Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding individual performances; great Southern gothic
Review: This is one of the best films I have seen this year. I thought there were many outstanding performances: the narrator (the New York writer who comes south to write an article on Savannah ), Jim Williams,the genteel antiques dealer; his lawyer,who finally achieves an acquittal for his long-term client; Billy,Jim's young drug-taking homosexual employee who is also his lover, Joe Odom the piano player and his girlfriend Mandy, and particularly Minerva the voodoo priestess and Lady Chablis all really impressed me with their performances. The story is an interesting one set in a slow Southern Gothic pace, and there is in addition the wonderful Johnny Mercer song "Skylark" which is played at the beginning and at the end. I think the character of Savannah is brought out in the film in many ways: the walks in the park, the Mercer house, the identical scenes at beginning and end in which Minerva feeds a squirrel sitting on a park bench as the plane arrives overhead. Not to mention that voodoo is part of Savannah's ambience. Plus there are wonderful humorous interludes: the man walking the invisible dog, the man who carries flies on pieces of string and threatens to empty a bottle of toxic poison into the city's water supply; the ladies bridge society. The best individual performance is probably by Kevin Spacey followed closely by Minerva, Lady Chablis, Williams' lawyer, and the narrator and his girlfriend Mandy. In the end the narrator wins the girl, after Minerva tells him, "Don't focus so much on the dead that you forget the living."

Rating:
Summary: I liked this movie...
Review: ...back when it was called "The Great Gatsby!" This movie (and book) is a thinly-veiled rip-off of The Great Gatsby.