Deep, moody film, unsettling, with an overdose of despondency. Ideal fare for those who wish to wallow in their own terminally depressive states. Me, I'm just a perv, I was checking up on STRIPTEASE on Wikipedia, when I Googled I got a link to the best striptease movies ever, so last week I watched CLOSER, this week, POWDER BLUE. I was thrilled to hear that Jessica Biel was in it, as a stripper, mind you, hell, she made me look at (I still can only shake my head) that show with the reverend, I'm not going to even mention its name, but really, me watch the Religious Right's flagship TV show? I just hovered around the TV and watched when she and her kid sister was on. This, of course, is way at the other end of the spectrum. Too dark, too melancholy, too depressing, but the sight of Jessica on stage is worth my every effort. So, it's a long way from the old days of a politically-correct holy-righteous TV show to this mixture of lust and redemption. Still, when I think of her, I'd always remember SUMMER CATCH, again, not my kind of movie, too much damned baseball, but what a dreamgirl.
Show me all the nudity in the world, if it doesn't come along with the soulful eyes, what's the point? And Jessica has them. Lovely eyes you can gaze into, and see love. A thing of beauty, as that other reviewer said.
Of course, the people who watched that unmentioned TV show wouldn't watch POWDER BLUE, unless on the sly, what with the straying-from-the-flock menfolk...
Getting back to the movie itself, it is not exactly guaranteed to put you in a fun frame of mind. An ex-priest who lost his young wife and wishes to be put out of his misery, but who doesn't want to pull the trigger himself, entices all and sundry, including a transsexual prostitute, with the lure of big money, into doing the deed. He meets Sandy (Lisa Kudrow, downbeat from FRIENDS), a waitress, and life seems to begin to have meaning again. A stripper with a cocaine habit and a kid in a coma, is confronted by her long-lost, morose and dying Dad, even as she finds love with a mortician, a geeky misfit who shares her love for animals. Whole lot of drug use, origin of movie title, obviously.
I have to stipulate, my DVD is just a plain version, no subtitles, and there are a lot of places where subtitles would have really helped. Watching for a second tine now, I catch on to stuff I missed the first time round. The blue snow bit I find to be overly-dramatic. After all, it hardly ever even rains in California, and here you have this blue ice...? Heaps of it?
If it wasn't for Jessica, I wouldn't have been remotely interested in this. Yes, there are powerful emotions here, but, no, the story itself is not the kind of thing I want to watch. Not that there aren't cute romantic moments, like the trolley cart scene.
P.S. Hell, that was Patrick Swayze???? Went through the entire movie without realizing.
Show me all the nudity in the world, if it doesn't come along with the soulful eyes, what's the point? And Jessica has them. Lovely eyes you can gaze into, and see love. A thing of beauty, as that other reviewer said.
Of course, the people who watched that unmentioned TV show wouldn't watch POWDER BLUE, unless on the sly, what with the straying-from-the-flock menfolk...
Getting back to the movie itself, it is not exactly guaranteed to put you in a fun frame of mind. An ex-priest who lost his young wife and wishes to be put out of his misery, but who doesn't want to pull the trigger himself, entices all and sundry, including a transsexual prostitute, with the lure of big money, into doing the deed. He meets Sandy (Lisa Kudrow, downbeat from FRIENDS), a waitress, and life seems to begin to have meaning again. A stripper with a cocaine habit and a kid in a coma, is confronted by her long-lost, morose and dying Dad, even as she finds love with a mortician, a geeky misfit who shares her love for animals. Whole lot of drug use, origin of movie title, obviously.
I have to stipulate, my DVD is just a plain version, no subtitles, and there are a lot of places where subtitles would have really helped. Watching for a second tine now, I catch on to stuff I missed the first time round. The blue snow bit I find to be overly-dramatic. After all, it hardly ever even rains in California, and here you have this blue ice...? Heaps of it?
If it wasn't for Jessica, I wouldn't have been remotely interested in this. Yes, there are powerful emotions here, but, no, the story itself is not the kind of thing I want to watch. Not that there aren't cute romantic moments, like the trolley cart scene.
P.S. Hell, that was Patrick Swayze???? Went through the entire movie without realizing.