Too many fans seem to be blown away

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

All I can say about this movie is that it is the best -- from the screenplay to the cinematography to the choreography to the acting -- this movie is the best! It's got it all -- from irony to bathos.Knowing nothing of the plot, it was just a bit hard to get into. But by the time I had watched 15 minutes, I was hooked. It took me a while (all right, over an hour) to understand the flashbacks and the surrealism (come to think of it, that element is rather similar to what the Coen Brothers did in their masterpiece Barton Fink) but when I did sort out the real from the surreal and the present from the past, I was overcome with admiration.It's visually gorgeous; the music is luscious; the pacing is perfect ... The Singing Detective is glorious, a splendiferous accomplishment.See it ASAP!

I was the Hollywood equivalent of an army brat, fed and bred in the industry. My father brought a well-known TV show from radio to the new broadcast medium, and I appeared on it as an extra several times; my sister was once asked which she preferred, radio or TV, and thoughtfully replied that she found the pictures on radio prettier.I've always devoted a great deal of my free time, not to mention a whole lot of my should-be-working time, to the distractions of TV, and I have a long list of favorites: Ernie Kovacs, Bilco, Rawhide, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, Homicide, Simpsons, Dinosaurs, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Seinfeld, list far from complete. I got lots of enjoyment out of TV, but not much inspiration. I guess I always considered it entertainment for the masses, and I was a mass.Forest for the trees. I never even thought that TV should or could be an art medium until Dennis Potter came around. We all so needed him to have a decently lengthy career. When a artist dies with so much work obviously ahead of him, the world ends up deformed, missing obvious parts we can't describe but acutely sense the absence of.It's true, as the rough jmb3222 points out, that the industry was eager to put out anything with Potter's name on it after his death; it's true that the remaining, cobbled together oeuvre was by and large inferior to the Singing Detective. I'm grateful, nonetheless, to every hand and force that helped make them available to me, not the least of which, of course, was the raging drive of Potter's talent and his dedication to leaving as much behind for us as he could through the increasingly debilitating pain of terminal leukemia. What a guy!

Dennis Potter's "Singing Detective" in its 1986 TV production, surpasses standard definitions of dramatic entertainment. It amazingly integrates cultural fragments and memories with unequaled acting performance(Michael Gambon), giving full-dimensional life and impact to a form pioneered by Joyce, but with a soul and involvement of the senses far beyond "Ulysses".Although it has a plus 6 hour running time, we are left with a desire to continue sharing the company of this incredibly complex man. No other book, movie, etc. has so completely affected me as a work of art.The visuals of this production perfectly match the "mindworld" of Marlow as he struggles with agonizing disease, childhood memories and the birth pangs of artistic creation.

Spoilers herein.I have been without a TeeVee for thirty years. It is a standing challenge to my friends to show me something that is produced for TeeVee that does less harm than good in working with the viewer's mind.I finally have it here. Lynch's `Twin Peaks' experiment came close, but turned into a comment on the empty soul of TeeVee as the basic material was passed from one director to another, each trapped by different restrictions in the medium. Lynch finally had to `fix' it by making a wrapper film that brilliantly references those bounds.What we have here is something that spreads out and takes time to percolate. It is designed to coherently be delivered in small discrete parts. I saw it on DVD but can imagine it not being destroyed by those pesky interruptions and the delay between broadcasts.The idea is pretty complex for TeeVee: five levels of narrative, three in story, one in reference and one in a particularly strong use of song as narrative. This last is so novel and different from the conventions of artificial reality we've come to expect in musicals that it alone makes it interesting.The nominal base level is Marlow the writer in a hospital. He has a story that was written, is being written and rewritten and adapted. It is also what we see.Above these two levels is the explicit recognition that Potter, the `real' writer is Marlow, the fictional writer. This is wisely not introduced in any meaningful way until the 4th episode, including the notion that the characters at all levels are in control.Below these three levels is the story of his `murder' of his mother, his own `detection' and the ghosts of character.Permeating all is that fifth level, narrative assembled and saturated by popular song. Some characters and actors, even gestures and props (like that one shoe) appear in all five levels. Redheads are used in a particular clever way. (A project with similar tone and aspirations was "Draughtsman's Contract" which inspired Potter and which also features Janet Suzman.)But as time goes on, we can see that each level struggles to be the generator of the others. Particularly sweet is the notion that the singing detective can sing and think at the same time and what we see at all levels is what he thinks. Over time it becomes more viable to see the situation in any one layer as written (or imagined) in any other. Along the way he provides clear tools for doing so.The interesting thing here is that Potter uses the time of the miniseries format wisely. He introduces a new layer or idea or narrative folding in each half hour. Only so fast as we can adapt. He uses the same material over and over, but always in a new context. It is exactly anti-TeeVee in this way as TeeVee depends on a consistency of context as frame. Here, the frame shifts, and the whole point of the context is to provide levers for that shifting.That's what the detective story is all about: starting with events and locating a frame. And why it revolutionized literature. Too bad the appearance of this didn't revolutionize TeeVee.I haven't yet seen the 2003 film version, with the amazing Downey as Marlow. But it seems that this exploration in causal frames needs time to stretch, because one of Potter's tricks is to use the fact that his scope exceeds that we normally swallow in a 90 minute film experience.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.