Blu-ray Review: Powder Blue (2009)

Now Available on DVD & Blu-ray

With all the '80s musical and dance film remakes either in the works or in pre-release from Fame to Footloose to, yes, Girls Just Want to Have Fun-- Powder Blue is proof that instead of an audition, if they ever decided to remake Flashdance, Jessica Biel could just send the filmmakers a screener of this film from writer/director Timothy Linh Bui.

Of course, aside from Biel's scenes as an exotic dancer which have long been the talk of the sleazier side of the internet (including humiliating leaked photos of Biel topless etc.), those imaginary producers of the possible Flashdance remake would have to endure the rest of the film which simply put is one of the absolute worst movies I've seen in a long, long time. I could just say "end of review" but if you're interested why, go ahead and read on.



For honestly, the thing is-- sadly Biel (whom I first saw in The Illusionist and felt she showed great promise) would've done much better by deciding to show her frankly extremely impressive and athletic skills as a dancer in Flashdance since (unlike that film's talented star Jennifer Beals) she completes all of her own highly stylized routines in this one.

However, in Blue she stars as a single coke-snorting stripper so desperate for companionship she comes on way too strong with every man she meets--nervously talking about Annie Hall for example which any film geek will tell you isn't a good idea. Why the coke and latching onto fantasies of men who will take her to Paris, you ask? Well, the filmmaker is only so pleased to constantly remind you that it's as a way to avoid thinking about her coma-ridden son and missing dog (yes, as if one of those plot-lines wasn't depressing enough).

Obviously, Biel is completely wasted here and to add further insult to insult, she's now been made the subject of online sleaze for believing in a filmmaker so much that she pours hot wax all over her bare chest in a pretentious film that on paper was most likely trying to become the next in a long line of Short Cuts, Crash, 21 Grams, Magnolia, Garden Party, Crossing Over, The Air I Breathe, and dozens of other hopelessly lonely movies about the bleakness of life in La La Land. And as everyone knows we can never have too many of those!

While the film's central premise as promised in the synopsis and on the back of the box is that we're going to encounter "the destinies of four people desperate for connection and redemption," in a way that "movingly chronicles the imperfect lives of people teetering on the edge of despair and the miracles that bring them back," basically throughout its unspeakably mind-numbing 106 minute running time that makes Chariots of Fire and Reds feel like "short films," Bui introduces us to an endless parade of losers. He does this in an attempt to as the filmmaker describes in the making-of-featurette (which I watched both as a critic and as a viewer just simply in shock that this picture had been made in the first place) to create "a study of loneliness in a city of 8 million people."

Inexplicably an obsession of the filmmaker for four years as he struggled to get it made-- even going as far as to live in a seedy motel he'd read about in the paper where failed dreamers and transients who'd ventured to Los Angeles all with the hopes of "becoming somebody" go to rot-- Powder Blue tries its best to dress up the devastation of the piece with religious symbolism and dialogue throughout from the opening frames of the film.



Setting it right around Christmas, Bui makes his "miracle" a bizarre one wherein at least three characters wind up dead. Oh yes, there's a happy present for you and frankly I would've preferred Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia style rain of frogs which freaked the hell out of me but did so with style!



And early into the movie we also meet a suicidal Forest Whitaker willing to pay any given stranger 50 grand to shoot him in the heart (most likely for agreeing to produce and star in this film), Ray Liotta as a terminally ill ex-con and a quirky asthmatically shy mortician so unrealistic he's named for the keyboard-- Qwerty (Eddie Redmayne). Oh and I think it goes without saying that Qwerty whose last name is actually Dolittle who has never had a real girlfriend and entertains kids with puppets.



As if that wasn't enough drama, the film also somehow manages to work in creepier subplots and wasted cameos by incredibly talented actors including Lisa Kudrow as a good-natured waitress who-- lonely but still functioning after a divorce-- provides an early romantic possibility for the suicidally depressed and grieving widow Whitaker (whose wife we see in flashbacks was played by the impressive Sanaa Lathan).

