Mister_Blandings

I remember seeing and loving this movie when it played at Film Forum in NYC back in the late 80's. It was recently re-released for a limited engagement so I took my wife to see it (again, at Film Forum). Almost twenty years later, it's just as beautiful and heartbreaking to watch. The brilliance of this movie is that you don't have to be jazz or Chet Baker fan to enjoy it -- my wife and I have a marginal interest in jazz and we loved it. It's a brilliant portrayal of how talent, youth and beauty are destroyed by excess, and you'll feel both awe and pity for the late Mr. Baker. DVD is supposed to come out at the end of the year -- rent it, you won't be sorry.

Watched this movie on cable after reading the endless, gushing user comments that treated this movie like it was the second coming of Star Wars. At the end of the movie I literally wondered if I had watched the same movie everyone was getting misty-eyed over.

In a nutshell: acting that ranges from wooden to disinterested, a storyline and payoff that is anticlimactic to say the least, and -- the mortal sin for any sci-fi story -- not an original idea to be found from beginning to end. I should've known by the all the Buffy lovers waxing lyrical about this to stay away... I would've had more fun watching C-SPAN hearings.