The glitter. The feathers. The mascara. The glam. Ziggy Stardust lives again in "Velvet Goldmine."
Okay, this pop-rock-biopic is not about David Bowie, but it’s not hard to make the connection between the androgynous alter-ego Bowie created in the late 1960s and the one in "Velvet Goldmine," Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). At the beginning of the movie, an assassin shoots Slade in mid-performance, spraying glitter, feathers and blood everywhere. Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), an adoring fan just starting to awaken to his own bisexuality, is in the crowd that day. He’s paralyzed by the apparent death of his idol.
Flash forward ten years. Stuart is now a journalist and, on a slow news day, he’s given the job of finding out what really happened to Slade who, as it turns out, faked his own death. Stuart grudgingly takes the assignment and starts interviewing those who knew the enigmatic Slade: his ex-wife (the impressive Toni Collette), his first mentor and lover (Michael Feast) and the self-destructing rock star Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor, bearing an eerie resemblance to Kurt Cobain).
Part "Citizen Kane," part "Eddie and the Cruisers," this is a stylish movie that pays no heed to the conventional formulas of film as it jumps back and forth through time and reality as Stuart pursues his leads. "Velvet Goldmine" is a surreal mind trip on the order of the Pink Floyd movie "The Wall," where nothing is as it seems. Are we watching Slade’s life or is it one of his music videos?
In the end, however, "Velvet Goldmine" turns out to be all glitter and little substance. Brian Slade remains a mystery, a shadowy question mark whose motivations are never satisfactorily explained. I really didn’t care what was behind his facade. The only characters I felt anything for were those portrayed by Collette and Bale and that, I think, is due more to their intensely-felt performances than the characters themselves.
"Velvet Goldmine" is in love with its own flamboyant outrageousness, flaunting bisexuality with a fierce, in-your-face attitude that makes no apologies. Conservative viewers must either put up or shut up. In fact, there probably won’t be any conservative viewers left after the first half-hour. If they’re smart, they’ll have returned the video to the store for a more substantial film.
Starring Ewan McGregor (Star Wars: Episode 1, Trainspotting) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Governess, Michael Collins)--executive producer Michael Sti...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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