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The Singing Detective
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List Price:
$14.98
Diseases Finder Price:
$9.98
Your Savings: $ 5.00 ( 33% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Paramount
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Robin Wright Penn, Mel Gibson, Jeremy Northam, Katie Holmes
Directed By: Keith Gordon
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0097363409045
Format: Anamorphic
Label: Paramount
Manufacturer: Paramount
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Paramount
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2004-03-23
Running Time: 108
Studio: Paramount
Theatrical Release Date: 2003
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Editorial Reviews:
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If you can pull The Singing Detective out from under the long shadow cast by the acclaimed 1986 British miniseries, Keith Gordon's 109-minute film version achieves its own distinction. It was a daring (and some might say foolhardy) assignment to film Dennis Potter's screenplay, written out of Potter's desire to see his semi-autobiographical drama in feature-length form, but Gordon rose to the occasion with a superlative cast led by Robert Downey, intense as ever as Potter's on-screen alter ego. Bedridden with an excruciating case of skin-rotting psoriasis, pulp novelist Dan Dark (Downey) escapes into his vivid imagination, where gunmen and gumshoes pursue their pulpy agenda, casting himself as the titular "warbler" whose pain and anger is focused like a laser on his cheating wife (Robin Wright Penn) and anyone else who's made his real and imaginary worlds unbearable. Coproducer Mel Gibson appears under heavy makeup as Dark's condescending psychiatrist, and supporting roles are played with stylish flair by Adrien Brody, Katie Holmes, Jeremy Northam, Carla Gugino, and others. While many critics called this a noble failure, The Singing Detective captures the essence of Potter's story, offering a welcome alternative to the acknowledged superiority of the miniseries. --Jeff Shannon
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Lively Nightmare
Comment: This movie didn't seem to get very good reviews. After seeing it myself, I'm frankly kinda stumped. It's malevolent and weird, but it certainly isn't dull; it's nightmarish and surreal, but not to the point that you can't tell what's going on. Plus, the acting is great and the concept disturbing. As unpleasant as parts of it were, I'm going to watch it again.
Part of the problem is, this movie is a remake of a much better TV series. The TV series ran 7 1/2 hours, and this movie has *somehow* been cut down to 2. Okay. You can guess what happened. In an attempt to trim off fat, they whittled the plot down to an incomplete skeleton. But it all still makes sense, and I enjoyed doing my own job of guessing and reconstruction.
I think the other problem is that people see the title, and expect a fun, flashy crime story. This movie is not what you'd call "fun", unless you love a good Lynch or Cronenberg marathon.
Also, if you want to ogle Robert Downey Jr.--and that's a good and admirable pastime, I applaud it--this movie will bother you. He spends most of it looking like he's in the last stages of radiation poisoning. His dreamworld alter-ego is handsome enough, but rendered as a flat-voiced, shiny-eyed Invasion Of The Body Snatchers doppelganger. I had to remind myself that it was only an actor in makeup; the illness portrayed here is horribly hopeless and seems very real. (Which is too bad. Here Downey is, ferociously good, filled with rage and scorching the paint off the walls, and I'm duckeng the effects as fast as I can.)
Yeah, Downey is great in this; he goes from a sick, vicious, venomous [...] in the first half to a slightly-less sick, more charming, more frightening head case in the second half. More frightening, as he becomes less insane? Absolutely. In the first half of the movie, you know what he will do--he's going to break every bone in your body, if he could just beat the pain enough to lever himself out of bed. In the second half, he is a gentler lunatic, still lashing out, but also experiencing moments of dotty clarity; he is picking up pieces of his own broken mind and saying "Oooh. Look at that." Watching the expressions flicker across Downey's face is amazing. There is a moment when his wife says something to him, something innocent which still brings up a flare of insanity. You see a blaze of fear and paranoia, an "Uh oh, what am I doing?" moment, then a forced calm as he reminds himself that he shouldn't follow that impulse.
