Dear Coz,
* Just in case an unprecedentedly retarded--in senso doppio--subliminal posthypnotic suggestion from Dawsonland should manifest itself in response to your film history class and lead you to head West for the technicolour glory that is Sunset Boulevard--just in that case you might ought to go see DE-LOVELY. For you can learn a lot of moviecraft from a flick which only begins to flicker into life toward the end, as one after the other of the characters conks off.
* Talk about a tour de force. To take as subject a jazzage Cole Porter, who dripped celebrity, talent, good luck, wealth, style, Paris, Venice, 42d Street--and he seems to've had prettier sextoys than some folks I could name, and all preAIDS--to take a character like that and come up with an emotionsuppressed drabness in comparison with which Death is as welcome as the birdies in Spring, well it takes some doing, is all I can say.
* So much musick, so very much musick. Wonderful clever musick, wonderful clever lyrics--but really, so very much. It's worse than a Broadway show; there, at least, there's enough dialogue inbetween the chunes to relate a story, insipid though it be.
* But this thing's a CD, two hours and someodd minutes, and no breather as the discs change . . . .
* Well it was hopeless, wasn't it, hopeless from the word go. Nobody'd listened during high school chemistry class.
* No chemistry between Cole and Linda--o the poor woman! where was QUEER EYE'S hotwax crew when the cuddle scene was fixing to be filmed, it was like Goldilocks and all three of the Bears smushed onto one grizzled furry chest--so what. But there wasn't even any chemistry between Cole and a single one of his numerous male ingenues--the Russian dancer was torrid in and of himself, but he was beached on that Venetian bed like a suffocating whale.
* And if there HAD been chemistry, who'd've watched it? Not all those aged mixedsex couples that actually were the audience, the ones who remembered debutante balls with a local band repackaging Cole Porter songs for the witless boondocks. A few geriatric mufmufs, that's who'd've watched it. Box office suicide.
* Yet suicide, as presupposing life in the first place, would've been preferable to the stillbirth that is DE-LOVELY.
* Your cousin, Giac
