Forty Shades of Blue (2005)

hyped garbage

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

.. if Russian women are purported to be highly educated and intelligent.. then this one for sure must be one of the very dumb ones... she's living with a guy thirty years older, has a kid with him, then proceeds to have an affair with his eldest son, who is nearer her age, and who's married with a family of his own... oh yea, to top it all off, she goes ahead and falls in love with him.. and near the end drops a line blowing up all their futures.. someone worked really hard on this fantasy plot.. more like Forty Shades of Stupidity.. if it garnered any kind of buzz/attention.. it could only be because of the likes of a Rip Torn, otherwise most would not be paying much attention at all.. it's a kind '5'

Dina Korzun played an immigrant, abandoned with her son in the sordid wastelands of Merrie England, in Last Resort, and her character is in a way an extension of this part. In 40 Shades she is the trophy wife of a 'legendary' Memphis record producer, and her fragile, doll-like beauty is an extreme foil for Rip Torn's gross and menacing but superficial superstar. It is an unsettling experience to see a film like this coming from America: after half-an-hour, the plot doesn't seem to have settled on a direction. About twenty minutes have passed before we can begin to guess who everyone is, and what they are doing. None of that in-your-face stuff. The enclosed world of these people is shot mostly indoors and feels suitably claustrophobic; it's perhaps a mistake by the director to extend this feeling of claustrophobia to the auditorium where you may be watching this, though, and similarly, the exploration of ennui amongst the rich and powerful backslappers should not cross over into the darkness of the front row, like some kind of virus. Antonioni used to specialise in this kind of milieu and he (damnably) admitted that he found boredom fascinating. There is a dulled spark in there, though: Michael (Burrows), the son of the Great Man, and the lonely doll fall desperately in love, and there is an excellent scene where Big Al lovelessly declares his love for his Laura through a hootenanny P.A. while the young pretender, the hungry wolf, or Lonesome Polecat, prowls around the edge of the dance crowd. But about 40 minutes into this your reviewer began feeling the passing of time, and by the end, even this theatre's lovely new seats were arse-numbing. A noir-ish film like this should provide lots of enjoyment for the eye alone, but the camera-work was outstandingly ordinary. There is a good enough film in there, but it needs to be cut out of the block. CLIFF HANLEY

What's great about seeing films as part of a film festival is that most of the time they've received little or no advance word-of-mouth. For me that makes encountering such films a very pure experience, having no expectations, just open to whatever story the filmmaker wants to tell. I hand myself over to the film and see where it takes me.Within 15 or 20 minutes of watching this film, where it took me was straight to my left wrist to check my watch. For me, watching this turtle crawl was one of the more excruciating experiences I've had in a theater.Spoiler warning, as above, and now here's the problem: a boring lead character who is bored and depressed spends the length of the film bored and depressed and ends the film bored and depressed. Guess where the audience winds up?What's fascinating about the film for me is the director's insistence upon scenes that literally do nothing a go nowhere, telling us nothing. In one interminable sequence, our heroine walks around, looks at furniture, lays down on a bed, looks at the ceiling, stares at nothing, you get the point. With each edit the audience anticipates-- perhaps even prays for-- something, anything to happen in the next scene and there is literally no payoff.Case in point: laboriously, slowly, she makes her way to a closet to pull a journal off a shelf. What will be in it? Some secret we don't know? Alas, it's a blank page. Now she's grabbing a pencil. What will she write? Is this her suicide note? Alas, we don't get to see what she's writing. Will it materialize later in the film? A crucial plot point to be revealed at film's end? No. Unfortunately this waste of 5 - 10 minutes of screen time literally goes nowhere, tells us nothing, and provides no break to the depressive monotony of the 90 minutes preceding it.She's dropping her kid off at the day care. What will she do? What will happen? Nothing.This is the case the entire film. It got to the point where the pointless culmination of each exhausting sequence elicited derisive snickering from those around me in the theater. As we exited, a thirtysomething woman behind me commented, "Every one of those people needed some caffeine or some prozac." Hear, hear. As did the audience by that point.I don't know the work of Sachs, but it seems that Sachs was aggressively bound to make a film that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Sachs would make a film in which our heroine makes no journey, learns nothing of herself, and winds up depressed and miserable, precisely where she started. With claustrophobic framing, dark and dreary colors, and an almost pervasive lack of music to break or enhance the mood, it's almost like Sachs was determined to leave the audience miserable as well.Even the brilliant Rip Torn can't elevate this pointless dreck above the sensory experience of watching wallpaper dry.

Just saw this movie in the Best of Fest for Sundance 05 and can honestly say I hated every minute of it. As I walked out the theater I wondered if the Sundance judges had pulled a joke on us since this was the supposed Best Drama picture this year... I heard many other disgruntled folks around me saying this was just agonizing to sit through which sums it up perfectly. Although Rip Torn did a great job, the other characters were just plain annoying and moved through this hollow storyline without motive or any indication of life. Even the final shot of the movie evoked some unintentional laughter from the restless audience. This would be great for those battling insomnia.