Confessions of a Dangerous Mind [Blu-ray]

Who's the mole?
Close on the heels of his ADAPTATION, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman scores again with CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, based on the (fictional?) autobiography of the same title by Chuck Barris. It's also George Clooney's initial outing as Director.

At the very beginning when the audience sees a bearded and naked Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) standing as if in a trance while a frumpy housekeeper vacuums around him, the viewer suspects that the film will be something special, outrageous, or both. This is the starting point for an extended flashback as Barris recalls his young adulthood, when it seemed everybody but him was having sex, to his successful career as a TV game show creator and low-brow polluter of the American airwaves ("The Dating Game", "The Newlywed Game", "The Gong Show"). Pretty standard stuff except that along the way Barris is seduced by a penchant for violence into a double life as a CIA contract killer, and the schizophrenia brought on by his double life almost...

A Very Funny, Star-Packed, and Deeply Disturbed Romp
A movie that combines "Ocean's Eleven" stars and a core storyline from "A Beautiful Mind" with the TV progenitor of Simon Cowell? It seems unlikely, as does much of the book this film's script was based on, yet it all comes together well in a very weird, but hilarious piece of entertainment.

Sam Rockwell is dead-on as game show producer Chuck Barris, who created not only two staples of American television mediocrity (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game), but also the "American Idol" of the 1970s -- The Gong Show. The only differences between Barris' production and today's "Idol" are that Barris featured ONLY bad wanna-bes, so there were no recording contracts and such offered, and his judges were a lot funnier, as was he. Of course, viewers were different back then, too, in that they didn't know what to make of a show on which struggling "talent" were verbally abused. Today, that's half of Idol's viewership. In any case, Rockwell's portrayal of him is perfect...

Wrong Tone, Wrong Cast
In the featurette on "the making of," everybody praises Charlie Kaufman's script adaptation from Barris's fictional (non-fictional?) autobiography -- including Barris himself! Then Clooney comes on and starts talking about his own vision for the movie, saying "I hope I didn't ruin it."

It seems pretty clear he did.

The in-the-camera special effects, the performances, the sets and costumes are all top-notch, but the editing and tone of the film are in direct opposition to the material. Clooney has made it into a film noir. He took out all of the ambiguity and mystery. The editing is a mess of unrelated scenes, poor music choices, unattractive color saturations and/or monochrome scenes. For a film about a comic there are painfully few funny moments. The script that enticed big names like Clooney and Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore to sign on for essentially no money seems to have been thrown out the window entirely -- at least, there is none of the bracing originality that...

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