's wife in Goldmine, Mandy, seems a less bitter version of Bowie's wife Angie, who caused a stir by writing in her memoirs that she walked in on her husband in bed with Mick Jagger (whose analog is nowhere to be found in Goldmine, though Mandy does catch her husband in bed with Wild). And though Mandy seems hopelessly devoted to Slade, Angie was less so to Bowie; as ex-Stooges Ron Asheton recalls in the book Please Kill Me, "While David Bowie was palling around with Iggy, I was fucking David's wife. He didn't mind, I didn't mind, we never felt weird about any of that."
Which raises the question: Did Bowie and Iggy, like Slade and Wild, sleep together? Seems unlikely, give that Iggy and his Stooges were Detroit spuds with a pronounced homophobic streak. Asheton has said of the Bowie-sponsored Stooges album, Raw Power: "We were all mad because they'd made Iggy look like a faggot on the cover." Ultimately, it matters not. Writer-director Todd Haynes works the material to suit his ideas, not history. The fact that he names one of Slade's albums Lipstick Traces, after an audacious book by Greil Marcus, should clue you in to the nature of his game. Haynes gives Slade a Brian Epstein-ish manager (of Beatles fame) to discard, and morphs Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno into a postmodern Oscar Wilde figure named Jack Fairy. Which Haynes has every right to do. But in a way it's a shame, since the Slade-Wild re-creation of the song "Baby's on Fire" is, in fact, utterly lame when compared to the Eno original. ÐCHAS TURNER