Neil Young Is Digger Hive

Digger, writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu's new apocalyptic black comedy where Tom Cruise slaps on old-age makeup to play an uber-rich cowboy oilman, is one of the year's great box-office calamities. Based on Digger's commercial performance thus far, it may be a while before we get another star-driven big-budget passion-project art film. For the most part, Digger reviews have also been dismal, but there's a passionate core of supporters out there who insist that it's a great, vital, important work of cinema. One of them is my friend Jayson Greene, who wrote a New York Times op-ed about how Digger is a "secret masterpiece." Another is Neil Young, who calls it "the best film I have ever seen."Neil Young posted a passionate defense of Digger on his Neil Young Archives website last week, and it has been making the rounds ever since. As someone who hasn't yet seen Digger, I can certainly understand how its values might align with Young's own, but his all-out conviction on this subject is still a little surprising. Here's what Young says about it:Digger is the best film I have ever seen. None of the reviews I have read describe this film adequately, in my opinion. They seem to ...