posted 01/15/2008 (Tue) @ 07:55 pm
>>> Movies
Ryan Gosling = Kurt Cobain?
Courtney Love wants the guy from The Notebook to play Kurt Cobain in a new movie based on Heavier Than Heaven, the Love-endorsed Cobain biography by Charles Cross. Maybe my inability to see Ryan Gosling playing anyone but Noah Calhoun has colored my initial reaction: what the hell.
After further review, I guess I could see him fitting into the role. It’s gonna take exactly the right amounts of long, greasy blond hair, stubble, flannel, and smoker rasp, though.
Now, Scarlett Johannson as Courtney Love? I can’t argue with a large cross-section of commentators so far: it’s gonna take one hell of a make-up job to make Johannson that ugly.
Ultimately, the movie will do well, since it’s the first thing about Nirvana outside of documentaries or shitty art films to reach the public. So I should be behind it, right? Wrong. Nirvana fans have always been unevenly split into two groups: those who don’t care about Courtney Love, and those that view her as a modern day Yoko Ono that possibly murdered her husband for fun and profit. I used to be in the latter camp. Now I don’t really give a damn anymore. Her antics have been depressing to watch, to say the least; the saddest part is that she is still famous for it.
If the movie is good, I will notice. But more than likely, it will never live up to the hype and piled-on expectations from the droves of rabid Nirvana fans who will be its audience. We’re talking about everyone from the people who (like me) jumped a bit from (pleasant) surprise in the theatre when “Something in the Way” played over a nightmare sequence in Jarhead, to the advertising execs who are sleeping much more soundly now that they can finally use “Breed” to sell baseball games to console gamers.
There’s enough about Cobain’s life to keep the audience reasonably entertained for an hour and a half, but the better flick would throw the murder conspiracy into the mix– something I can fairly safely say will not be happening in Heavier Than Heaven. Why? Because Love is executive producing.
Which is another reason I don’t actually want to pay money to see the movie when it comes out. I think she’s had enough of my money over the years to start packing up and moving out of the limelight entirely, already.
Tags: kurt cobain, Movies, Music, nirvana
