BEFORE: I'm halfway through the year, with 150 films watched and 150 to go - however, there are still 154 films on the watchlist so I'm going to have to start trimming, without interrupting the chain. Any film that doesn't link to another film may now find itself on the 2016 calendar. Kevin Spacey carries over from "Henry & June", and I'm back on the crime beat.
THE PLOT: A visiting city reporter's assignment suddenly revolves around the murder trial of a local millionaire, whom he befriends.
AFTER: Moving from 1931 Paris to modern-day Savannah, Georgia, and things haven't changed all that much. Both cities have a secret side to them, places where the rich people can indulge themselves and the old gender roles don't apply. But perhaps this represents a sea change, because it's a film from 1997 that shows gay people as part of society, (even high society) and they're not the weirdest people in town. I didn't read the book this was based on, but I'm going to check the Wikipedia page and the IMDB trivia to see where the movie and the book differ.
For example, there's a guy who walks an invisible dog, which is really just a leash with a wire in it, so it doesn't touch the ground. Another guy takes flies (presumably dead ones, although perhaps in the film they just couldn't do this effect with live ones) and ties them to strings so they'll appear to fly around his body. What's the point of doing this? It's never really explained. Does he want to create the visual appearance of someone who smells bad? The same guy also carries around a vial of poison, and he keeps saying that one day he's going to pour it into the water supply of the town, but he never gets around to it. What's worse, the fact that nobody in town takes him seriously or tries to stop him, or the fact that this is a plot thread that never goes anywhere? It's brought back a second time during the trial, but nope, never goes anywhere that time either.
(Ah, it seems like the film dropped some of the characters from the book, and condensed some of the others into composite characters. Seems they managed to keep the personality quirks that were the most pointless.)
There are a lot of loose threads here, plotwise - the voodoo woman in the cemetery is another great example of killing time, spinning wheels without a real destination. She was supposed to put a curse on the district attorney, or something, but that never really happened. Or did it? Then she came back at the end because she felt that justice had not been served. How seriously should I take this character, who claims to speak for the dead and have some kind of second-sight, but appears to talk in riddles or nonsense?
All this makes the movie extra-long, at 2 1/2 hours - hey, did you know "Law & Order" can do a murder trial in an hour, and that's with commercials? And I'm sure that the "SVU" series has covered gay and transgender issues more seriously and in much shorter time-frames as well. I could deal with an extra-long film if it felt more worthwhile, if the pieces came together better and it all added up to something, but that just doesn't feel like the case here.
It looks like artists and writers are both recurring themes this year - I'll deal with this all in the wrap-up, but I can't help but notice that paintings and sculptures have popped up in "The Monuments Men", "Prime", and I've got more art stuff coming up. Writers have been portrayed in this year's films like "Young Adult", "The Grand Budapest Hotel", "Something's Gotta Give", "Girl Most Likely", "Roman Holiday", "The Great Gatsby", "The Night Listener" and of course "Henry & June" - Hollywood just loves making movies about writers.
But that fact that the main character is a writer raises some questions here - the accused killer invited the writer to Savannah in the first place, ostensibly to write an article about his infamous Christmas parties. He just happens to choose THAT night to shoot someone, knowing full well that the writer was in town? It seems like a strange coincidence, or else he acted with premeditation, thinking about the inevitable book deal if he did something salacious enough. I suppose that's debatable.
Also starring John Cusack (last seen in "The Butler"), Jude Law (last seen in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), Irma P. Hall (last seen in "Patch Adams"), Alison Eastwood, Jack Thompson (last seen in "The Great Gatsby"), Lady Chablis, Paul Hipp, Bob Gunton (also last seen in "Patch Adams"), Richard Herd, Kim Hunter (last seen in "A Streetcar Named Desire"), Geoffrey Lewis (last seen in "Heaven's Gate"), Leon Rippy, with cameos from Michael Rosenbaum, Patrika Darbo, Gary Anthony Williams, James Gandolfini (last seen in "Enough Said").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Johnny Mercer songs
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