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September 17 -- This weekend I saw two movies by
theater people centered on pop music. Theoretically, that's an
excellent combo for me. But I didn't love either Julie
Taymor's Across
the Universe or John
Turturro's Romance
& Cigarettes. The former is a super-high-budget
special-effects extravaganza that telescopes the story of the
1960s through the Beatles' songs, sung by the cast of mostly
young unknowns (with cameo appearances by the likes of Bono,
Joe Cocker, and Eddie Izzard). I loved the really trippy
sequences: "I Am the Walrus" (sung by Bono as he
takes a busful of acid-dosed kids on a Magical Mystery Tour),
"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," and
"Strawberry Fields Forever." But the boy-girl love
story at the heart of the movie felt banal and generic to me.
I thought the movie would be much more political and draw
stronger parallels to today. Many people I respect, including Stephen
Holden, totally fell in love with the movie -- maybe you
will, too. I liked it and respected it but didn't go crazy. I
went with a big posse of people
and we had fun talking about it over dinner afterwards at
Borgo Antico. And I did enjoy seeing lots of wonderful theater
actors in small parts -- Linda Emond, Bill Irwin, James
Urbaniak, and Ching Valdes-Aran, to name just a few.
Seeing lots of great theater actors cavorting among famous
movie/TV stars is just about the main attraction to Romance
& Cigarettes, which is a very wacky low-budget pet
project for Turturro, who's probably best-known as a perennial
character actor in films by Joel and Ethan Coen, who executive
produced this movie. It's sort of like Dennis Potter's The
Singing Detective, in that the characters keep
breaking out into song, sometimes a capella, sometimes
lip-synching, sometimes singing along with corny old pop hits
by the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Dusty Springfield.
It sounds like more fun than it actually is. It's like a
ramshackle version of John Waters' already ramshackle
fast-and-dirty movies (big emphasis on dirty). You get to see
James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken,
Mary-Louise Parker, Kate Winslet, Bobby Cannavale, Aida
Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Elaine Stritch -- amazing cast,
right? And yet you wind up thinking, "Boy, did Turturro
call in a bunch of favors on this one....."
see previous
entry here
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