kezzabou Reviews

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Would you change anything?

[29 October 2011]

Peggy Sue Bodell attends her 25 year high school reunion, only to collapse and be transported back to 1960, her senior year. The more she wants to change things, the more she discovers that she makes the same choices as she did before, with a few adjustments. Although she starts by wishing she was a free spirit, and the desire to run away with the local bad boy, she discovers he wants to be a polygamist writer whose wives would take care of chickens for their income. This is at odds with her personal values and she realizes that she is not what she thought she was. There is more self-discovery in this movie than there is learning about those around her, but she does pick up some lessons from them along the way.

A side note: I noticed on one review that I read someone was using the scene with Peggy's mother having her jewelry appraised to indicate that she was becoming an independent woman in the early days of the women's movement. I interpreted it that Peggy's parents were dealing with the same problem that led to Peggy and Charlie's problems, which she says herself - "house payments"! Her father owns a hat shop, a business which is surely on the decline at this time, foreshadowing family financial catastrophe in the years ahead. Did anyone else think this, or was there something else going on in your opinion?

Almost Famous (2000)

Music Will Set You Free

[27 October 2011]

William Miller would be but four years older than I am, if he were a real person. Like William, I was protected from the "evils" of rock and roll by strict parents, which had claimed my siblings during the late 60s. My brother and sisters are 11, 16 and 17 years older than I am, and I was 10 in 1974, the year in which "Almost Famous" takes place, so perhaps I'm more than a smidge partial to this movie, and the way I so strongly identified with it.

The movie brought to mind the first time I listened to Queen's "A Night At The Opera" and Styx's "The Grand Illusion" - the first time I'd heard rock anywhere outside of my brother's closed bedroom door. It reminded me of the fascination I had with magazines like Tiger Beat, Creem, 16, Song Hits and the like during the mid-'70s and how I wanted to be a music journalist then, so I could meet the people who had entered my life and turned my world upside down. I would read about the stuff going on in New York City at CBGB and long to go, even to go to Long Island and hope for a glimpse of Billy Joel. (That was back when you could say Ramones, Billy Joel and Black Sabbath in the same conversation.) Because we lived so far from the venues where the larger acts played, I never got to see Queen or Styx growing up. It wasn't until I was 16 that I got to see my first rock concert, Cheap Trick in 1980. I still remember being absolutely enraptured with them all over again, even without Tom Petersson on bass. William Miller's rapture is my rapture, recreated. His dream was once my dream. Unlike me, William got to live it in his alter ego, "Almost Famous" writer/director Cameron Crowe.

This movie is the ultimate for me in vicarious living. About the closest I ever got to the rock and roll life that still burns within me is when I interviewed for a receptionist job at Bad Animals Studios, where Heart (including Mrs. Cameron Crowe) record in Seattle.

It's a throwback to my life at that time, a fond collection of memories and the songs I would hear every day from the moment the floodgates opened that cold day in '74 at my best friend's house.

The performances are honest, real and delivered with such credibility that you forget you're watching a movie, not a documentary, at times. Patrick Fugit as William definitely captures his initial innocence and later the frustration of finding out what his heroes are really like. Kate Hudson has that wide-eyed-but-in-on-the-joke look about her for much of the time, watching the young writer with amusement, but when she finds out her true value to the band, the illusion shatters and she becomes more real. Billy Crudup and Jason Lee's conflicted characters reflect the egos I often saw in my own brother and his best friends when they were struggling for their own brass rings.

All in all, whenever I watch this movie, I again become the 14 year old I used to be, and remember dreams and that inevitable loss of innocence we all must go through on our journey into adulthood. But that doesn't come without a wakeup call, without a price - the price being that we are never quite the same again.

Queen: Greatest Video Hits 2 (2003 Video)

"Scandal" =/= AIDS theme!

[7 May 2009]

A reviewer in 2004 said that the song "Scandal" showed a lot of what Freddie was dealing with during the early years of dealing with his HIV status.

Not so.

The song was composed by Brian May, and it was about the media hassling him and his family after he had a brief affair with his then-assistant, a woman named Julie. (He was already in a relationship with Anita Dobson.) The resultant media coverage inspired him to write "Scandal".

Many people read far too many messages into later Queen songs, messages that are simply not there.