Waste of time

Simply Perfect

How sad is this?

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Ugh - I saw all the good actors listed and so I watched this movie. Can I erase my memory? Maybe go to Total Recall and pay to have it removed? I just wanted to know how the little boy got in the coma. Is that too much to ask?? It was really depressing and I guess the only moral to the story is that if you just get through it things might get better if you can make a connection with someone else before you get so depressed you want to shoot yourself in the head. I also could not understand how Ray Liotta's character was deep in snow but The stripper and the mortician - there was no snow. The snow was blue - so that explained the title of the movie but still did not make sense. I just found the movie a little disturbing all-in-all. It was about as shallow as Demi Moore's stripper debut movie and that other awful movie I had managed to forget with the redhead stripper from Head of the Class but she could not act and these people could. I will steer clear of Crash and Magnolia, since others are hinting that this movie is even worse than those. I will only have to conclude for myself that the little boy is in a coma because his coke-head mom crashed the car or dropped him on his head. She didn't deserve to have a dog either.

Multi-plot, hyper linked or mosaic films (as it is called here), whatever, I really love films like these specially when well made and with relevant things to show and tell. "Powder Blue" successfully is one of those since it has an good cast, a good story and memorable moments. Just fails a little in developing some of the moments, what can make of this film at times unbearably cheesy.Here we follow the days in the lives of an dying man (Ray Liotta) trying to connect with the daughter he never met after serving 20 years in jail; the girl (Jessica Biel) is an exotic dancer with financial problems and needs money to pay the medical bills of her comatose son; an suicide guy (Forest Whitaker) who can't cope with life anymore after his wife's death, but lacks courage to him pull the trigger and end with his life so he keeps finding someone who'll do that in exchange for money; and a young mortician (Eddie Redmayne) with lots of problems not only financial ones, almost going to bankruptcy, but also in dealing with girls. The story goes on with these characters who stumble upon each other trying to set their lives in a good way.Sure, "Powder Blue" is involving and has some relevance but it almost gets stuck in a enormous pack of predictable moments that is so obvious this character is going to meet that character that some viewers will find it a dull film. It's not dull, it just goes in ways it didn't need to go to such as the scene where Biel sexually offers herself to her son's doctor (so, so bad). Other times it almost achieves a sense of greatness with its sequences but when you have a film storage in the head like I do, you get the feeling that some elements would work in other film or they were taken from another film which doesn't make you say "It's taken from that film". Rather than that you'll say it's a copy! Example: the 1-2-3 hug scene is clearly an cheap reference to the great "Magnolia" (the kiss between Melora Walters and John C. Reilly), even the editing style is similar with the camera giving a zoom during the hug! It just lack some identity of its own.It is a beautiful picture, I loved its themes of giving second chances (or first at times) and loved the characters, all of them were interesting (Redmayne was my favorite even though the script said that the answer for his problems was to get involved with someone in similar conditions as he, with no money at all, and his change of profession wasn't all that cleared). The grandiosity of "Powder Blue" lies within these poor figures and if a movie gives, even if a small time, enough things to make you care about them, then you'll succeed it in making a film that is closer to life and relevant to it. Aside the problems it has, it's a good suggestion indeed. 8/10

Los Angeles can be a hard city. It is the backdrop for the intertwined stories of four fractured people: Jack (Ray Liotta), out of jail after 25 years, Rose-Johnny (Jessica Biel), a stripper with a son in a coma, Charlie (Forest Whittaker), a suicidal widower, and Qwerty (Eddie Redmayne), a mortician with shyness issues.With multi-strand stories like this, there are a number of things which govern how effective they are as a movie. Do we care about the people? How well are the story threads tied together? Does it surprise us, or is it predictable? For instance, there are elements of the Rose-Johnny/Jack relationship which are signposted a little too heavily (not good), as opposed to noting that we had two protagonists with money and clear exit routes from life, and two protagonists with strong reasons for living and also a need for money, where the obvious developments don't exactly take place. Here, the majority of this film worked and worked well.For a film which looks at the underside of LA life, this film is beautifully and carefully filmed: the attention to colour shows in every scene.It is unfortunate that this will probably be remembered for the movie in which Jessica Biel gets her kit off, because there is so much more here, not least of which are excellent performances from the whole cast, but especially Biel, whose performance is emotionally raw.I was both engaged, and frequently moved, by this film.

It seems like in recent years many filmmakers want to depress the audience for their $20 ticket price. Powder Blue takes it one step further and tries to bore us to death at the same time.It somehow also manages to make Jessica Biel nudity boring and depressing too.The core plot lines follow a short timespan in the lives of four characters – the aforementioned single Mum/stripper Rose (Biel), a burly tatted ex-con with a secret named jack (Ray Liotta), a religious man with a death wish named Charlie (Forest Whitaker) and a waifish young mortuary owner named Qwerty… for some reason.Over the course of nearly two hours all four leads manage to inch their way towards nowhere – one paralysingly dull scene at a time. It seems for every step toward the light there are two punches in the face waiting. They even decide to throw a dying kid in the mix to cheer us up.Cameos abound with Patrick Swayze, Lisa Kudrow and Kris Kristofferson popping up to provide either momentary hope or to crush dreams – occasionally both – in an intricate series of supposedly random events that bring our four pathetic 'heroes' into each other's orbit. Things I might add that would never actually happen.Powder Blue wants to be Babel meets Storytelling meets Crash, which in my opinion is hardly lofty aspirations anyway. What results is somehow less than, but just as non-entertaining or thought provoking. In the end it's depressing meets unlikely with a solid helping of dull for good measure.Final Rating – 5 / 10. There's a reason that you haven't heard of Powder Blue, and if you have it's because Biel gets her kit off. Let me tell you that isn't near as inspirational as it should be either.