Director Cameron Crowe drew on his experiences as a budding rock journo in 2000’s Almost Famous, capturing the infectious passion that pulls music lovers into the orbit of rock stars. With Roadies, new to NEON this week, Crowe follows other feature filmmakers to the smaller screen, for a series that – as the title suggests – traces lives behind the scenes of a touring arena act.
Less about the band that plays to adoring thousands, and more about the family of crew and the personal and professional struggles they face, Roadies stars Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino, Imogen Poots and Rafe Spall – and should be free of egregious errors about the live music biz. The same, sadly, cannot be said of these films – which teach important lessons in the elementary mistakes they make along the way.
1. Jim Carrey is not a convincing frontman
Billed as James Carrey here, in one of his earlier film roles, Jim Carrey’s turn as rocker Johnny Squares in 1988 Dirty Harry pic The Dead Pool is full of (unintentional?) comedy. As he lip syncs his way through a music video shoot for director Liam Neeson (his LinkedIn profile positively bursting with skills, evidently), the results are plain hilarious, even more so than the music scene he’s emulating while performing Welcome to the Jungle.
No strangers to unintentional comedy themselves, members of Guns N Roses memorably cameo elsewhere in the film.
2. Singers don’t usually enter the stage via flying fox
We’re not going to say this is never, ever done. But when Bobby Black (Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil) takes a zipline to the stage from the rear of the auditorium in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane it seems there’s a ton of stuff that can go wrong as opposed to the usual walk-along-a-corridor method (although look where that got Spinal Tap).
In the larger scheme of things, this Andrew Dice Clay vehicle proved that a ton of stuff can go wrong in the movie biz too – some of which you can see on screen, the rest in the gutter where his career died a painful death until his role in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.
3. When a band’s playing they can’t actually hear the crowd
You might think we’re not really music fans, based on these early suggestions, but I will fight anyone with a knife in a darkened alleyway if they impugn the quality of Josie and the Pussycats. Comedy it has in spades, thanks largely to one of Parker Posey’s most unhinged performances as the villain. Plus, we all know about corporations’ use of pop music to subliminally control teenagers, right?
Right here, though, is the best example of the worst live music movie cliche – conversing across a crowd mid-song. Either you’ve got some lungs, or some ears, or some different physics apply there.
4. Tens of thousands of people don’t turn up early to eagerly await the opening act
Foolishly dubbed “The Citizen Kane of our generation” by foolish Tim Batt in foolish podcast The Worst Idea of All Time, We Are Your Friends chronicles Valley f*ckboy Zac Efron’s struggles to clamber to the top of the LA DJ pyramid. At the film’s peak, his budding DJ reaches his goal, playing the main stage at Summer Jam.
Leaving aside his awful music and nonsensical live setup, who are all these people patiently facing the stage, waiting for a DJ they have never heard of? Have the filmmakers actually gone to a show? Oh, they took thousands of dollars of drugs as ‘research’? That would make sense.
5. Guitars don’t work by pulling faces, your hands have to do the right things at the right time
With a bit of a heavy heart, it would seem that soon we’ll have to wave farewell to the phenomenon of actors badly feigning musical ability on screen, and it’s the fault of bloody computers.
Between the internet making the casting of specific musical skills much easier, and digital trickery making it routine to superimpose actors’ faces on other bodies, there will soon be little excuse for this sort of atrociously-shot sequence of Sean Penn doing God-knows-what on the guitar in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. From the neck up, he’s amazing, but unfortunately that’s not the part of the body you use to play a guitar.
6. Bands don’t replace frontmen with singers from cover bands
Oh, this one is actually true.
This lovely piece of content is sponsored by NEON, the only subscription video on demand service that enters the stage via flying fox. You can stream Roadies right here, right now on NEON – if you’re not on NZ’s best streaming service already, click here to start a 30 day trial.
