There's a scene in Cameron Crowe's new movie, Almost Famous, that I haven't been able to get out of my head. In case you don't already know (unlikely, considering the buzz surrounding this movies feels like it has been building since the '70s), the movie is about a fictional band and its triumphs and tragedies on the way to stardom.

The scene in question is a moment of crisis for the band. The lead guitarist, played by the innocuous Billy Crudup, gets high on drugs and makes a fool of himself in public. (Why do all the women in my office swoon for this actor? He's no better looking than any character player on General Hospital.)Everyone is angry with him. You could cut the proverbial tension with the proverbial knife. We hold our breath. Will this break the band apart? Will we continue on to have more glory and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll? For a nanosecond, the audience is unsure... .

And then, like a slave yelling, "I am Spartacus," Elton John's voice fills the theater - saving the day. "Hold me closer, tiny dancer. Count the headlights on the highway." (Come on readers, join in! You know the words! It's like camp!) "Lay me down in sheets of linen, you had a busy day todaaaaayyyyyyy." (This is the point when I imagine Crowe himself in the bus, light meter in hand, puffing on a joint, passing it over to his wife Nancy for a toke... .) "Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the baaaaahaaand."

OK, get the picture? I've been thinking about this scene since I saw the movie and decided why it's significant.

This scene is the perfect Cameron Crowe scene. It's his auteurial signifier. Like Welles and the opening sequence to Citizen Kane or Scorcese and the Taxi Driver voice-over, I believe this scene can sum up Cameron Crowe - he is the auteur of smiling.

Let's think about how much Crowe has made us smile in the past. Who could not smile when Jennifer Jason Leigh and nerdy Brian Backer finally get together at the end of Fast Times at Ridgemont High? (But they still haven't gone all the way! Smile!) Or when Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick jockey for position in that familiar when-do-I-call-the-other-person dating dance in Singles. (Sigh. Smile. We've all been there. Smile.) Or, perhaps any scene from the most smilific movie of all time - Jerry Maguire. Just thinking about "show me the money" makes me smile. How about you?

Why do we smile? Because we feel good. And I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with feel-good movies. The trouble is, I think many people confuse "feeling good" with genuine emotion, real reactions that come from the heart versus those that come from some other place inside us (presumably the same place that makes some people like Touched by an Angel or, say, The Family Circus - "Not Me" did it again! That rascal!). Likewise, Cameron Crowe's movies rely on sentimentalism and nostalgia; the audience's response is fueled by sugar-coated memories of the past.

Take, for example, one of the running gags throughout Almost Famous. Frances McDormand plays the mother of our young reporter who goes on tour with the band. We continually cut back to her during the movie to see her worried reactions to her son's phone calls as he follows those shaggy-haired musicians. You can't help but feel good and warm watching these scenes, thinking of your own mother and how she was silly and worried needlessly as you sowed your wild oats. Another feel-good moment arrives when the young boy loses his virginity and is freaked out. Again, we all feel good as we think back to our own experience. You chuckle as you remember how silly it all was. And it does feel good - the knowledge that you survived.

What irks me is that people call Cameron Crowe a great filmmaker. Just as certain directors are labeled artists for only presenting the horror and pain of life, Crowe's movies are all nice little packages with happy endings. But worse, Crowe directs with a sense of self-satisfaction, a mood of intense profundity (and audiences and critics seem to buy it) that seems to say, "Pay Attention to Me! I'm Saying Something Important! These movies are about real LIFE... ."

But unfortunately, they aren't. Are real-life epiphanies as easy to come by and obvious as the one in Jerry Maguire? Is coming-of-age as safe and "footloose and fancy free" as the one in Almost Famous? The truth, as always, is somewhere in between - to use a familiar cliché, it is the agony and the ecstasy. And in Cameron Crowe's films, we really only get the ecstasy, the version where all comes out right in end.

Like the end of Almost Famous . Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson), the spurned groupie who loves unconditionally and always gets burned, hops on a plane and flies off to live in her fantasy city abroad. It's the only way Crowe could leave us - a romantic, ideal (but unfilling) conclusion. It's like the one-sheet for the movie, a close-up on a face wearing sunglasses - we don't see the eyes.A soulless, fairytale finale.

Almost Famous is based on Cameron Crowe's real life experiences as a young reporter for Rolling Stone. Maybe it is too much to ask for him not to film his memories with anything but a rose-colored lens? Is it possible for a filmmaker to probe his own past and make a film that captures the real essence of the people he met?

An interesting comparison, I think, is a film about another artist's memories of the people he worked with. Francois Truffaut's Day for Night is based on his own experiences as a director on movie sets. Like Almost Famous, it is the story of a group of people whose personal lives have an inevitable effect on their work lives.

The difference between Crowe and Truffaut is that Truffaut presents both the beauty and the sadness of these people's lives, and he is relentless in revealing the price that those who make movies pay for the addiction to their profession. Truffaut's characters mimic the title of his film: The glamour of making movies and being an artist is as fake as nights that are shot during the day.

There is the actress who can't perform because she is too distraught over her son's illness, yet must work to pay his bills. In another character we find a young actor who falls in love with a script supervisor but who is heartbroken when she runs off with a stunt man. The director himself (played by Truffaut) is in complete control on the set during the day, but is haunted by nightmares of being obsessed with cinema. But don't get me wrong - the movie is still really funny.

Day for Night doesn't use any tricks or manipulations, songs on a bus, or memories of Mom at home to give it punch.You never sense that Truffaut is playing to the audience. He is translating his life into a movie, putting his own passions, anxieties, and insecurities on the screen. Almost Famous remains glib (and, in a way, arrogant in its comfort with itself), never asking more from its characters than to make all their problems go away by singing a happy song and driving off into the sunset.

Cameron Crowe makes coming-of-age movies, but there is still something childish at the heart of them - you get the feeling that he doesn't want to dig deeper. His films present wisdom like the fortune in a cookie - nice little soundbites that you can write on your senior page. For example, the Almost Famous fortune might read: "Sometimes heroes (your favorite rock star, the free-spirited groupie) aren't always what they seem." This is essentially the "important" idea behind this movie.

The difference with Day for Night is that there is no easily defined soundbite. But the beauty of a film like this is that, years after watching it, a scene will come back and inform an event in your life, and you'll suddenly understand exactly what Truffaut was getting at.

And you'll smile.

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