Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a couple reviews. I'm really pulling for the biopic THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS, but the word is incredibly mixed on the film. Geoffrey Rush looks freakishly like Sellers in some of the pics I've seen, although the below reviewer apparently doesn't think he fits the role enough to make a successful film. I hope I disagree, but we'll see. After this first review we got a look at Kevin Spacey's Bobby Darin biopic BEYOND THE SEA, so look below for that!!!
HI there Harry & Co...
We didn't have Geoffrey Rush and Stephen Hopkins in Paris - Geoffrey rushes over later. All we had was the film,. Or films. And nnen of 'em worl.
The one plain, obvious and indisputable fact about The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is that while Sellers could become Geoffrey Rush – without working up a sweat - Geoffrey Rush cannot become Peter Sellers. That is the difference between genius and a talent prone to extreme ham. Not that the film makes any attempt to really demonstrate Sellers’ genius – ie. to explain just why we should be interested in this guy’s life. Apparently, we’re all supposed to know about that going in. (Richard Attenborough and Robert Downey Jnr. did a slightly better job with Chaplin). Most everybody looks like who they are supposed to be – in the way any girl with a blonde wig and ruby red lips can resemble Marilyn – except the long, tall, thin, oblong-faced Stanley Tucci as the shorter, dumpier, rounder-faced Kubrick. It’s not as if we don’t know these people!
In order to pass for Sellers, Clouseau, etc., Rush looks like a Nip/Tuck victim. He’s never fat enough for the young Sellers and the casting only fuses when Sellers begins to match Rush’s age. His Chauncey Gardiner is amazing. Too look at, that is. His Millionairess make-up is grotesque – almost racist. And his reading of the President on the hot-line to Moscow in Strangelove - “well, how do you think I feel, Dmitri?” - loses everything that makes it one of the classic scenes in movie history.
Well, there are two moments where it really works. Split seconds... One where Sellers is shaving off his Mr. Topaze beard in the plane to Rome to become Clouseau (actually, he created the character in the car from the airport to Cinecitta Studios and it had nothing to do with seeing a moustachioed hero on a box of matches, Sellers had been into false moustaches since a kid), and there with half the Rush face hidden by shaving cream, the eyes are pure Pete. Another time, Rush does a Sellers giggle, his own not one of his characters’ - perfect! Only works the once. Next time he tries it, it’s all Rush and not Selledrs.
Worst sin of all, Rush worked overtime in studying and capturing the various voices Sellers is famous for from The Goons to Clouseau and back - and yet makes absolutely no effort to sound like Peter Sellers, himself... which I would have considered to be somewhat important... for a film called The Life And Death of Peter Sellers. Look at it this way, America – how would you fancy a film about Clinton or Jim Carrey... sounding like Russell flaming Crowe?
Stephen Hopkins has not made one film but several. And, as per usual, when a director sets out to bamboozle his audience by juggling too many balls at once, it is to cover up the fact that he didn’t haeve the alls to insist on the most vital ingredient of any movie - a good script. Unless he's Fellini. And Hopkins ain't no Fellini.
He keeps to the book-within-a-book idea of the 400,000 Roger Lewis biography by making a film-within-a-film as if it was being made by Sellers, and so – annoyingly – he does turns as his dad, his mom, his wife and even as Kubrick. And, apart from the scene as his own wife, these are all a waste of screen time, not advancing the story in any which way. In a recent article for The Guardian newspaper in Britain, Lewis calls the result “a pop-art masterpeice.... evocative of Sellers’ spellbinding freakiness.” I can’t agree. It is about as true, honest, correct, successful and with-it as the terrible credits... debased upon the DePatie-Freleng Pink Panther creds.
Oh yeah - there is one blissful moment when we hear the real Sellers – a voice-off from the Goodness Gracious Me record he made with Sophia Loren. And that’s what we want. And what we should stick with. The real thing. Not this almost insulting travesty.
You can call me Bobby Dupea...
I love, love the cast of this film. Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee is perfect casting and I'm psyched to see John Goodman on the big screen again. Moonshine is kinda lukewarm on the whole thing, so we'll see, but I know I'm still excited about this one!
Hey guys,
Moonshine, checking in. Just saw Kevin Spacey's labor o' love, "Beyond The Sea," a biopic about Bobby Darin that Spacey co-wrote, directed, produced and acted in, and thought I'd chip in more than my two cents. The danger with dream projects like this is that they can very easily turn into overindulgent piles o' shit, and I'm sad to say that that is indeed what this movie has turned out to be. Don't get me wrong, it's a very interesting pile o' shit that Spacey has pumped out for us to see. But if I paid ten bucks to see this one, I would have been royally pissed.
