Le parfum du succès

I read the preceding review before I saw the film and I was compelled to return to IMDb, register and drop a few lines of my own. With all due respect to the Sundance attendee, I laughed at the portion of the review that described how the Q&A session fizzled after a few minutes. The film reminded me of Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days". What more is there to be said? Téa Leoni is simply heroic in her pratfalls and Thornton wears the brown suit like a snake. Strangely enough, Ed Helms doesn't fit in the cast since his elephant through a pinhole style is too familiar. I'm sorry I had to stumble upon this piece. What can "brown do for you" when it's competing with self-centred angst, car crashes and CGI monsters for the attention of simpletons.

As soon as I saw the start of this film I asked myself, "Why the sepia tones?" Later, I asked, "Is this a play? Finally, when unsure of the answers to either question, I turned to IMDb. Oh, I see! It's shot on digital! Now, the RED camera is capable of super-realistic colour reproduction. On the other hand, RED format can sometimes even pass off masquerade as film - for a while. Given time, we audiences will possibly come to accept its particular look as being worthy of filmic drama. But not yet. Until that day, those film-makers who are unsure of their screenplay, talent or the financial certainty of their venture are likely to seek the cost-savings which digital acquisition can offer.

One day too, some brave cinematographer will use the RED's hyper-colour potential, starting an exciting, new genre. Until then, cut-cost producers will try vainly to disguise RED's inability to actually look like film. Usually these DOPs rely upon under-exposing and heavily back-lighting their scenes, with often a touch of rim-lighting to dazzle and sparkle. It's sort of like every lady's best trick: the little black cocktail dress. -But all day? Every day??

With The Smell of Success, the producers have gone all the way and hidden the colour altogether. It's sepia! only the faintest hint of skin-tones. We are treaated to yellow skies, hospital doctors in beige lab-coats, beige teeth and lots of brown. I'm afraid the whole film reminds me of the nicotene-stained Czechoslovakian cafes of the Soviet days. An aesthetic mistake. Bad taste. Please take the whole thing back to the colourists and undo that last, desperate decision they made in an attempt to save a picture they had no confidence in: Lose the sepia. Re-release the original, un-colourised film. If we want modified colours we can probably tweak the settings ourselves.

A low key comedy that kept me amused and entertained. Tea Leoni proves to be a great comedic actress, and I LOLed at several of her pratfalls. Paired with the subtle sly humor of Billy Bob Thornton, there is a lot of nuance to mine from a movie plot about competing manure salesmen.

Low cost production values added to the comic strip sense of humor. Scenery seemed painted, e.g., clouds in the sky didn't move with the breeze. But the story had all the necessary elements, including bad guys in the form of a competitor fertilizer company which seems overpoweringly endowed. There were subtle double entendres that showed the tongue in cheek intent of the film.

This is an amusing and fairly intelligent comedy pretending to be dumber than it is. Some viewers don't get the deeper level of very well executed comic strip comedy.

Bof, I just saw the movie with my husband and I like the beginning but the story turned strange rapidly. Too much emphasis on the sh*t jokes. I really like Billy Bob Thornton thats why I rented the movie, I never heard of it before. I was at the video club and I rent it with 2 others movies. Tea Leoni was great but the character she played was too clumsy and it look a bit too surreal. The colour in the movie were strange, my husband didn't stop telling me that everything is brown! It was filmed in sepia, I was hoping that they will switched to normal colour but they only do at the end of the movie. The sepia got me very annoyed during the movie, it nice for a couple of minutes, half-hour maximum but the entire movie was too exaggerated. An average movie for a Wednesday night.

Anyone that has seen a movie by Mark and Michael Polish should come to expect something unusual. Their latest film, Manure, delivers in spades (yeah, that was a pun). Actually, this movie might best be seen under the influence of drugs. Being straight and sober, I'm not sure I appreciated it. Or understood it. Or perhaps I fell asleep and dreamt this.

Starring Billy Bob Thornton and Tea Leoni, the story is about a woman living in New York (Rosemary Rose) who inherits her father's manure company after his untimely passing. Thornton is the lead salesman (Patrick). Together they try to save the company from bankruptcy. That's the sane part.

Here's the silly stuff: Unfortunately, making Rose Manure profitable involves selling a lot of s___ (only one of maybe 200 excrement jokes and puns in the movie). And there's no better bulls____ than Patrick (trust me, they never stop).

No, no, that was the sane part. This is what's zany: Turns out there's new competition in the form of a chemical fertilizer company entering the market, actually by parachuting in countless crates of chemical fertilizers as well as black-suited salesmen who land carrying briefcases.

Hold it, that's still pretty tame compared to the psychedelic mushrooms they eat which causes them to vomit voluminously onto one another and hallucinate, or dressing up the Rose salesmen as Indians to burn at the stake, or the 48 Triple-D breasts one of the salesmen grows when he eats some fertilizer, or the vegetable masks. And there's plenty more where that came from.

The plot is as silly as you can imagine, and like all the acting (except Thornton), way over the top. The sets typically include backdrops, with everything (EVERYTHING) in various shades of brown. You could not conceive of a more ridiculous movie. Which would be perfect if you were in the right mood (know what I mean?). But passing joints is not allowed at Sundance screenings, so most of the crowd was left shaking their heads and wondering what it was they just witnessed.

Notes from Sundance The cast was all present on opening night. Thornton and Leoni were sitting right in front of me. They were both very gracious with fans, allowing their photos to be taken and being great sports. After the movie, Thornton was very funny and clever. But the Q&A quickly fizzled. The audience was too shell-shocked to think of intelligent questions. And no one had the audacity to ask Mark and Michael Polish what was on everyone's mind: "What the heck were you guys thinking?!!!"