Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: Timothy Linh Bui
Year: 2009
Rating: 
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
From watching Powder Blue, you’d have to conclude that writer/director Timothy Linh Bui was way too impressed with Oscar winner Crash. That film, as shallow and psuedo profound as it is, is a masterpiece of social realism compared to Powder Blue.
Let’s see. In Powder Blue, we have the following characters:
1. Jack Doheny (Ray Liotta), a thief who just spent 25 years in prison. His partner in crime Randall (Kris Kristofferson) didn’t visit him once in prison, but hands him a suitcase full of cash on a bus (!) as a reward for his silence. Jack is dying of some unnamed disease and he has a grown daughter that thinks he’s already dead and has never met him.
2) Said daughter, Rose Johnny (Jessica Biel) is naturally a stripper with a drug habit and a comatose kid.
3) Then we’ve got a suicidal man of the cloth, Charlie (Forest Whitaker) who keeps offering strangers $50,000 to shoot him.
4) Oh, yeah. There’s Qwerty Doolittle (Eddie Redmayne), who works in the family business, a funeral parlour. Dear old dad, recently deceased, left a pile of debts, and the bank is about to repossess the business.
I’ve mentioned the most outrageous characters, but there are many more.
Of course, following the Crash model, these people keep running into each other in L.A., which is definitely NOT a small town.
Powder Blue just piles on absurdity on top of absurdity. On top of all of this, poor Timothy Linh Bui can’t write idiomatic dialogue to save his life. Plus, you know you’re in trouble when most of the characters repeatedly gaze in bathroom mirrors and wash their faces, a cliche that was moldy at least as far back as the 80s. The actors labor mightily to make this nonsense work, but they are hopelessly handicapped by the screenplay. Powder Blue desperately wants to be gritty and moving, but the story carries as much credibility as the average episode of Astroboy, which makes it impossible to take the struggles of the characters seriously.
The pity of it is there is some fine technical work here. For example, whoever choreographed Jessica Biel’s pole dances and other strip tease antics did a bang up job. They’re creative and reasonably authentic, although I have to admit, I’ve never seen something in a strip club as artistic as the cocoon dance, in which Jessica Biels writhes inside a gauzy bag suspended from the ceiling.
The thing is, Director Timothy Linh Bui can move the camera and some of his imagery is very strong. Maybe he’d have better luck directing other people’s scripts.
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