Karen O'Connor, a young journalist known for her celebrity profiles, is consumed with discovering the truth behind a long-buried incident that affected the lives and careers of showbiz team ... Read allKaren O'Connor, a young journalist known for her celebrity profiles, is consumed with discovering the truth behind a long-buried incident that affected the lives and careers of showbiz team Vince Collins and Lanny Morris.Karen O'Connor, a young journalist known for her celebrity profiles, is consumed with discovering the truth behind a long-buried incident that affected the lives and careers of showbiz team Vince Collins and Lanny Morris.
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Karen O'Connor tells the story about two distinct but related periods in her life. In 1972, she is an up-and-coming Los Angeles based journalist who has been given the lucrative assignment of convincing once successful comic Vince Collins, who is at the tail end of his career, to allow her to ghost write his memoirs. Most specifically, she has the task from her publishers of discovering the reason behind two issues in Vince's life from 1957: why he and his former on-stage partner Lanny Morris, who is still active and well known within the entertainment business, broke up their professional partnership shortly after they hosted a successful thirty-nine hour telethon for polio research in Miami, there not having been any indication of problems between the two before that; and how did the dead body of Maureen O'Flaherty end up in the water filled bathtub in Vince and Lanny's New Jersey hotel suite, the opening of that New Jersey hotel owned by mobster Sally Sanmarco which was Lanny and Vince's next gig after the telethon. Maureen, a college student, was working part-time as a room service waitress at the Miami Versailles Hotel where Vince and Lanny were staying during the telethon, she who had served the pair at the time. The last she was known to be seen was by the Miami hotel staff when Lanny and Vince were still staying there three days before the discovery of her body, with the official cause of death being accidental drowning as she had narcotics in her system. Neither Lanny or Vince was ever implicated in having anything to do with Maureen's death or even how she got from Miami to New Jersey coinciding with their own travels. Despite there perhaps being more well known writers who could do the job, the publishing company chose Karen as, known or unknown to Vince, she was the Miracle Child, a polio survivor who appeared on the 1957 telethon. During her research, Karen is unable to meet with Lanny, who, through his legal representatives, tells her that he is writing his own explosive tell-all book which will make her project meaningless. In Karen's search for the truth, things get complicated when she starts receiving from an anonymous source upcoming chapters from Lanny's memoirs which may purely be to throw her off the track from reality, and when she meets Lanny in the flesh, she not divulging to him who she really is. —Huggo
Top review
The Beautiful and The Bizarre-It doesn't quite come together, but the effect is potent.
Warning: vague, minor spoilers. Not really, but hey better safe than sorry.
Here is a movie so delightful, messy, strange, sexy, and all together not quite there; that it makes me glad that films like it are still being made.
Egoyan soaks the film with a shining visual flare, and the characters leap off screen demanding to be fantastic. With such flamboyant settings, people, and actions, casting is absolutely critical. This is where Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are invaluable and perfect. They are so famous, so flamboyant on their own and so well known that we are drawn into this story right along with Karen. And let's face it, they are all sexuality, with evil and lies boiling just beneath the surface. This is that rare kind of film that does justice to a phrase like that which is usually written on the cover but not delivered in the movie.These men carry their own persona into the film, and deliver just the right amount of insanity and insecurity. Watch Bacon's Lanny yell at a waiter for bringing lobster to the Jewish Lanny. Watch Firth's Vince stumble away from Lanny and Maureen reeling with rejection and sexual confusion. Watch Lanny lean over and kiss Vince's cheek while they perform high. The movie could have been all style and intrigue and little substance; but since Egoyan is directing, the sexual scenes are handled deeply, the drugs are films in full glory, and poignancy creeps in through cracks of the story.
Alison Lohman, who was SO good in the vastly underrated "Matchstick Men" has a good part here as a young journalist still somewhat infatuated with Lanny and Vince's famous duo. For me, her performance is the only one that never really takes off and leaves the screen, but I still went along with her character Karen, and it is not a serious or terribly noticeable flaw, simply a slight mismatching of actress to character; all though perhaps I find Karen a bit weaker and smarter than the other characters and no actress could have changed that.
Some quotes are a bit "bookish" and take us out of the movie for a moment, but even them I found working excellently. Bacon's voice-over in particular drips with confident malevolence. He has a speech on what he sees in Maureen's eyes in a key moment, that at first seems ridiculous and distant, but had me coming back and appreciating it more and more.
Overall, if you like the looks of the film/story/trailer/or even cover, it certainly delivers, and you will love it. The combination of drugs, mystery, lies, murder, fame, bisexuality, more drugs, more sex, and above all, Egoyan's flashy but confident directing, is stunning.
Not perfect, but a wild ride about manipulation, consequences, fame, and sex.
Here is a movie so delightful, messy, strange, sexy, and all together not quite there; that it makes me glad that films like it are still being made.
Egoyan soaks the film with a shining visual flare, and the characters leap off screen demanding to be fantastic. With such flamboyant settings, people, and actions, casting is absolutely critical. This is where Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are invaluable and perfect. They are so famous, so flamboyant on their own and so well known that we are drawn into this story right along with Karen. And let's face it, they are all sexuality, with evil and lies boiling just beneath the surface. This is that rare kind of film that does justice to a phrase like that which is usually written on the cover but not delivered in the movie.These men carry their own persona into the film, and deliver just the right amount of insanity and insecurity. Watch Bacon's Lanny yell at a waiter for bringing lobster to the Jewish Lanny. Watch Firth's Vince stumble away from Lanny and Maureen reeling with rejection and sexual confusion. Watch Lanny lean over and kiss Vince's cheek while they perform high. The movie could have been all style and intrigue and little substance; but since Egoyan is directing, the sexual scenes are handled deeply, the drugs are films in full glory, and poignancy creeps in through cracks of the story.
Alison Lohman, who was SO good in the vastly underrated "Matchstick Men" has a good part here as a young journalist still somewhat infatuated with Lanny and Vince's famous duo. For me, her performance is the only one that never really takes off and leaves the screen, but I still went along with her character Karen, and it is not a serious or terribly noticeable flaw, simply a slight mismatching of actress to character; all though perhaps I find Karen a bit weaker and smarter than the other characters and no actress could have changed that.
Some quotes are a bit "bookish" and take us out of the movie for a moment, but even them I found working excellently. Bacon's voice-over in particular drips with confident malevolence. He has a speech on what he sees in Maureen's eyes in a key moment, that at first seems ridiculous and distant, but had me coming back and appreciating it more and more.
Overall, if you like the looks of the film/story/trailer/or even cover, it certainly delivers, and you will love it. The combination of drugs, mystery, lies, murder, fame, bisexuality, more drugs, more sex, and above all, Egoyan's flashy but confident directing, is stunning.
Not perfect, but a wild ride about manipulation, consequences, fame, and sex.
helpful•329
- ChigurandSpice
- Apr 19, 2006
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