Boob Job

According to naked celebrity-themed site Mr. Skin, “The biggest celebrity nudity news of the year is in—and 2009 isn't even half over! The forthcoming release Powder Blue will indeed include Jessica Biel nude.”

Well, at least the film has something for boob watchers. What a waste of a topless Biel, though. One assumes that the actress really believed in the script for Powder Blue to agree to her first nude scene, but yikes, wrong project to bare her soul and whatnots. In fact, writer-director Timothy Linh Bui should probably send a fruit basket to Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven, as it’s only because of Striptease and the legendarily awful Showgirls that Powder Blue is not the worst stripper movie ever made. And that’s too bad, because if it were a little sillier, it’d be a lot more campy fun. Instead, it’s a cloying, cliché-riddled 106 minutes of self-importance that desperately wants to be Magnolia, or Crash (and not the good, perverted David Cronenberg Crash, the obvious and mediocre Paul Haggis Crash).

Crammed with coincidence and life-lessons, Powder Blue is centered around Biel’s character, Rose Johnny, who lives in a hotel and works at a strip club, where she’s the main attraction due to her extraordinary stripper routines, such as emerging from a sheet-cocoon suspended from the ceiling and splashing hot wax all over herself – OK, that and her rockin’ hot bod. But don’t judge her! After all, she’s doing it to pay the bills for her comatose son (and, um, to buy coke), and if things weren’t going bad enough, her dog runs away and the club owner is pressuring her to prostitute herself to patrons. Patrick Swayze – who apparently made an enemy in the wardrobe department – hits a career low playing bleached rocker mane-sportin’ bar owner Johnny Velvet (check out the pic!). The guy went from A-list to D-cup.

Jeez, wouldn’t it be great if someone came along to save Rose from all these problems? In most movies our fractured heroine would have one saviour, but in Powder Blue there are two. The first is Jack Doheny (Ray Liotta), who has just finished a 25-year prison term and seeks out his long-lost daughter. (Kris Kristofferson is wasted in a cameo as his former boss who gives him a case full of money as thanks for his silence.) But he can’t just tell Rose the truth, so he enters her life as a kindly stranger – a plot thread that plays out exactly as you’d expect, except for an unintentionally hilarious scene that recalls the finale of The Shining.

Saviour number two is Qwerty Doolittle (Edward Redmayne), nervous asthmatic who inherited his father’s cash-strapped funeral home. He’s also never had a girlfriend, draws dark, angsty pictures and has a passion for marionettes, because if you’re named after a row of letters on a keyboard, you’d better damn well be quirky. He hits Rose’s dog with his car, which brings them together way too late in the film for the standard unlikely romance plot thread.

The fourth player in this ensemble drama is suicidal lapsed priest Charlie, played by Forest Whittaker, who demonstrated a remarkable lapse in judgment by also co-producing the film. Aside from a brief encounter with Qwerty, Charlie’s presence in the film is completely unnecessary. Once in a while we check in with the character to watch him brood in the rain, discover love in the form of a kindly diner waitress (Lisa Kudrow, who manages to not embarrass herself in this mess), get fist-shakingly angry at god for his bride’s death and get tangled up with a cross-dressing prostitute – so we can learn that drug-addicted tranny hookers are people too… well, sort of. Things don’t end so well there.

The film is very simplistic and conservative in its moral universe, as the lapsed rediscover faith, former “bad” people are redeemed through hardship or self-sacrifice and the dregs of society are punished. It’s the kind of movie with all the complexity of a music video; it rains when things are particularly dire, literal nakedness is the obvious metaphor for vulnerability and heaven is represented by an over-lit day at the beach. As far as the title goes, it’s the shade of Ray Liotta’s eyes, it shows up as a colour motif throughout the narrative and there’s a blue snowfall at the end of the film that’s intended to be something utterly transcendent, but is more likely just some frozen toilet water jettisoned from a passing airplane. At least that would be the appropriate metaphor.

Alright, so let’s get down to brass tacks and brass poles: does Biel’s nudity warrant a look at Powder Blue? (Out on DVD and Blu-ray on June 16th, from Paradox.) Granted, the stripper scenes are lit, shot and edited for maximum ogling opportunities, with the kind of drooling attention reminiscent of Showgirls. And Biel is a gorgeous creature so, yeah, it’s fantastic stuff if you’re in the Mr. Skin camp. But, dammit, even though a little breast can go a long way, there simply is no mammry miracle that can warrant sitting through this utterly – you guessed it – flat film.

-Dave Alexander