De-Lovely

I’m a big dum­b­ass for not think­ing De-Love­ly, a movie about Cole Porter, would be a musi­cal. Of course it was a musi­cal, you big dum­b­ass! Not you. Me. I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like musi­cals, so bear that in mind as I review this one.

This is one weird musi­cal. It is actu­al­ly a self-reflex­ive musi­cal biopic. Some­how it gar­nered a PG-13 rat­ing for sex­u­al con­tent. I think the only rea­son it was rat­ed PG-13 is because there is one scene where a dude smooches anoth­er dude. I’ve seen more sex­u­al con­tent dur­ing Mass. The movie’s great­est strength is its use of Cole Porter tunes as frames for the actu­al actions of the man. For peo­ple that real­ly love Cole Porter musi­cals, they’ll hear most of their favorites in this movie. Kevin Kline and Ash­ley Judd can’t sing. Although in their defence, appar­ent­ly Cole Porter could­n’t car­ry a tune in the real world and Ash­ley Judd looked good enough in her roar­ing twen­ties garb that I could ignore her speak-n-say singing.

Most of the oth­er songs were sung by Top-40 artists, Rob­bie Williams, Natal­ie Cole, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costel­lo [OK, maybe he isn’t Top 40]. The musi­cal num­bers them­selves were a bit schiz­o­phrenic. Some­times all the ran­dom folks in the action start­ed danc­ing and join­ing in, like typ­i­cal musi­cals but most of the time Cole was just in places where there hap­pened to be live music, almost like a music video. Still, the musi­cal num­bers were bet­ter inte­grat­ed than in some­thing like Chica­go, which I hat­ed every moment.

All in all, it was­n’t a waste of my time, but I have no desire to see it again.