The Last Movie I Saw

I've been thinking a lot about rock and roll movies lately, because I'm going to be co-teaching a class on Pop Music and Society and the plan is to include a bunch of films. If it were out on video, I'd be tempted to add Get Him to the Greek (directed by Nicholas Stoller) to the final list, as it seems to capture the contemporary malaise afflicting pop music, or more accurately the business model that has for years dominated the production, distribution and selling of pop music. The movie has a couple of really good performances by Russell Brand as the rock star and Sean Combs as the label boss, and it mostly adheres to a nicely raunchy attitude with respect to the music and its acolytes. But it also wants everything to work out in the end, which seems unduly optimistic in light of the way things seem to be evolving in the music business. In some ways, this can be seen as almost a remake of a much better movie from about thirty years ago called My Favorite Year, directed by Richard Benjamin and starring Peter O'Toole. It too tells the story of a young man put in charge of babysitting a "difficult" star, in that case one who was due to appear on a 1950s variety show modeled on Your Show of Shows. Over the course of the earlier story, the young man came to see his mythic hero in a different light, and the story plays out in a bittersweet but redemptive way. In the context of the 1950s, that story about innocence and its loss resonated because it fit with the common perception of that particular historical era. In Greek, the ending feels a bit phony because it's hard to imagine a kid working in the contemporary music biz being as naive as the Jonah Hill character seems to be here. We want to believe that it's really all about the music (as Hill does in the film), but does anyone really buy that the industry functions with that as their primary goal? If that were a common belief, I doubt the record business would be in such desperate straits, or that American Idol and the Disney Channel would be the dominant sources for the next generation of stars. Get Him to the Greek just doesn't quite have the guts to peg the industry for what it is, no matter how entertaining a tale it tells.