It's said there's a longer cut of 54 that can miraculously turn this mediocre dud into a great motion picture... but if you've prepared a plain meal and add more food, you'll probably wind up with... more plain food on the table: And it's a stilted, cautious one at that, since... despite the R-rated T&A raging inside the infamous New York City 1970's Studio 54 nightclub, where only mostly-ugly rich celebrities or beautiful nobodies could enter... there's a standard-dialogue/TV-movie vibe from the very beginning, even making Mike Myers' otherwise decent attempt at playing gay nightclub mogul Steve Rubell seem watered-down, cliche and predictable...
And back when flavor-of-the-month Ryan Phillippe (here allowed into the club while buddy Mark Ruffalo's too ugly to enter) may have been a more legitimate actor than former rapper Marky Mark Walhberg, there's simply no touching PT Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS, which 54 attempts but without the inspired muse of Scorsese-meets-Tarantino's contagious celebration of gritty exploitation cinema (and Phillipe's stale narration proves how comparably brilliant GOODFELLAS' Ray Liotta was)... Instead, 54's a bland one-night-stand that lacks the necessary nerve to go all the way while random side-characters lethargically add to a mainstream feel-good movie (with pallid traces of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER melodrama), clumsily attempting yet another anything-goes/based-on-a-true-story expose: Like naive bartender Brecken Meyer's Afterschool Special-style drug addiction; Salma Hayek's attempt to be a music star straight from an episode of FAME; or Neve Campbell's famous TV starlet, half as pretty as the pretty boy supposedly obsessed with her... So, overall, there's no saving a picture that has recently laid practically all blame on producer Harvey Weinstein, supposedly having edited-out the story's inner-core, and yet, if that's the case, how do you explain PULP FICTION? Well... the difference is the director, folks, who in this case didn't jump in with both feet... to end up wading in extremely shallow waters. Rates: **
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Featured Post
UNFROSTED (2024)
Even rabid fans of the sitcom SEINFELD are realizing that that joke about Jerry not being a good actor, built right into the classic show it...
-
The extremely low-budget of THE DEATH COLLECTOR should not be a detriment since it effectively provides an eerie realism to what's a po...
-
If a novelization flows, it doesn't matter how many times you've seen the movie, since, on the printed page, RAIDERS OF THE LOST A...
-
Hands down the best scene of EASY MONEY has Rodney Dangerfield insulting a fat kid and his family... where he seems like characters from sup...
-
Starts out decently enough, and surprisingly different for Mel Brooks to direct a remake: something that isn't a parody of a serious ...
-
Although on the big screen the film noir/crime b-movies were on their way out (or morphing into something else), television held onto this ...
-
Well if anything happens, and THE WALKING DEAD: DARYL DIXON doesn't become a big hit, then they could easily make a prequel taking place...
-
It's not just that son of Jim Henson Brian Henson crapped on his father's MUPPET SHOW legacy by making a crude comedy where crude pu...
-
While SHADOWS AND FOG is a pretty good movie, and uses the titular elements that channel old British mystery novels, German Expressionism an...
-
Poor Ryan O'Neal couldn't catch a break. Even two films now considered classics didn't make money in the 1970's upon relea...
-
LIVE CREAM is the best live Cream album, covering songs from the first LP Fresh Cream and Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker (bass/l...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.