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From my favorite movies..

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The Singing Detective (2003)Plot In A Paragraph: From his hospital bed, Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr) a writer suffering from a skin disease (he calls himself a "human pizza) hallucinates musical numbers and paranoid plots.I can't talk about this movie, without talking about the casting of Robert Downey Jr. Long before Downey Jr cleaned up his act and landed the Ironman gig, there was a time when he was damaged goods and yesterday's headlines. Following a troubled past, at the turn of the decade, Downey Jr was on the rise again. He'd been nominated for an Emmy, and had won a Golden Globe for his superb work in Ally McBeal, and he was praised as being responsible for a boost in the shows ratings, but he was fired from the show by FOX, after his latest drug related incident, it also forced Mel Gibson to shut down his planned stage production of Hamlet with Downey Jr in the lead role and he also lost the John Cussack role in American Sweethearts. That seemed to be that. Nobody would touch him, let alone offer him a decent movie role. Enter his Air America co star Mel Gibson.However it wasn't plain sailing, Gibson had to pay Downey Jr's insurance, after the studio balked at the cost of insuring someone deemed an unreliable actor, due to the last five years of substance abuse, arrests, rehab, and relapses. Gibson dug in to his own pocket to ensure Downey Jr was cast. This movie is certainly not to everyone's taste, and I can see why!! But it's filled with great performances from Downey Jr, Robin Wright Penn, Katie Holmes, Adrian Brody, Saul Rubineck, Carla Gugino and a barely recognisable Gibson. Its soundtrack is filled with songs almost everyone over a certain age should recognise, and personally I'd much watch something original like this, than another Transformers or Fast & Furious movie. I'm not sure why Downey Jr's singing voice was dubbed for this, as he has a good singing voice. I even own his album. The Singing Detective was a flop, it did not finish the year in the the top 100 highest grossing movies of 2003. Which (even for a supporting role) was unheard of for a Gibson movie back then.It's funny how their respective careers went from here. Downey Jr had supporting roles in movies such Gothika, Scanner Darkly and Zodiac whilst nabbing the lead in Shane Blacks Kiss Kiss Bang Bang before being cast as Tony Stark/Iron Man. Whilst Gibson made The Passion Of Christ and all hell broke lose..... and it was pretty much down hill from there for a long time.

I was 24 when the BBC screened Dennis Potter's 6-part series The Singing Detective starring Michael Gambon as a hospitalised psoriasis sufferer. I watched it avidly, of course, because of the extensive outcry against it: notoriety was ever good for the box office. And I confess that I was too young and inexperienced to properly comprehend its strange and beguiling mix of real life, fantasy, fever dreams, flashback, pastiche mimed musical numbers, and the meaning and purpose of the way they were interwoven.17 years later, Hollywood films a Potter-scripted revision of the piece, substantially shorter, transplanted to the USA, and brought forward in time some years. I can't really compare them, because my recollections of the TV piece are sketchy.So I am commenting solely on this movie. It retains the mix of the original, but it is substantially easier to come to terms with what is being done: what is fever, what is imagination, what is recollection, and why each section is presented in that way. Robert Downey Jr as the protagonist (here renamed Dan Dark from the Philip Marlow of the original, each name having its own significance) as hugely impressive, but everyone shines.And the makeup....

This movie is a big screen adaptation of a 1986 British television series. I've never seen the original program but I have to assume it was unbelievably good, because that's the only possible thing that could have blinded everyone involved with this film from recognizing what an incredible mess it is.The Singing Detective is the story of Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr.), a writer of detective stories who's been struck down by a painful and crippling skin condition. Virtually trapped in his hospital bed, Dark is beset by daydreams where he's the lead character in one of his own books and hallucinatory musical numbers where people start dancing and lip syncing to songs from the 1950s. Dark is also filled with a blinding rage and loathing for himself and almost everything around him, especially his wife (Robin Wright Penn), who he paranoically fantasizes is trying to screw him out of his share of a movie deal. Dark is assigned to the care of a psychotherapist named Dr. Gibbon (Mel Gibson), who tries to find out the source of Dark's self-crippling anger. That leads us to a bunch of flashbacks to Dark as a young boy and the tragic end of his cheating mother.If I had to guess, I'd say the point of this story is that Dark's physical and psychological problems are linked and his body cannot heal unless his mental and emotional wounds are also fixed. That's only a guess, though, because such a link is only alluded to in the film and never demonstrated. If you don't pay close attention, you might think it was just the opposite – that Dark's physical improvements are what enable his breakthroughs in therapy.The Singing Detective tries to be a whole bunch of things as a story but doesn't seem to understand how to actually be any of those things. It's supposed to be comedic, but it's not really funny. It's supposed to be a musical, but people lip sync instead of sing. I t's supposed to be dramatic, but the story's tone is so phony and artificial that there's no emotional impact when it tries to be serious. It's supposed to be fantastic by mixing up reality with Dark's delusions and daydreams, but it confuses up bizarre hallucinations, imaginary flights of fancy, paranoid obsessions and childhood memories. By the time two of Dark's fictional characters seemingly come to life in the real world, there's no real point to it all except a forced and deliberate effort to be "kooky" and "offbeat".The Singing Detective is more a flawed movie than a bad one. But its flaws are so basic and so emphatic that I was just waiting for the film to be over. As I wrote before, the original TV series must have been really, really good. Wasting my time with the movie version, however, has left me with absolutely no interest in finding out.

This is one rather odd unusual movie. It mixes several movie elements such as comedy, musical and film-noir. It's however one mix that doesn't really work out and comes across as an odd one.It's also most certainly due to the confusing script that mixes truth and fiction and uses lots of flashback elements that also mixes past with 'present'. What is this movie really about? What story does it try to tell? Exactly what is the point of this entire movie and what does it try to achieve.The movie obviously tries to be an homage to the '50's and the '50's movie genre but it does so without having much style of its own. The clothes are right, the dialogs are right but the atmosphere really isn't, which is of course the most important element. The musical elements could had helped to let the movie work out better but the movie chooses to use evergreens instead new, specifically for this movie written songs. Also the fact that the actors are obviously play-backing to the real singers is a reason why it just doesn't ever work out in the movie. The movie tries to be stylish and fun but it's perhaps trying to hard, which causes it to work ineffective. This movie gave me the feeling that a different director could had still let this movie work out.The movie obviously doesn't try to be serious but it does this by actually having also very little humor in it. Yeah, you can say that this movie is a black comedy but this movie really isn't the best or most effective example in its genre.Too bad that the movie didn't really worked out, since it had a great and surprising cast. It was Robert Downey Jr's. first big role after his drug addiction. He of course got the role through his good friend Mel Gibson who is a producer of this movie. Downey Jr. does a good job and he once more shows how a great actor he is and how well he is capable of carrying a movie. Mel Gibson himself also plays a surprising role underneath a lot of make-up effects. The movie further more also features Adrien Brody in his first role since his Oscar-winning performance in "The Pianist". It really wasn't his greatest career choice.Has it's moments but in the end this movie leaves nothing more than a pointless and confusing impression.4/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/