Of course the biggest problem right off the bat is that Spacey should have loved this project enough to let someone else play the main part. Bobby Darin died in his mid-30s, and Spacey is nearly 10 years older than that now. And he looks it. Although a child actor, William Ullrich, plays Bobby as a boy, Spacey picks up the story when Darin should have been about 20 or so, and it just doesn't work. Spacey tries to cheat his way out of this problem by framing the story as a movie within a movie, in which he's supposed to be an older Darin filming a biopic about himself. A studio exec tells him he's too old to play the part, but Darin's brother-in-law (played by Bob Hoskins) barks that no one else could play the part. It's like they're saying to the audience, "Wink, wink. Get it?" Sorry, guys, I'm not buying it and neither will 90 per cent of the people who see this movie. Beyond the simple fact that Spacey just LOOKS too old, there are punctuation marks littered throughout the film that scream out the fact that he's too old for the part. This opening scene is one. Another is a scene where Bobby concedes that he's losing his hair and needs to start wearing a toupee (he wasn't already??? it sure looked like he already was). His courting of the luminous Kate Bosworth (playing Darin's real life love Sandra Dee) is another glaring moment. He looks like he could be her father. Near the end of the film Bobby mentions that he's just turned 36, but he looks closer to 46. And the age problem isn't just with Spacey. Though she's great in a few scenes later in the film, Caroline Aaron plays Spacey's older sister Nina. In her earliest scenes, she's supposed to be in her mid-20s, but Aaron is easily pushing 50, if not beyond it, and she looks it. Still, all of these age problems bring me back to one of the movie's brightly glowing gems: William Ullrich, who plays a young Bobby. This kid is spectacular. And though Spacey's performance (especially when he's singing) is very good a lot of the time, the fact that Ullrich was so amazing made me wonder if there wasn't some untapped twenty- or thirty-something talent out there who could have truly done justice to Darin and made Spacey's movie a much better and more believable piece of work.
Even still, when you push that big fat elephant out of the room, there's still plenty that doesn't work with this movie. The movie wants to be a serious biopic, a whimsical musical, a love story, a political lesson, and on, and on. It's almost like Spacey couldn't decide on what his favorite cereal was, so he threw a couple spoonfuls of Froot Loops into his bowl, along with some Rice Krispies, some All Bran, some oatmeal, a little bit of fruit, and who knows what else. The end result was certainly colorful, but ultimately a total mess. For all intents and purposes, the movie wants to be, and probably should have been, a straight telling of Darin's life, which was plenty dramatic enough even without all the frills. But more than once, Spacey and company break out into unrealistic, technicolor dance numbers that take you out of the dramatic story being told onscreen. The musical numbers are generally pretty damn good, but they're utterly out of place given the sense of heavy drama found elsewhere in the movie. There are also jarring pits of politics thrown into the film--Bobby supporting a black comedian, Bobby writing Vietnam war protest songs and supporting Bobby Kennedy's presidential bid. Neither of these stray political plotlines are hinted at in any way before they suddenly appear onscreen, so they make virtually no sense. What we do see is that Bobby's very reason to continue living is showbiz, and suddenly he's supporting a "brother" against a racist club owner and threatening a sit-in at the Copacabana? Huh? Where'd that come from?
As I mentioned before, the framing device used is a biopic about Darin, starring Darin. Too bad no such movie was ever made. What's worse is that Spacey as adult Darin and Ullrich as child Darin spend a lot of time watching this never-made movie and chatting about it. Whenever a scene isn't going right or Spacey's Darin isn't telling it to the younger Darin's satisfaction, we hear the kid scream "Stop!" and we pull back to them arguing over how things really happened. This tendency towards meta-storytelling grows tedious after a while. Really, guys, I don't need this suddenly very overused movie cliche. Just show me the fucking story! Bobby Darin's life was amazing. Sickly as a child, he was expected to die before the age of 15. He survived, worked his way up to being a musical star, married a girl next door movie star (Sandra Dee), got nominated for an Academy Award at a very young age, found out something monumentally life-changing about his personal life in his mid-30s (I don't want to spoil the surprise, so I'll say no more about that one), continued to perform onstage almost to his very last breath, and then died at the very young age of 37. Show me that story, Kevin, and drop all the frou-frou extras.
All my bitching aside, though, I do have to give Spacey kudos for his musical performances. Rather than lip-sync to Darin's recordings, Spacey performed every one of Darin's songs in the film, and he's absolutely astounding. If this movie tanks at the box office, as I think it will, Spacey should find himself a good Broadway musical to recharge his batteries.
Take it easy.
Moonshine