Anyway, enough. I highly recommend this movie if you like good acting, if you like being disturbed, if you want so0me Twilight Zone to chew on. It is much more unnerving than some horror films I've seen, and the ending is happy in a horrifying way. Go ahead, it's great, you just have to like this sort of thing and be in the mood for it. Watch it on Halloween, I dare you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This needs more than one viewing
Comment: What can I say? I was a Singing Detective virgin, being ignorant of the British TV show or the story line. I bought it for Robert Downey, Jr. It is weird, disturbing and pulls you in like a moth to a flame. I have watched it several times now, getting a little more understanding every time I do. My favorite scene is the Mr. Sandman number. How funny!
The acting is supurb; why this didn't get any critical acclaim is beyond me. Robert Downey Jr proves, yet again, that professionally no one can touch him. He is a rare class of actor that can deliver any range be it humor or tragedy. This role had to be a challenge though with the total body make up needed for Dan Dark's horrible skin condition; not to mention the emotional roller coaster the character is on. The man appears to cry real tears at one point! Kudos RDJ!! I wish The People could vote for Oscar winners and not "The Academy". There would be a lot of different winners. RDJ would have several of the gold guys on his mantelpiece if I had anything to do with it.
I don't care for the ending at all; I probably don't totally understand it yet. For a SD newbie, trying to figure out which scene is in Dan Dark's tortured mind or is for real is part of the fun of this film. I intend to see the British series as soon as I can. Maybe I can understand the ending better. Hummm......
It's not for everyone but for those willing to take a risk and actually have to think about a story rather than just watch it, oh, do try this film.
Customer Rating:
Summary: not good at all
Comment: it was all scrated and will never by from them again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not the usual Robert Downey, Jr.
Comment: I'm a huge Robert Downey, Jr. fan, but this movie did not live up to my expectations. I found it tedious and boring for the most part. I guess every great actor has an occasional bad movie.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Touched by Genius
Comment: The film is a strange animal, all right, a work sans genre, and at times Gordon seems to have overreached himself, grasping for effects he isn't quite able to achieve. The various styles, moods, and genres give the film a slightly garish, amateurish feel, yet in the end (perhaps consciously on Gordon's part) this very awkwardness works in the film's favor. The Singing Detective is a remarkably ingenuous work, fresh and daring, almost childlike in its lack of pretension, and easily one of the most original American movies of the last twenty years. Above all, it showcases Robert Downey Jr.'s raging, embittered psoriasis-afflicted pulp writer, inside whose head the whole movie (more or less) takes place, and Downey gives an inventive, powerful performance, what may be the apotheosis of his enormous talent. Praise for Downey notwithstanding, on its release Gordon's film met with a wall of critical resistance, a veritable consensus of contempt. This may have been due in part (in the UK at least) to a fondness for Potter's original TV series; but it was perhaps due even more to the basic incompatibility of Potter's idiosyncratic, scathing vision with mainstream (critical) tastes. Whatever the case, the movie once again tragically failed to find its audience.
As with his previous adaptations, Gordon respected the source material without revering it, and as a director, he has a rare gift: the ability to fuse his own sensibility and talents with his subject at a fundamental level. In the case of The Singing Detective, it was a somewhat less seamless fusion; Potter's vision (his bizarre blend of musical fantasy with bleak psychological realism) was so startlingly original it required another sensibility at least as strong and eccentric to fuse with. Gordon doesn't quite possess (yet) the surrealist gifts to make Potter's vision his own, or to take it to the next level (David Lynch might be the only director capable of that). He's a proficient director in every way, and seems to be blessed with a natural rapport with actors (perhaps why so many good ones want to work with him). Yet Gordon isn't a visionary director, and this was a visionary script. Fortunately, he had a visionary actor at a career peak to take up the slack, and Downey carries the day.
The Singing Detective isn't a masterpiece; it's flawed and fractured and at times thin, even facile and occasionally redundant (most especially in the pseudo-noir sequences). But it's an imaginative and fearless piece of cinema, an admirably eccentric work that manages to do something like justice to a brilliant piece of writing. Full of inventive delights and heartfelt touches, it leaves most other recent American films in the dust. Yet it flopped badly, both in the UK and the US, being so poorly reviewed that many people (myself included) gave it a miss, wary of the stench of failure. As it happened, the bad smells came not from the film but from critics too corrupt and jaded to recognize a work of art when they saw it.
(Excerpt from "True to the Muse: Keith Gordon's Life on the Fringe," from DOGVILLE VS. HOLLYWOOD, by Jake Horsley)
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