Almost Famous (2000)

Director: Cameron Crowe

Cast: Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand

Have I Seen It Before?: Yes.

Did I like it?: I remember liking it well enough, but for whatever reason it didn’t enter that pantheon of great movies for me at the time. Now, as I watch it again twenty years after the fact, I can’t quite grasp why it didn’t more thoroughly burrow its way into my brain.

Which is odd, because that most profound experience occurs for me as the film unfolds. I see myself reflected in the characters. One might think its solipsistic to reach for those—perhaps tenuous—connections, but if we don’t reach to see yourselves in the characters projected for you on the screen, we’re doomed to be subjected seven or eight more Transformers movies, or the written-by-committee blockbusters that Disney and the other studios are churning out with disappointing regularity. We’ve relegated Crowe to not direct that much anymore, after the admitted misstep of Aloha (2015), but if he could reach into the recesses of his deeper felt inclinations to make more movies like this, it may be past time to let him out of director jail.

On first blush, I shouldn’t feel so connected to the film. The main character and I are almost pointed opposites in many ways. We are separated by thirty years. William Miller (Fugit) is doomed to appear younger than he actually he is for all of his days, while I appeared to be in my mid-thirties since the age of ten. Miller’s soul is filled with every inch of popular music, whereas I couldn’t be bothered with anything musical (itself a likely act of rebellion against my musically inclined family), but instead steeped myself in movie so early, it’s entirely possible my real life didn’t begin until after my family got a DVD player and I was first introduced to the wild world of audio commentaries.

So why do I feel seen by the film, as much as I myself am seeing it? There’s the scene early on where Miller and Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman, so perfectly cast that I thought the role had to be written for him, until I realized he was one of the few characters who really existed) talk about writing just for the sake of it, with no aim in sight (see these reviews) and talk about their typewriters like people in other movies might talk about cars and motorcycles. It’s a small scene, but such a specific choice that tickles the wrinkles in my brain that I would have gone anywhere the film wanted to take me after that moment.

Saved! (2004)

Director: Brian Dannelly

Cast: Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit

Have I Seen it Before: Several times. It’s one of my wife’s favorite movies, so it ends up being a movie I see roughly once a year.

Did I Like It: It’s charms cannot be denied. It could have been like any other number of teen comedies, especially of the era, but it manages to transcend.

Most teen movies are going to have the same general structure. Characters fall in and out of love. Misunderstandings abound. It all ends in a prom or other dance. To my mind, only John Hughes could eschew this format, and he only did so some of the time, and only when he tightened the focus of his adolescent epics to the timespan of one day. Even that most perfect of all movies, Back to the Future (1985) can’t quite pull out of that particular orbit.

So it is, too, with Saved. Many movies in the genre are content to hit those same beats and offer nothing new. They are quickly forgotten. What separates those special stories—like Saved!—that live within the trappings of a genre and manage to transcend things. For one thing, it’s the setting. While some version of Christianity is probably still prevalent in America, most can’t say they went to a private Christian academy for their High School.

Even I can’t say that, and I tragically got all of my education in the state of Oklahoma. Even if the setting is alien and interesting, the characters are familiar, or at the very least feel real. The writing is certainly critical to this quality, the performances cannot be ignored. Mandy Moore—long before she established her acting bonafides in NBC’s This Is Us—paints a villain that is both blindingly frustrating and totally human in her hostility. Mary-Louise Parker normally plays knowing and shrewd characters, but here plays largely oblivious but ultimately decent with the same level of believability. The relationship between Macaulay Culkin and Eva Amurri—despite coming from what on paper appears to be supporting characters—is the emotional heart of the film, as they are the true strangers in this strange land, but still manage to cut through any artifice they might have needed to survive only to believably wear their pathos on their sleeves. Other movies would be content to have cookie cutter characters lurching to something akin to life by actors either too bored or too unwilling to bring anything interesting to the proceedings.

That may be the secret to any film that exceeds expectations. Just tell a story using a familiar structure, in a completely unusual setting, with interesting characters. It must also be perfectly cast.

That easy, right?