Jack and I loved this HBO movie based on the memoir of Liberace's boy toy Scott Thorson. Michael Douglas and Matt Damon are terrific and all 11 Primetime Emmy Awards are well deserved. Douglas (now 71, last blogged in Haywire) is believable as Liberace at 57 and Damon (now 43, most recently in Elysium), well, no one thinks he's 17 at the beginning of the movie, as Thorson was when he met the star in 1977, but his character's innocence and naïveté is well portrayed. Great support by Scott Bakula (The Informant! by the same director, and the sadly-cancelled series Men of a Certain Age, among others), Rob Lowe (some of my favorites: The Outsiders (1983), The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), About Last Night… (1986), Bad Influence (1990), and though I didn't see his 84 episodes of The West Wing, I saw and liked his 78 in Brothers & Sisters, his 5 in Californication, and his ongoing contribution to Parks and Recreation--LIT-trilly), and Debbie Reynolds (her Oscar nomination was for The Unsinkable Molly Brown and I enjoyed, among others, Singin' in the Rain (1952), Divorce American Style (1967), Mother (1996), and In & Out (1997)) almost unrecognizable as Liberace's mother with a Polish accent.
Although the excellent psycho-thriller Side Effects (sorry, I was on a blog break when I should have written more than two sentences about it) was supposed to be director Steven Soderbergh's last picture when it was released in February of this year, Behind the Candelabra came out in May, and he is, according to imdb, now in pre-production on a TV mini-series scheduled for sometime next year.
Check it out on cable or DVD for the story, the acting, the history (the times that were paradoxically both swinging and homophobic), the sets, costumes, makeup, and music--both the score written by Marvin Hamlisch just before his death last year (the movie is dedicated to him) and the songs.
No comments:
Post a Comment