After all the work involved in dreaming up and creating Velvet Goldmine it must have been a bit of a blow to have so many critics 'not get it' and to even have some seem to enjoy bashing it. However, Todd seems remarkably philosophical about reviews. A BBC interviewer asked 'How seriously do you take reviews?'
They affect you, and I've been lucky because I've had a lot of really smart critics writing about my films. [LA Weekly writer] John Powers, for instance, wrote a very mixed review about Velvet Goldmine, that I found really, really interesting. It wasn't something that hurt me or hurt my feelings, because I respect what he has to say. Even if I disagreed with some of it, I still found it really interesting. So I can take criticism for sure, except really stupid stuff, and I got a lot of that on Velvet Goldmine too. I've got so much good press from the beginning that I'm probably in a pretty secure position to take bad stuff too.
Here's that review he mentions:
"Vogue Nov. 1998 by John Powers
There's never been a rock-'n'-roll picture quite like Velvet Goldmine, a big, bright roman candle of a movie that sends ideas flaring in all directions. It centers on Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a Bowie-like British rock star whose career collapses after he fakes his own assassination during a 1974 concert in London. Ten years later, a newspaper wants an article on "Whatever Happened to Brain Slade," and the assignment goes to English journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a rabid fan whose youth was profoundly transformed by Slade's gender-bending music. As Stuart interviews the stars old cronies (a la Citizen Kane), we're given flashbacks of Slade's life-his bisexuality and drug use, his uneasy marriage to a Yank expat (Toni Collette), and his homoerotic worship of an Iggy Pop-ish rocker named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor). Yet the more we see of the enigmatic Slade, the more we grasp that the real story isn't his incandescent career. It's the rise and fall of the glam-rock era itself, a utopian moment when sexual identity grew fluid, personal freedom appeared boundless, and people revealed who they really were by the masks they chose to wear.
Velvet Goldmine was written and directed by Todd Haynes, the most reliably audacious filmmaker working in America today. At a time when most "independent" directors can't wait to book a seat on the Hollywood gravy train, he keeps trying to bring the avant-garde into the multiplex. Whether he's using Barbie dolls to tell the story of Karen Carpenter in Superstar or exploring environmental illness in Safe, Haynes is always looking for ways to subvert our expectations. Although this new movie is officially about the seventies rock scene in London, it begins in outer space, features a cameo by Oscar Wilde (who cheekily declares his desire to be a pop star), and winds up as a bleak portrait of Ronald Reagan's America. A true filmmaker of ideas, Haynes uses Stuart's quest for Brian Slade as a way to explore sexual identity, the history of gay culture, the manufacture of stardom, the honesty of artifice, and the life-enhancing value of pop stars who may ultimately betray their fan's good faith.
While Velvet Goldmine is the year's brainiest picture, what grabs you first is its sheer joy in spectacle. Haynes clearly adores glam rock's flamboyance and uses his movie to celebrate seventies high style. He gives us platform heel and faces painted with glitter. He gives us hairdos the color of tropical fruits and silvery costumes that sprout iridescent plumage. He gives us men dressed as women, women dressed as men, and musical numbers so deliriously gaudy they're like a Hello Dolly! revival in Oz. Showering us with songs and colors and Brechtian high jinks, Haynes wants us to understand the giddy, rule-breaking magic of the glam scene.
But while the movie's always a joy to watch (it's extremely well shot by Maryse Alberti), the story itself is often cold and abstract-too aware of its intellectual meaning. Haynes never takes us inside the juicy passions that drive his characters. The camera lingers on Rhys Meyer's sinister, pouting beauty as Slade, but we never feel the singer's inner excitement as he slips into high heels, seduces the crowd, or slides into bed with whoever suits him; we understand how glam helps Stuart discover his own gayness, but we don't share his quivering thrill as he sees his own forbidden longings enacted onstage. Nor does the movie fully capture rock-'n'-roll's visceral power. Although handsomely mounted, the music sequences are so studied that I began longing for the rude, bacchanalian energy that Oliver Stone brought to The Doors. Such primal excitement happens here only once, when Curt Wild pulls his pants down and dives through flames into the roaring crowd. McGregor's orgasmic performance reminds us, for the first time since Trainspotting, why he's one of the world's hottest young actors.
