Further Tales of the City

This is definitely a step up from the last installment. I still don't like some of the recasts. Overall, still not that great but good that the original series ended here on a better note.

This third installment of "Tales" takes place four years after the original and continues following the story of Mary Ann Singleton (Linney) and the gang at 28 Barbary Lane into the Reagan era. The plot goes a little haywire with too much time spent on Jim Jones, Mary Ann trying to advance in her career, and other much sillier points. The series also suffers from too much focus on Garrick's DeDe Halcyon Day. The character, as she appears in the third movie, is not particularly sympathetic and her motivations are not well explained.

Again, this series really is worth seeing because of Linney, she knows her character very well by now and does a great job. Campbell really only has about 15 minutes of screen time in this one and Dukakis is good, but her character is getting tiresome. Certainly watchable, but not up to the caliber of either of the first two installments.

What a disappointment and what a boring mini. Totally wasted the talents of Jackie Burroughs, Parker Posey, Joel Grey, Billy Campbell, and John McMartin. Hideous "happy" ending and quickly tied-up endings. There may have been a good story, but it didn't make it to the screen (and Maupin wrote the damned screenplay himself).

You have to start at the beginning, so I'd suggest watching Tales of the City and More Tales of the City first. These mini-series are based on a six part series of books by Armistead Maupin. Maupin began writing these stories for a San Francisco newspaper in the 1970's. They became the Tales of the City book series. And in the early 1990's, he started serializing them for the small (TV) screen. I've watched all three of these films over and over again. They are (like the books) like getting a really juicy letter from an old friend you've been aching to hear from. This third installment is shorter than the previous, but packs in a great storyline and lots of fun. All of the actors from the 2nd Tales are back for more mystery and romance. The best thing about Maupin's stories for the new millennium is that he was the first author to integrate gay and straight characters into a novel and then watch them grow and age together as a family throughout the six books. For the cinema, this is still a HUGE leap. For those of us who've been living in reality, it's our world come to life. I'm anxiously awaiting the fourth book, Babycakes to be made into a mini-series, but in the meantime I watch Mrs. Madigal, Michael, MaryAnn, Brian and all their extended family look for love and excitement in late 1970's San Francisco.

What can I say? Mother Mucca is a character I just can't quite get into. I find her crusty, salty and slightly repulsive. You just know if you got too close to her she'd have that old person's smell. And with the cigarettes added to that well,......ugh. She doesn't have ANY of the love-able quirkiness Mrs. Madrigal has.

And the rest of this? It becomes tawdry and tedious. And then,........oh dear, we add in the terrible Jonestown Massacre and how two characters escaped and a fake Jim Jones. No, no, no! This is something out of Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, not Tales of the city!

If you've seen the first one there is something innocent and charming about it all. It may be very cliched but it works. The dialog here is bad, there are no real intimate conversations or situations with the characters. Maybe by this point in life we had lost that so no writer could quite come up with any ideas. We had moved on to empty sex and that was supposed to just hold everyone over.

Eh,.....hope they don't do anymore of these.