Likewise we encounter Kris Kristofferson as another underworld type who always arranges to meet Liotta on a city bus (not exactly something out of the typical wiseguy playbook), a hooker transvestite trying to raise money to undergo surgery to become a woman, and Patrick Swayze as Biel's lecherous strip club boss who-- similar to the girl playing his employee-- would've been much better off in an '80s musical or dance movie remake.

I will grant that it is intriguing indeed on Bui's part to cast Liotta as a soft-spoken against-type character who lets his eyes do most of the talking in a storyline that also involves Biel yet he ruins it as it's also one of the most predictable "gee, how are they related?" connect-the-dots of the wretchedly gritty script and to top it all, the payoff feels like a cheat.



Despite this, the sole bright spot of the film is found in Kudrow who manages to work wonders with her tiny role making us wish she not only was offered more work but that Powder Blue (by the way, I still don't get the title) would've centered around her.

Moreover, by this point I'm seriously questioning Forest Whitaker's motives (along with Liotta's actually) in never finding a role they decide to turn down as they both recently starred in equally bleak ensemble pictures like Whitaker's The Air I Breathe and Liotta's Crossing Over which you know wouldn't have garnered them a big salary at all.

Yet in the case of Powder Blue, mostly you just feel the sorriest for Biel. Not her character mind you as Biel's Rose-Johnny (again with the stupid names) could've disappeared along with the rest and we would've been fine but instead during the film, I felt incredibly badly for the actress herself.



As despite all of the online chatter about her body and beauty including quips about her acting chops by agreeing to appear in some downright silly movies like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (although to her credit, I wouldn't have turned down a Sandler picture either)-- not to mention the endless gossip fodder surrounding her relationship with Justin Timberlake-- she's a strong onscreen presence. And much like she did given her great yet underwritten role in The Illusionist, she plunges completely into Blue with a fierce dedication and loyalty that makes you painfully aware that she should be offered the chance to prove herself in something far more worthwhile than this film.

Downright ugly and extremely unpleasant (so much so that I'd rather watch a double feature of two other contemporary horrors--Margot at the Wedding and The Savages before I'd ever watch this again), Powder Blue is the type of movie that should come with a prescription for an antidepressant or perhaps a tranquilizer so that you could sleep through its entirety.

Additionally, the work that even seems visually grainy in high-definition despite a strong sound balance goes against its tagline that "hope is found in the darkest places" by proving that it can only be found when you hit eject. Since ultimately, the only thing it makes you want to do is avoid Los Angeles like the plague, any future films by the director, and ask yourself just when filmmakers decided that the only subject to make an independent film about is devastating loneliness, suicide, terminal illness, and/or lost causes. For Bui-- perhaps realizing he'll never have the chance to make another movie-- opted to just go for the 2009 Sophie's Choice Depress-a-thon Award of the Year and put them all in the same film.

DVD Review: Savage Grace (2008)

View the Trailer & Photo Gallery

The Independent Spirit Award
Nominated Film

Arrives on DVD
12/23/08

Read the Book

"I'll give you all I've got to give
If you say you love me too
I may not have a lot to give
But what I've got I'll give to you
I don't care too much for money
For money can't buy me love."
-- The Beatles, "Can't Buy Me Love"
(1964)

The thing about the Bakelands is that they knew damn well that money couldn't buy them love from others but did everything within their power to buy themselves enough to make them love themselves. And to this end they succeeded brilliantly... at least for awhile whether it was in the form of fancy parties, gorgeous couture, expensive jewelry, lessons in the fine arts, languages and ultimately in the form of travel from one country to the next when they inevitably wore out their welcome nearly as quickly as they arrived.

"Known everywhere, [and] loved nowhere," as Roger Ebert wrote, the tragic tale of the Bakeland dynasty, with money being inherited down three generations from their Bakelite plastics empire which was "used in everything from cooking utensils to nuclear bombs," provides incredibly provocative, kinky, and overwhelmingly tragic storytelling fodder for director Tom Kalin and screenwriter Howard A. Rodman (working from Natalie Robins and Stephen M.L. Aron's award-winning book of the same name).