For all its playful panache, Velvet Goldmine is about something serious: the liberating potential of pop culture. Haynes wants us to see how a movement like glam rock can tear through suffocating traditions and offer its fans a doorway to new ways of living. He'd clearly like his movie to do the same thing for the nineties audience-to make us see art, style, and sexuality in a radically different way. This is a lofty goal, and not surprisingly, it leads him to cram too many ideas into a single film. He introduces a key character, a dandyish clubber named Jack Fairy. Then drops him halfway through; he self-consciously mimics the structure of Citizen Kane but can't deliver a Rosebud; he stages so many musical numbers, they start to swamp the characters. Such rough edges make the movie feel slightly unfinished, yet they're offshoots of its willingness to take huge artistic risks. Velvet Goldmine is too ambitious for its own good (and its own limited budget), but in the year of Armageddon and There's Something About Mary, I won't fault Todd Haynes for aiming too high."
Christine Vachon admits that she has a completely different attitude and snubs reviewers who pan her productions, "If you put your work out in public, you have to deal with the fact that some people will like it and some won't. Some critics won't get it, and some will write reviews that will be painful to read. I still get upset at bad reviews. More upset than I should. When critics I know write nasty reviews of my films, they're off my Christmas list so fast.
Todd has something which I think is important for a director: an absolute serenity about his work. He doesn't need confirmation from critics that a movie is good. Safe was savaged by many of them. When we showed it at Sundance, people came out making noises of bewilderment; a few reviewers looked embarrassed when they saw me and murmured, "I don't know what to say". The next morning Variety described the film as boring and pretentious. I was devastated. But Todd just said: "Oh, well. Not everyone's going to get it." Today, only a few years after its release, Safe has begun to acquire the kind of reputation that I thought would take decades. Two of those critics at Sundance who threw up their hands when they saw me ended up including the film – a year later, after they'd had a chance to let it percolate in their systems – on their Ten Best lists."
We here at vardathemessage believe that now, seven years after its release, Velvet Goldmine has undergone a similar reassessment. It's definitely on its way to being a cult classic and viewing it is certainly a mind mangling rite of passage.
They affect you, and I've been lucky because I've had a lot of really smart critics writing about my films. [LA Weekly writer] John Powers, for instance, wrote a very mixed review about Velvet Goldmine, that I found really, really interesting. It wasn't something that hurt me or hurt my feelings, because I respect what he has to say. Even if I disagreed with some of it, I still found it really interesting. So I can take criticism for sure, except really stupid stuff, and I got a lot of that on Velvet Goldmine too. I've got so much good press from the beginning that I'm probably in a pretty secure position to take bad stuff too.
Here's that review he mentions:
"Vogue Nov. 1998 by John Powers
There's never been a rock-'n'-roll picture quite like Velvet Goldmine, a big, bright roman candle of a movie that sends ideas flaring in all directions. It centers on Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a Bowie-like British rock star whose career collapses after he fakes his own assassination during a 1974 concert in London. Ten years later, a newspaper wants an article on "Whatever Happened to Brain Slade," and the assignment goes to English journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a rabid fan whose youth was profoundly transformed by Slade's gender-bending music. As Stuart interviews the stars old cronies (a la Citizen Kane), we're given flashbacks of Slade's life-his bisexuality and drug use, his uneasy marriage to a Yank expat (Toni Collette), and his homoerotic worship of an Iggy Pop-ish rocker named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor). Yet the more we see of the enigmatic Slade, the more we grasp that the real story isn't his incandescent career. It's the rise and fall of the glam-rock era itself, a utopian moment when sexual identity grew fluid, personal freedom appeared boundless, and people revealed who they really were by the masks they chose to wear.
