Post Production Details - U.S. Premiere
May. 8th, 2005 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vardathemessageThe film premiered in the United States at the New York Film Festival on Thursday October 1st 1998, (and, appropriately, was screened again that Saturday at midnight - on the Friday in between there was a party at the Killer Films offices.)
In Shooting to Kill, Christine Vachon says, "The New York Film Festival, which is the showcase for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is the most selective and the toniest, regarding each acceptance – perhaps justifiably – as a momentous event in the life of its makers. ... The only thing to consider with NYFF is that it means an automatic review in the New York Times – which, if it's bad, can sour a film's prospects." Fortunately, Times critic Janet Maslin raved about it. Read her review
'Velvet Goldmine': Glittering Ode to the Days of Ziggy Stardust
Todd Haynes' dazzlingly surreal "Velvet Goldmine" offers a celestial "Here's looking at you, kid" to the heyday of British glitter rock in general and to the David Bowie of the early 1970s in particular. Without addressing Bowie directly, it appropriates his shimmering, protean aura in virtuoso ways that put ordinary period filmmaking or time-capsule musicology to shame.
The astounding Haynes, whose last film ("Safe") took place on an entirely different planet from this one, brilliantly reimagines the glam-rock '70s as a brave new world of electrifying theatricality and sexual possibility, to the point where identifying precise figures in this neo-psychedelic landscape is almost beside the point. "Velvet Goldmine" tells a story the way operas do: blazing with exquisite yet abstract passions, and with quite a lot to look at on the side.
Structured as a rock "Citizen Kane" with an extraterrestrial Rosebud, "Velvet Goldmine" traces its tendrils back to Oscar Wilde, whom it imagines as a schoolboy. ("I want to be a pop idol," this child sweetly announces.) A century later, the Wildean spirit of flamboyance is spectacularly reborn, ready to erupt into the glittery, pansexual pop utopia over which Bowie so dramatically presided.
The film, with a vibrant soundtrack of glam-era homages and originals (performers like Roxy Music, T. Rex, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop are interwoven ingeniously), doesn't force its musical references on audiences, but it evokes them with vast fondness and fascination. "People have certain memories that they hold very dear, so you want to remain true to them," Christine Vachon, the film's audacious producer, has explained.
Out of the wild Ken Russellish phantasmagoria of "Velvet Goldmine" several essential characters emerge, central among them the Bowiesque Brian Slade. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a stunningly pretty, insolent, snake-hipped presence, he embodies the provocative and mysterious heart of the film. Haynes, cerebral as ever despite this film's explosion of visual sensuality, surrounds Slade with implicit questions about art and inspiration, truth and honesty, passion and repression. "You live in terror of NOT being misunderstood," Slade is eventually told by Mandy (Toni Collette), another witchily familiar figure here. Mandy is an American whose transformation into London party girl is, we're told, a great source of amusement to one and all.
Playing what he has rightly called "a birthday present of a part," Ewan McGregor makes a fabulously charismatic rock star named Curt Wild, who is both reproach and object of fascination for Brian Slade. Whatever else he may be, McGregor's often hilariously decadent Curt Wild is the real thing. With typically wicked wit, the film mentions that Curt underwent early shock treatments "to fry the fairy clean out of him" and that the net effect of this was "to make him bonkers every time he heard an electric guitar." The resultant mad-dog stage presence, with as much Jim Morrison as Iggy Pop, is exultantly displayed.
In a film that has at least one more major character than it needs, and that like "Safe" overworks its elusiveness in ways sure to confound some audiences, Christian Bale plays the journalist a la "Kane" who investigates Brian Slade from the chilly distance of 1984. That period is rendered no less fancifully than the film's rainbow days, as Bale's doleful Arthur Stuart reaches out from his dreary present to a past that both entices and humiliates him. Arthur, the fan who is forever linked to Curt Wild in one of the film's most exquisitely imaginative visions, conveys all the wistful distance of what it means to see the events here from the outside, looking in.
Another review of the film states, "While introducing his latest film, Velvet Goldmine, during the New York Film Festival, director Todd Haynes likened it to an acid trip whose hallucinatory effects, though barely noticeable at first, would take hold of us and not let go until the lights came up. Indeed, the vast majority of the audience stayed on through the film's final credits, as if they wished to stay submerged in the film's stupor for as long as possible. Like any good narcotic experience, Velvet Goldmine creates a wild high. When it is over, however, it leaves us hating ourselves for enjoying something so superficially pleasing. But what a high it is!" The mostly positive review by David Ng, here.
