slightlymad22 The Singing Detective (2003)Plot In A Paragraph: From his hospital bed, Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr) a writer suffering from a skin disease (he calls himself a "human pizza) hallucinates musical numbers and paranoid plots.I can't talk about this movie, without talking about the casting of Robert Downey Jr. Long before Downey Jr cleaned up his act and landed the Ironman gig, there was a time when he was damaged goods and yesterday's headlines. Following a troubled past, at the turn of the decade, Downey Jr was on the rise again. He'd been nominated for an Emmy, and had won a Golden Globe for his superb work in Ally McBeal, and he was praised as being responsible for a boost in the shows ratings, but he was fired from the show by FOX, after his latest drug related incident, it also forced Mel Gibson to shut down his planned stage production of Hamlet with Downey Jr in the lead role and he also lost the John Cussack role in American Sweethearts. That seemed to be that. Nobody would touch him, let alone offer him a decent movie role. Enter his Air America co star Mel Gibson.However it wasn't plain sailing, Gibson had to pay Downey Jr's insurance, after the studio balked at the cost of insuring someone deemed an unreliable actor, due to the last five years of substance abuse, arrests, rehab, and relapses. Gibson dug in to his own pocket to ensure Downey Jr was cast. This movie is certainly not to everyone's taste, and I can see why!! But it's filled with great performances from Downey Jr, Robin Wright Penn, Katie Holmes, Adrian Brody, Saul Rubineck, Carla Gugino and a barely recognisable Gibson. Its soundtrack is filled with songs almost everyone over a certain age should recognise, and personally I'd much watch something original like this, than another Transformers or Fast & Furious movie. I'm not sure why Downey Jr's singing voice was dubbed for this, as he has a good singing voice. I even own his album. The Singing Detective was a flop, it did not finish the year in the the top 100 highest grossing movies of 2003. Which (even for a supporting role) was unheard of for a Gibson movie back then.It's funny how their respective careers went from here. Downey Jr had supporting roles in movies such Gothika, Scanner Darkly and Zodiac whilst nabbing the lead in Shane Blacks Kiss Kiss Bang Bang before being cast as Tony Stark/Iron Man. Whilst Gibson made The Passion Of Christ and all hell broke lose..... and it was pretty much down hill from there for a long time.

oscar-35 *Spoiler/plot- The Singing Detective, 2003, An hospitalized 3rd rate hack writer of detective books suffering from his psychosomatic illness needs to free himself from his daydream fiction life of his alter ego, a singing detective to get mentally adjusted and well.*Special Stars- Robert Downey Jr, Robin Wright Penn, Adrien Brody, Jon Polito, Katie Holmes, Mel Gibson.*Theme- Your life could be a novel or a dream, it's up to you.*Trivia/location/goofs- Paramount Pictures, B & W film noir sequences with present day scenes, Rated 'R' for the multiple 40's sex scenes involving fictional call-girls and gangsters. Look for a heavily disguised famous lead actor & film producer on camera playing a helpful bald psychologist. Shot around downtown Los Angeles and the Silver Lake area.*Emotion- A rather crazy confusing film with too many 'flash-back' or dream sequences in film noir and back to plot present-day reality, but somewhat saved by the rest of the film's scenes and actors. It's all clues, with no solutions. This film has some spirited musical lip-sync songs with a killer 50's music tracks. It's a very odd plot and film.

travis_iii If it weren't for the original TV series I fancy that this version of Dennis Potter's 'The Singing Detective' would be regarded as an unusual and interesting film, maybe with something of a cult following. But inevitably it is compared to the original series and can't help but shrivel in its illustrious presence.So why remake the 1986 TV series as a feature film? The original is one of the best works ever made for TV and it runs to almost seven hours. It could be that the producers wanted to bring the piece to a wider audience and that is laudable, but the time constraints mean that much of the original narrative is stripped away and with it goes most of the emotional power, leaving a peculiar and spare story about a bitter, misogynistic man who is hospitalised with psoriasis and who is haunted by feelings of guilt concerning the death of his mother. This means that fresh audiences of the story will probably see it as a piece of rather clichéd psychodrama made interesting only by its visceral dialogue and quirky dream sequences, rather than as the masterpiece it is. Maybe if the producers were really committed to the work they would have added another 30 minutes to the film to give it a better chance of success as a work of art. I suspect a half-hour more running time wouldn't have saved it but it would have allowed more material from Dan Dark/Philip Marlow's childhood to be included, for that is where the emotional core of the work lies. The fantasy sequences are meaningless without reference to the real emotions that Dan Dark has left behind. This lack of context drains the film and its characters of meaning and it is left just being quirky and slightly interesting; a sort of puzzling crime scene. The question being: who stole the story's soul, and where has it been stashed? In parts, RDJ's performance is very good (he excels hamming it up as the fictional detective of the title), but in parts it slips, and generally the acting comes across as more mannered than the British TV original (makes one appreciate just how great that cast were). In particular Mel Gibson , in dodgy prosthetic comb-over, is rather grating.The finger-prints of the Hollywood studio can be found all over the cinematic crime-scene. The songs should have stayed in the 1940s. Shifting them to the 1950s seems like an attempt to make them have more commercial appeal and perhaps allow RDJ to look a bit more cool when lip syncing - which rather misses the point of the songs. He gives the game away when he actually sings a song over the end credits - I bet Dennis Potter didn't put that into his screen adaptation - more likely it was RDJ's agent. It has the effect of eradicating any lingering sense that you've been watching a drama. Of course by the time the credits are rolling you've already been served up an ending even more anodyne than the problematic ending of the original, with RDJ strolling out the hospital looking like he's just got back from a two-week vacation in Florida.There are some well crafted scenes but ironically the film looks rather small and studio-bound compared to its TV predecessor. I think this is partly because of the originals' brilliant direction by Jon Amiel. It was shot in film often in wonderful locations such as the Forest of Dean and so even cinematically it was a hard act to follow.So many considerations make one realise what a doomed artistic enterprise this was. Potter was at his most brilliant when writing about the things he was most familiar with, especially the Britain of the 1940s and 1950s with its repressive class system, and his childhood in the Forest of Dean. Removing this cultural setting (along with 5 hours of complex interwoven imagery) renders The Singing Detective impotent. I can't help but think he knew this - and I'd also like to believe that any adaptation he handed over was hacked to pieces in the making of this film. It may also be that he wanted to leave an extra financial legacy to his family, and handing over his most celebrated work to Hollywood was the best way of accomplishing that end.My plea to first-time viewers of The Singing Detective is: do not be put off by this feature film version. Please, please watch the original! It's breadth is enormous and it will make you think and weep like the best art should.

Neil Welch I was 24 when the BBC screened Dennis Potter's 6-part series The Singing Detective starring Michael Gambon as a hospitalised psoriasis sufferer. I watched it avidly, of course, because of the extensive outcry against it: notoriety was ever good for the box office. And I confess that I was too young and inexperienced to properly comprehend its strange and beguiling mix of real life, fantasy, fever dreams, flashback, pastiche mimed musical numbers, and the meaning and purpose of the way they were interwoven.17 years later, Hollywood films a Potter-scripted revision of the piece, substantially shorter, transplanted to the USA, and brought forward in time some years. I can't really compare them, because my recollections of the TV piece are sketchy.So I am commenting solely on this movie. It retains the mix of the original, but it is substantially easier to come to terms with what is being done: what is fever, what is imagination, what is recollection, and why each section is presented in that way. Robert Downey Jr as the protagonist (here renamed Dan Dark from the Philip Marlow of the original, each name having its own significance) as hugely impressive, but everyone shines.And the makeup....