Recent viewings

Blow Dry. A movie that can't quite decide what it wants to be. On the one hand, its setting -- the world championship of hairstyling, which takes place in a small British town -- is eccentric enough for any deadpan, sardonic Christopher Guest mockumentary. The exaggerated theatricality of the stylists, and the bizarre bad taste of their avante-garde creations, are quite amusing. But running parallel to their wackiness are at least four other plot threads of completely different character. On the one hand, we a comic villain in the person of an egomaniac hair stylist who quite transparently schemes to sabotage other contestants using strategems somewhat less convincing than the bad guys' plots on old episodes of Scooby Doo. On the other hand, we have Alan Rickman exuding his trademarked air of slightly annoyed British gravitas as a small-town barber who was once the toast of the hairstyling world before he suddenly gave it all up. (Will he be lured back into competition? Go on, take a guess....) On the third, fourth and fifth hands, if they existed, we would have his estranged ex-wife, who has just learned that her cancer is terminal; her lesbian lover, who used to be his hairstyling model; and his son, who in between practicing hairstyling on cadavers, develops a tentative romance with the cute daughter of the above-mentioned egomaniac.

Got that?

I enjoyed the comic elements of the movie. But terminal cancer tends to silence hilarity, as do very awkward and serious family situations. Still, the satirical take on "high style" is amusing, even if the rest of the movie seems to be doing its best to fly apart in all directions at once.