Really Surprised!

A Brilliant Conflict

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

I was begged to watch this movie by a friend that said it is really good. It started out like a play adapted to the screen with a few bumps here and there. It picks up with a plot but it is full disjunctive and broken attempts at making sense. P S Hoffman really tries, but he cannot get this role off the ground. Bobby Milk does what he does, act great. But he has a very limited chances to pull off the role other than to follow a grievously poorly written script that pales in comparison to the direction of use on the back of a stool softener box. When Bobby get the stroke he it gets better, that way he does not have to read the bad lines nearly as much. In fact if everyone would have had a stroke I could have given this stinker 3 stars. The best part is the end, it is over.

Flawless (1999)It's too easy to say the Flawless isn't. It's also too easy to say what is really irksome and artificial about this plot and its characters--a cliché of a broken down older cop and a apartment building shared with drug dealers, drug users, and most colorfully, a whole slew of cross dressers and transvestites. We know they are not going to get, even though we don't know why the cop lives there when he is so clearly out of place. And we know that the movie is about a reconciliation between these types--and stereotypes.Furthermore, the picture of these kinds of people, including the key transvestite played with a certain amount of conviction by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is one drawn by an outsider. Director Joel Schumacher is openly gay, but he is also open about not being part of the transgender world, and not understanding it at first.So for this reason, at least, the playing of clichés is too brazen and thin to be persuasive. I can't imagine people in the tranny community really being convinced, though they might still enjoy the scenes (being rare enough in a mainstream movie). But you do wonder why Hoffman was tapped for the role when there are so many really outrageously good, and excessive, actors equally and more capable in those shoes. Schumacher's explanation that he wanted someone who could play both sides of being a man seems thin. I'm guessing it was about getting two stars head to head. The writing, also by Schumacher, is painfully clumsy at time--people shouting stupidly out their windows, confrontations between drug dealers and other falling into bad clichés, on and on. And in all, it's kind of a rotten movie.Except...except for one redeeming quality that is quite beautiful, and this comes (tellingly) directly from the director's experience. And that is the way two people can be made to understand and even love each other (in their own hamstrung ways) as very different kinds of men. And how someone with a stroke can be made to sing, to come alive, even a little, more than they thought they could. Skip all the drug nonsense, all the blatant attention getting garbage that fills up most of the movie to the point of being either laughable or offensive, and enjoy what does work.

What do Kevin Spacey, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Denzel Washington, and Russell Crowe have in common. They were all up for the Best Actor Award at the 2000 Screen Actors Guild competition. Spacey won for American Beauty, but Hoffman was there for this film.You can always predict that Robert De Niro will turn in a good performance, and he certainly did as a homophobic security guard who has a stroke while trying to stop a drug shootout.He has to ask Hoffman, a transvestite lounge singer that lives in his building, for help in recovering, after his physical therapist tells him that singing improves stroke victims.This is set amidst a huge group of drag queens competing in a talent contest, and drug dealers trying to get their stolen money back.It is hilarious and sad at the same time. Every gay and drag joke you can imagine is here along with tragedy that will make you cry.What is great is the transformation made by people that just take the time to get to know one another.Hoffman was magnificent. Wilson Jermaine Heredia was a riot.

While the film itself certainly has it's shortcomings, Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance embodies the film's title. While a lesser actor would have taken the role of Rusty as a caricature of gay and transgender stereotypes, Hoffman performs the role with deep sensitivity and respect for the trials of someone living a misunderstood life. Robert De Niro is also believable as a gritty police officer recovering from a stroke.The most powerful thing about this film is that it doesn't gloss over stereotypes, but still makes the viewer feel compassion for both characters. Deniro's cop goes through a huge transformation from homophobe to someone who learns the value of people whom he may not fully understand, and does so with a delicate, nuanced touch.I love this movie, even if only for the scene with Hoffman talking to the Log Cabin Republican about their own bias against more flamboyant gays. It's powerful and true, and one of the only films to address the issue, even if only briefly.