Velvet Goldmine was written and directed by Todd Haynes, the most reliably audacious filmmaker working in America today. At a time when most "independent" directors can't wait to book a seat on the Hollywood gravy train, he keeps trying to bring the avant-garde into the multiplex. Whether he's using Barbie dolls to tell the story of Karen Carpenter in Superstar or exploring environmental illness in Safe, Haynes is always looking for ways to subvert our expectations. Although this new movie is officially about the seventies rock scene in London, it begins in outer space, features a cameo by Oscar Wilde (who cheekily declares his desire to be a pop star), and winds up as a bleak portrait of Ronald Reagan's America. A true filmmaker of ideas, Haynes uses Stuart's quest for Brian Slade as a way to explore sexual identity, the history of gay culture, the manufacture of stardom, the honesty of artifice, and the life-enhancing value of pop stars who may ultimately betray their fan's good faith.
While Velvet Goldmine is the year's brainiest picture, what grabs you first is its sheer joy in spectacle. Haynes clearly adores glam rock's flamboyance and uses his movie to celebrate seventies high style. He gives us platform heel and faces painted with glitter. He gives us hairdos the color of tropical fruits and silvery costumes that sprout iridescent plumage. He gives us men dressed as women, women dressed as men, and musical numbers so deliriously gaudy they're like a Hello Dolly! revival in Oz. Showering us with songs and colors and Brechtian high jinks, Haynes wants us to understand the giddy, rule-breaking magic of the glam scene.
But while the movie's always a joy to watch (it's extremely well shot by Maryse Alberti), the story itself is often cold and abstract-too aware of its intellectual meaning. Haynes never takes us inside the juicy passions that drive his characters. The camera lingers on Rhys Meyer's sinister, pouting beauty as Slade, but we never feel the singer's inner excitement as he slips into high heels, seduces the crowd, or slides into bed with whoever suits him; we understand how glam helps Stuart discover his own gayness, but we don't share his quivering thrill as he sees his own forbidden longings enacted onstage. Nor does the movie fully capture rock-'n'-roll's visceral power. Although handsomely mounted, the music sequences are so studied that I began longing for the rude, bacchanalian energy that Oliver Stone brought to The Doors. Such primal excitement happens here only once, when Curt Wild pulls his pants down and dives through flames into the roaring crowd. McGregor's orgasmic performance reminds us, for the first time since Trainspotting, why he's one of the world's hottest young actors.
For all its playful panache, Velvet Goldmine is about something serious: the liberating potential of pop culture. Haynes wants us to see how a movement like glam rock can tear through suffocating traditions and offer its fans a doorway to new ways of living. He'd clearly like his movie to do the same thing for the nineties audience-to make us see art, style, and sexuality in a radically different way. This is a lofty goal, and not surprisingly, it leads him to cram too many ideas into a single film. He introduces a key character, a dandyish clubber named Jack Fairy. Then drops him halfway through; he self-consciously mimics the structure of Citizen Kane but can't deliver a Rosebud; he stages so many musical numbers, they start to swamp the characters. Such rough edges make the movie feel slightly unfinished, yet they're offshoots of its willingness to take huge artistic risks. Velvet Goldmine is too ambitious for its own good (and its own limited budget), but in the year of Armageddon and There's Something About Mary, I won't fault Todd Haynes for aiming too high."
Christine Vachon admits that she has a completely different attitude and snubs reviewers who pan her productions, "If you put your work out in public, you have to deal with the fact that some people will like it and some won't. Some critics won't get it, and some will write reviews that will be painful to read. I still get upset at bad reviews. More upset than I should. When critics I know write nasty reviews of my films, they're off my Christmas list so fast.
Todd has something which I think is important for a director: an absolute serenity about his work. He doesn't need confirmation from critics that a movie is good. Safe was savaged by many of them. When we showed it at Sundance, people came out making noises of bewilderment; a few reviewers looked embarrassed when they saw me and murmured, "I don't know what to say". The next morning Variety described the film as boring and pretentious. I was devastated. But Todd just said: "Oh, well. Not everyone's going to get it." Today, only a few years after its release, Safe has begun to acquire the kind of reputation that I thought would take decades. Two of those critics at Sundance who threw up their hands when they saw me ended up including the film – a year later, after they'd had a chance to let it percolate in their systems – on their Ten Best lists."
We here at vardathemessage believe that now, seven years after its release, Velvet Goldmine has undergone a similar reassessment. It's definitely on its way to being a cult classic and viewing it is certainly a mind mangling rite of passage.