Alternately as plastic as Bakelite utensils themselves and as radioactive as their deadly weapons, in a behind-the-scenes featurette, Kalin discusses his decision to break down the enormous source material into five distinct "days" serving as near chapters for his Greek tragedy construct as he moves from what he considered to be the "key turning points in the story" as it spans several decades.

Beginning in post World War II New York, its initial conflict seems to fixate on the tense marriage between Brooks Bakeland (Stephen Dillane) and Barbara Daly (Julianne Moore) as in the opening scene she manages to wheel and deal her way into putting together an extravagant guest list for a dinner in a classy restaurant and uses her same smooth feminine wiles and titular savage grace to bend everyone (including her husband) to her will. While they parade around elegantly attired, their manners crumble over dinner when Barbara begins asking salacious questions of their guests. Barbara-- a woman who aspired to socially climb with the best of them yet managed to push everyone away with her tenacity and lack of tact-- a switch seems to flip in Barbara at any given moment from the height of external sophistication and poise to narcissistic confrontation and hedonism without any warning.



The problems within the marriage and in both Brooks and Barbara who seem a bit thinly drawn in the ninety-eight minute running time only escalate as Kalin moves locations and time periods and leads us into their world from the point-of-view of their son and the film's narrator, Tony (Eddie Redmayne). Although forced out into the world and able to effortlessly grasp languages and societal rhythms in Paris, Spain and London, the contradictorily fragile and sheltered son forms a creepily close bond with his mother Barbara that moves from simple over-coddling to eventually incest as he ages into a homosexual and both find themselves sharing her most loyal "walker" Sam (Hugh Dancy).

With Tony's father out of the picture after he manages to seduce a young Spanish beauty that Tony has brought home in the '60s, Barbara and Tony grow increasingly needy and codependent in a relationship that feels even more sinister than the ones penned by Tennessee Williams at his most provocative and indeed at times, the film's self-consciously flowery and honey-tinged dialogue seems as though it were trying to weave gold from the dirt in the manner of Williams (especially Suddenly Last Summer and The Glass Menagerie), Albert Camus' absurdist morality tale The Stranger, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, the Greek tragedies of Sophocles, and the films of Douglas Sirk which were used to stunning effect for both Grace actress Moore and its producers on the far superior Far From Heaven.

An uneasy and extremely disturbing exploration of "what humans are to one another" and "how attached and detached" they can be at the same time as Dillane notes in a DVD extra-- while the actors are all uniformly excellent, Kalin's direction is solid and the film is almost the most unsettling in how gorgeous it looks with the combination of set, costume, lighting, cinematography, and production design despite the horrific goings on. Yet ultimately it's far too cold in its execution to earn anything more than just startled fascination.



In addressing the key turning points as Kalin aspired-- he and his writer Howard A. Rodman nonetheless failed to flesh out the characters in a way that even begins to foreshadow Tony's underlying violent tendencies or schizophrenia (although the symptoms of mental illness seem prevalent in his parents) and we're never completely sure what the thesis of the film is aside from wanting to craft a visually beautiful yet incredibly haunting tragedy of the bold and beautiful and/or rich and famous.

Always riveted by fact based pieces such as Capote's In Cold Blood as he notes in the IFC Channel Special extra on the stunning DVD transfer from The Weinstein Company, Genius Entertainment, and IFC Films, with Savage Grace, director Tom Kalin releases his first film in fifteen years after his critically acclaimed feature Swoon, which chronicled the thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb formerly made famous in Alfred Hitchcock's fictional Rope.

And while he's an undeniable talent who seems to have a great eye for exploring American scandal and Grace is an impressively well-made feature that will inevitably get you thinking, it's much more surface-level in its approach. For, without enough depth below the surface as he builds and builds a tale of an empire except instead of a brick foundation, it tumbles down like a house of cards. Ultimately, we're given an arduous third act with a rushed conclusion and not enough psychological exploration of the three Bakelands to evoke much more than pity, a terrible unsettled feeling, and fascination of the way that money can't even buy three such shallow people anything close to love-- not from others-- but from themselves.