Sunset Strip

Well its like this, all I needed to read on the back of the box was "if you like Boogie Nights, you will love this"...NOT. What an excellent idea for a movie, 70's Hollywood club scene and the people trying to break into the biz....to bad it never delivered. Oh and by the way...it says it has a great 70's sound track playing through out? I think I recognized one song.

I'm not very interested in whether this film correctly portrays life as it actually was or is among the LA hopefuls or in whether the clothes or music are authentic. These issues seem to me to be superficial. As a story it is very, very good and is superbly acted by all the main characters. It is quirky in an interesting way. Anna Friel turns in a great performance as do several of the others. It should have had a wider release - I would give it a much higher rating than many of the banal films which become "hits" these days.

Anna Friel probably wishes she had Rachel Weisz's agent; otherwise she wouldn't have been stuck in the likes of "An Everlasting Piece," "Rogue Trader" (the Nick Leeson biopic which went directly to cable in the US), "Mad Cows" and "Sunset Strip." Barely released in America and never released here, the movie proves yet again that you should beware of anything that gets its sole airings on cable well after midnight and which isn't a porn movie.

Set in 1972 LA, the movie focuses on a day in the life of a variety of people in or linked to the music business - but with the exception of Jared Leto's wild and crazy singer, doesn't gets us interested in any of them. Not Simon Baker's photographer, not Nick Stahl's guitarist, not Adam Goldberg's manager, not Rory Cochrane's songwriter, not even Friel's costume designer. The movie wants a Cameron Crowe feel but never achieves it, except in one scene where Baker and Friel discuss the size of the latter's breasts - and only because "Singles" had something similar and much, much better. (Actually, everything about "Singles" is much, much better.)

Maybe it's me, but there's something wrong when a movie with music at its core has a soundtrack that sucks, both in terms of the score from Stewart Copeland and the songs heard; ironically, this results in one of the rare moments that works, when Stahl's band goes on stage as support for a visiting English band and winds up getting booed off. At that point the movie does capture the frustration of doing your best and finding it's not good enough, but with too few scenes like that, we're left checking the time to see when it ends (and it takes a long time - beware of movies that seem to last an eternity even at less than 90 minutes). The main band, by the way, is supposed to blow the audience away, but they're actually duller than the support.

No one will ever accuse the makers of glamourising LA, but even "That '70s Show" has more convincing period detail; and with no real coherence in its story and a wrapup that makes you wonder if a lot of the plot was left on Fox's cutting room floor, this viewer was left thanking the stars for Anna Friel's declining to wear a bra. Not that it prevents "Sunset Strip" from scoring a 98 on the "Is this boring or what?" scale; this should have gotten lost in its rock and roll and drifted away.

What do you want in a movie? If it's verisimilitude, you must have subjective overview for the context, or else it's just another period piece as distant and impersonal as The Napoleonic Wars. If it's a character study, you must accept this as the basis of the filmed entertainment.

"Sunset Strip" should be viewed as a character study companion piece to "Almost Famous" with far more accurate verisimilitude. "Famous" is a wondrous pastiche, lotsa entertaining bang for your buck. But "Sunset Strip" represents the real s**t. I know. I was there. And here's why you should take my anonymous word for it.

When I first saw this movie I was astonished that I didn't recognize the name of its writer, for I recognized every one of his characters, literally as well as figuratively. The writer obviously was exactly the same age I was, worked in the exact aspects of the entertainment industry that I did, at the exact same time in the early 70's at the exact same spots in Hollywood and knew the exact same people I did (or knew of.) Anna Friel was Genie the Tailor, who did in fact die in an auto accident with several members of British band Fairport Convention. The geeky manager was seemingly an early Geffen clone. The disolute songwriter was a Warren Zevon-alike, while Jared Leto was, dare I say, a completely interchangeable popstar type of the era. My own future husband, popstar of that era, lived in the exact same Laurel Canyon mountain aerie depicted in the film (replete with benevolent landlord), while I worked as a music photographer amongst the main protagonist's doppelganger. And I did know who he was. He was one of the names you'll recognize on photo credits of the era, who owns a major restaurant here. But he didn't want his name on the writing credits, so I'll respect that.

"Sunset Strip" is a highly entertaining character study that is unbelievably accurate in its depiction of an assortment of characters on the perimeter, or the earliest stages of ascent, of the music scene in Los Angeles in the early 1970's. It's all true. And we did go out there every night. . .

...Pardon my bad Cameron Crowe paraphrasing.

You know that feeling you get when you're sauntering past video boxes and you come across something that looks good...with some acting credit names you recognize, but somehow you've still never heard of the movie! It's a feeling of "This is probably going to suck, but I feel like takin' a chance anyway". Well, I did and it did.

I made it all the way through, although I was reading IMDb reviews of the thing while I was watching, and it sure helped not having to focus 100% of my attention on SUNSET STRIP. Kudos to the guy with the review linking Adam Goldberg's character to "Disco Stu", as I at least laughed at that while the tape was running.

Other than the alluring Anna Friel, there is absolutely no reason to watch this ALMOST FAMOUS ripoff (which actually was dumped in a couple of theaters a month before AF). But other than both films having a shot of the LA Continental Hyatt House, these movies are on opposite ends of the quality scale.