GRAND THEFT PARSONS (2003) ** Two things: this was a great idea for a movie, and I'm a little disappointed. The (fundamentally) true life story of a wild and crazy friend stealing the corpse of a deceased rock star in order to fulfil a blood brother pledge.it's kind of hard to beat that. There's also no denying that the film appropriates an appropriately morbid incarnation of that '60s zaniness that everyone loves but also makes a lot of folk worry. The music is a strength, in that it's great. Gram Parsons' stuff obviously ("A Song For You" is worked in very nicely; they couldn't find a spot for "Hickory Wind" and I couldn't see one either), but the Springsteen card may be played most effectively of all. The music is also a distraction in that they play a song-but only a maybe 90 second snippet of a song-with all too much regularity. So the film has the mutually destructive instincts of art film vs. pseudo-MTV flick. Too bad. The main problem, though, isn't that they embellished a true story. For enough people, including myself, are even familiar with the myths around Gram's burial. The problem is that the embellishments to the myth closely-tied to truth.aren't believable. There's just too much stuff that obviously isn't true amplifying a story that was acoustic in the first place. The MTV elements are wrong, the efforts at gratuitous entertainment ruin the texture, if they felt the need to invent characters why not ghosts and spirits and a Greek Chorus? Marley Shelton is terribly winsome as that kind of girl that somehow ends up hanging around rock bands (but shouldn't; or maybe should as she wouldn't have been any happier [and probably even more frustrated] elsewhere), and Christina Applegate is every bit as awful as she should be as a cartoon representation of a particularly vulgar mutation of L.A. woman.
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