My Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #3. Almost Famous

"It's all happening." If there's ever a sentence that describes New York City, it's that one. It's all happening in New York: business, theater, arts, sports, fashion, life. The city that never sleeps, the place where all the world seems gathered in Times Square at 2 a.m., it's the center of everything. In NYC, it's all happening because anything can happen.


"It's all happening" is one of the great lines from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. It's the constant refrain of the rock 'n' roll characters because it expresses the very ethos of their lifestyle: limitless possibilities -- for drugs and sex and love and music, for anything that can be experienced. For the rock stars and their groupies (sorry, "Band Aids"), "It's all happening," is both a hopeful declaration and a desperate plea. It all has to happen -- right now, tonight, after the show -- because all these people have is "the moment," the brief window of The Now in order to feel something, anything that will give their lives meaning. Anything for that human connection and a chance to feel alive in this lonely world.


That's why I love the New York sequence in Almost Famous. It manages to capture both the limitless possibilities which are promised by the city as well as the desparate loneliness that lurks around its edges. It give us New York as a world for Cool and Hip and Rich. And then it give us New York for the Melancholy, for the world-weary coming down after the high of champagne and quaaludes. And perhaps best of all, it gives us New York in the 70s not as it was in reality, but as it was made to seem by the movies of that era. The Almost Famous New York sequence is like an amalgam of Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same concert film, Annie Hall, and a Neil Simon play.


And as if the images and writing weren't enough to evoke "1970s New York," Crowe throws in one of the best Elton John songs ever -- Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters -- to play over one of the movie's most climactic moments. If ever there was a song that breathed New York, it is Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters. This swirling, bittersweet ode to the city takes me to Manhattan every time I hear it. The song simply IS New York for me.





All those yellow cabs against the browns and greens and grays of 1970s Manhattan, that mandolin strum, Elton John's voice calling out to the weary streets, a kid recklessly, desperately, dashing out onto the sidewalk to find the girl he loves -- that's New York City.


Cool and slick and chic. New York has moved beyond the already-fading "grooviness" of the hippie culture.

New York is glam, baby.


New York is a suite at the Plaza, gaudy, decadent, and filled with booze and pills and room service, and it's all just expensive set dressing for an adolescent love story. It's an impossibly tragic and romantic moment, a little bit cynical maybe, but also fantasy, a moment that doesn't take itself too seriously even though the heart of the moment is utterly sincere. He's about to go where many, many men have gone before. And he doesn't care. Because he loves her. That's New York.



I can't think of a better description of the magic of New York than this image.


The scene where Penny Lane tells William all her secrets. In the original script, this beautiful moment is set in an airport terminal. Thank God, Cameron Crowe changed that. What better place to walk off a hang-over and open up your heart than in Central Park?

Penny: I guess what I'm trying to say is, that I've done twice the things I said I've done.
William: What about your mom?
Penny: She always said -- 'Marry Up.' Marry someone grand. That's why she named me Lady.
William: She named you Lady?
Penny: Lady Goodman.
William: Lady Goodman? That's... great. [and he means it too]
Penny: Now you know all my secrets.

It's all happening in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, one of my favorite New York movie moments.

My Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #1. Big and #2. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #1. Big and #2. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

My idea for the Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments was to pick certain scenes and/or sequences from various movies that were my favorite movie “moments” of New York (or “New York” as the case may be with some of the older ones). These movies aren’t necessarily my favorite New York movies (though a couple of them are); some of these movies aren’t even particularly good (though I think most of them are). But in each, there’s a particular scene, a particular shot, a certain moment that has infiltrated my imagination and added a piece to that mythic image of New York City that swims around my brain.

So it’s kind of awkward then, that I start my list not with two movie “moments” as I described above, but with two actual, whole movies. The cinema we watch as children has a powerful effect, because it’s often these early films that form and shape not only how we approach the movies, but how we approach the world. The New York of my imagination was created in large part thanks to these formative movies of my youth. I watched Big when I was eight years old; Home Alone 2 when I was eleven. Together, they formed a version of New York City that was part playground, part slum. Playground if you had tons of money in your pocket; scary slum if you had none. Together they showed me that New York was the place where you went when you wanted to be on your own, to be independent and free. You went to New York to grow up; but with a lot of money, the city wasn’t a world of responsibilities and work (I had conveniently forgotten how Josh turns responsible and “grown up,” or how Kevin has to thwart the bumbling crooks again); it was a world of toy stores and junk food and pop machines in your living room and room service in the Plaza. New York in these two movies was only a scary place of hookers and bums when you had no cash.

"It's pretty scary in here too, kid."

With money in New York, even you could have your very own loft apartment filled with toys and a giant trampoline. With credit cards in New York, even you could stay at the Plaza and eat ice cream in bed while watching old black and white movies on tv.

Big is probably the single biggest reason why I’ve been in love with New York since as long as I can remember. I watched it when I was fairly young, and together with the creepiness of the Zoltar machine and the fact that the movie opens with Josh playing a computer game about wizards and dwarfs (I‘m a fantasy nerd), it was pretty much inevitable that I would be caught under the movie’s spell. But once Josh turned big and entered the city, he lived a life that was my dream come true. When you’re eight, the thought of playing with toys all day and getting paid for it, and living in that amazing loft, and being able to eat at fun Italian restaurants, and just basically doing whatever you want -- it’s the perfect life.

Sure, in the end he goes back to Jersey and becomes a kid again; but for me, it was the playground world of New York that was the lasting image. My secret wish is still to go to New York, get a job with MacMillan toys, and spend all my time playing with toys and getting paid. And to have a loft apartment with a pop machine in it.

Home Alone 2 came along later, and so it didn’t create such a lasting, complete image of “fun New York" as Big had done, but it still contributed. The two biggest impressions left by Home Alone 2 were of Central Park and The Plaza Hotel.

In Big, the city was about fun, fun, fun; whereas in Home Alone 2, the city is about luxury, strangeness (but in a good way), living the high life (though Big had its share of the high life, with the limo ride and hanging out the sun roof):

"Your limousine and ice cream, sir."

Home Alone 2 also had the magic of Christmas. It confirmed my own long-held bias that Christmas should be celebrated in a cold climate, preferably with snow, and with big, wonderful Christmas trees everywhere. Along with Miracle on 34th Street, Scrooged, Elf, and countless other films, Home Alone 2 stands in the great tradition of movies that say: New York is the Christmas town. And since Christmas has always been my favorite holiday, this association between holiday and city has only increased my love for New York. When you’re forming an opinion about the world at age eleven, and you see Christmas and New York so inexorably intertwined, you can’t help but fall in love with the city.

Home Alone 2 also helped create in my mind the mystique of Central Park.

I’ve always been fascinated with Central Park. There it is, this gigantic stretch of wilderness right smack dab in the middle of this huge city. The Central Park of Home Alone 2 was at once beautiful and strange; a bit of a fairy land amidst the steel and reality. Having recently been to New York for the first time (right after Christmas!), I can’t tell you how much I longed to see standing before me the surreal image of the pigeon lady. Alas, she is only a part of movie New York. But in those images swimming around my brain, imprinted there by these movies of my childhood, the pigeon lady of Central Park exists. Drifting along the edges of the real park, I catch a glimpse of her even as I stand in the cold, bright sun of a real December day.