Forty Shades of Blue - Palm Beach Post movie review

'Forty Shades of Blue': Tale of dysfunctional family is a bore

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

Well, it had to happen at some point.

The Emerging Cinemas series at Lake Worth's Palm Beach Community College, which presents new independent and foreign films that otherwise might not arrive here, is surely the best thing that happened at the movies this year.

Still, it was inevitable that one selection would prove that sometimes those unimaginative commercial bookers are right.

First Look Pictures

'Forty Shades of Blue'

C-

The verdict: A predictibly conventional family drama, set against the backdrop of the Memphis music scene.

Director: Ira Sachs
Starring: Rip Torn, Dina Korzun, Darren E. Burrows, Paprika Steen, Red West
Run time: 107 minutes
Release date: Sept. 28, 2005
Rating: Not Rated

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That film is Forty Shades of Blue, a Sundance Film Festival darling that feels contrived and uninvolving outside the thin atmosphere of Park City, Utah.

It is the tale of a grizzly, petulant, legendary music producer (Rip Torn) who fused country, blues and rock into a commercial hybrid and now spends his time between Memphis recording sessions picking up women — like the Russian tour guide (Dina Korzun) who now lives with him and their 3-year-old son — and picking up industry achievement awards.

One such awards ceremony brings his grown son (Darren Burrows) home from the West Coast, full of resentment and unresolved issues.

Yes, it is a dysfunctional family reunion drama, with carefully crafted confrontations among the three principals, but nothing new from director/co-screenwriter Ira Sachs to set it apart from the other films that have ambled down this road.

Torn almost holds the patent on these irascible scalawag roles and it is good to see him here, even as you scratch your head wondering where you have seen Forty Shades of Blue before.