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Velvet Goldmine Review
by 'Eric'
from www.darkhorizons.com

A gay-themed musical loosely based on “Citizen Kane?” That’s what we’ve got here. A celebration of that one brief magic moment when Edward Heath was prime minister of England and guys who wore feathers and lipstick were all the rage. They called it glam-rock, and those of us who were old enough to have heard of it could have sworn it only consisted of Elton John and David Bowie. I guess we were wrong.

One can tell this is going to be a weird flick, when the second thing we see is a UFO delivering a baby on the doorstep of a Mr. and Mrs. Wilde in1854. It appears they named their newly found son Oscar. Pinned to his swaddling clothes is a green macguffin.

Cut to a century later, where a boy finds the maguffin after getting beaten up. Cut to twenty years after that. The boy has grown up into a rock star named Brian Slade(Jonathan Rhys Meyers). He has himself shot. It’s all a joke, but when it’s revealed his fans abandon him. Cut to ten years later, it’s in New York, and Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a twenty something reporter is given an assignment to find out what happened to Slade. Citizen Kane, right?

So Arthur sets out to interview the people who knew him, beginning with his first agent(Michael Feast). We then go into flashback mode. We get to see a more than decent reconstruction of the music scene from about 1969 to about 1974. The music is mostly original, and this is a true musical, they do indeed break into song. We get to see what could be considered five or six full scale “videos” here, and many of them are quite good.

The story on the other hand, isn’t all that interesting. But the acting is good. An unrecognizable Ewan McGregor plays Curt Wild, Brian’s sometime boyfriend and collaborator. He’s delightfully sleazy. Toni Collette is Brian’s long suffering wife Mandy, whom Arthur also interviews at length. Be warned, there are several gay smooching scenes and simulated gay sex can be seen. But there isn’t that much. If you’re into ’70s nostalgia, this may be an interesting film, this is definitely not for Republicans.

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