Powder Blue

Here's another straight-to-DVD film, but this one deserved it's fate. Powder Blue's biggest claim to fame is that Jessica Biel shows her tits in it, and that's pretty much the highlight of the movie.

The film, written and directed by Timothy Linh Bui, is a moody, lugubrious meditation on lonely people living in L.A. In many ways it resembled Crash, but is even more earnest, if that's possible. Several different characters drift through the story, occasionally intersecting, and all the while viewers face cliches and heavy-handed writing.

The main characters are Biel as a single-mother stripper who is low on money and has just lost her dog; Forest Whitaker as a former priest who is now trying to find someone who will help him commit suicide; Eddie Redmayne as a nerdy mortician who faints in the presence of a pretty girl (and guess what--he uses an asthma inhaler--how original!); and Ray Liotta as a man just out of prison who has an unusual interest in Biel. Also popping are actors like Lisa Kudrow, Kris Kristofferson, and Patrick Swayze under an absurd mane of hair.

There are all sorts of things to annoy here. First of all, when will someone make a movie about a well-adjusted stripper? There are some, you know. And most strippers have a lot of money, because it's quite lucrative. If that weren't enough, there's also the other cliche of urban life: the transvestite hooker who is treated with patronizing sympathy.

The parallels to Crash are many, including the use of a Los Angeles snowfall as a metaphor for some kind of miracle. I wonder if it ever does snow in L.A., is the city full of people who watch it fall and come to sort of conclusion about their life? And does this mean that people who live in Vermont are less susceptible to the miraculous?

The writing and direction are ham-fisted and betray a kind of film-school earnestness that practically collapses under its own weight. Whenever Bui has a chance to lay it on a trowel, he does.For example, Whitaker's character is despondent because his wife died. But not only did she die--she died on their wedding day. He could use some lessons in subtlety.