Here is a transcript of the press conference attended by Todd Haynes, Christine Vachon and Musical Director Randall Poster.
In Shooting to Kill, Christine Vachon says, "The New York Film Festival, which is the showcase for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is the most selective and the toniest, regarding each acceptance – perhaps justifiably – as a momentous event in the life of its makers. ... The only thing to consider with NYFF is that it means an automatic review in the New York Times – which, if it's bad, can sour a film's prospects." Fortunately, Times critic Janet Maslin raved about it. Read her review
'Velvet Goldmine': Glittering Ode to the Days of Ziggy Stardust
Todd Haynes' dazzlingly surreal "Velvet Goldmine" offers a celestial "Here's looking at you, kid" to the heyday of British glitter rock in general and to the David Bowie of the early 1970s in particular. Without addressing Bowie directly, it appropriates his shimmering, protean aura in virtuoso ways that put ordinary period filmmaking or time-capsule musicology to shame.
The astounding Haynes, whose last film ("Safe") took place on an entirely different planet from this one, brilliantly reimagines the glam-rock '70s as a brave new world of electrifying theatricality and sexual possibility, to the point where identifying precise figures in this neo-psychedelic landscape is almost beside the point. "Velvet Goldmine" tells a story the way operas do: blazing with exquisite yet abstract passions, and with quite a lot to look at on the side.
Structured as a rock "Citizen Kane" with an extraterrestrial Rosebud, "Velvet Goldmine" traces its tendrils back to Oscar Wilde, whom it imagines as a schoolboy. ("I want to be a pop idol," this child sweetly announces.) A century later, the Wildean spirit of flamboyance is spectacularly reborn, ready to erupt into the glittery, pansexual pop utopia over which Bowie so dramatically presided.
The film, with a vibrant soundtrack of glam-era homages and originals (performers like Roxy Music, T. Rex, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop are interwoven ingeniously), doesn't force its musical references on audiences, but it evokes them with vast fondness and fascination. "People have certain memories that they hold very dear, so you want to remain true to them," Christine Vachon, the film's audacious producer, has explained.
Out of the wild Ken Russellish phantasmagoria of "Velvet Goldmine" several essential characters emerge, central among them the Bowiesque Brian Slade. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a stunningly pretty, insolent, snake-hipped presence, he embodies the provocative and mysterious heart of the film. Haynes, cerebral as ever despite this film's explosion of visual sensuality, surrounds Slade with implicit questions about art and inspiration, truth and honesty, passion and repression. "You live in terror of NOT being misunderstood," Slade is eventually told by Mandy (Toni Collette), another witchily familiar figure here. Mandy is an American whose transformation into London party girl is, we're told, a great source of amusement to one and all.
Playing what he has rightly called "a birthday present of a part," Ewan McGregor makes a fabulously charismatic rock star named Curt Wild, who is both reproach and object of fascination for Brian Slade. Whatever else he may be, McGregor's often hilariously decadent Curt Wild is the real thing. With typically wicked wit, the film mentions that Curt underwent early shock treatments "to fry the fairy clean out of him" and that the net effect of this was "to make him bonkers every time he heard an electric guitar." The resultant mad-dog stage presence, with as much Jim Morrison as Iggy Pop, is exultantly displayed.
In a film that has at least one more major character than it needs, and that like "Safe" overworks its elusiveness in ways sure to confound some audiences, Christian Bale plays the journalist a la "Kane" who investigates Brian Slade from the chilly distance of 1984. That period is rendered no less fancifully than the film's rainbow days, as Bale's doleful Arthur Stuart reaches out from his dreary present to a past that both entices and humiliates him. Arthur, the fan who is forever linked to Curt Wild in one of the film's most exquisitely imaginative visions, conveys all the wistful distance of what it means to see the events here from the outside, looking in.
Another review of the film states, "While introducing his latest film, Velvet Goldmine, during the New York Film Festival, director Todd Haynes likened it to an acid trip whose hallucinatory effects, though barely noticeable at first, would take hold of us and not let go until the lights came up. Indeed, the vast majority of the audience stayed on through the film's final credits, as if they wished to stay submerged in the film's stupor for as long as possible. Like any good narcotic experience, Velvet Goldmine creates a wild high. When it is over, however, it leaves us hating ourselves for enjoying something so superficially pleasing. But what a high it is!" The mostly positive review by David Ng, here.
Here is a transcript of the press conference attended by Todd Haynes, Christine Vachon and Musical Director Randall Poster.
