A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Not Fade Away (David Chase, 2012)

Bella Heathcote and John Magaro in Not Fade Away

Cast: John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett, Christopher McDonald, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Dominique McElligott, Molly Price, Meg Guzulescu, Gerard Canonico. Screenplay: David Chase. Cinematography: Eigil Bryld. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Film editing: Sidney Wolinsky. 

David Chase created The Sopranos, one of the greatest dramatic TV series of all time, rich in character and incident, with a superb evocation of a particular milieu. But what makes a series work doesn't necessarily make for a successful movie. Not Fade Away gives us a portrait of a corner of suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, with a youth culture at odds with the older generation and the Vietnam War seething in the background. The central story is that of Doug Damiano (John Magaro), who begins the film as a high school kid intoxicated with rock 'n' roll, especially after the emergence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He and his friends Gene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) start a band, and he gets a girlfriend, Grace (Bella Heathcote). Doug is at odds with his father, Pat (James Gandolfini) over his hair and his music, especially after Doug drops out of college to try to make it in the record business. It might have made a good TV series, but Chase fails to give it shape and coherence as a film, tossing in scenes that don't work with the main story, such as a needlessly included encounter of the young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train at the start of the film. He occasionally inserts a narrative voiceover by a secondary character whose identity isn't revealed until the very end, and then to no great point. There are some good performances by Magaro, Huston, and Gandolfini, but the movie's lack of focus and narrative drive undermines them.

Posted by
Links: , , ,