Review of The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) by Tim H — 11 Sep 2008

Boo, hiss, 1989! BOOO! I hate you and your crappy music! No one likes you!

Okay, the worst part is that lots of people like this really cruddy music. Honestly, this stuff is terrible. It blows my mind that anyone would find this jazzy or hip. This is muzak, pure and simple. Sure, it is on a piano. Heck, sometimes it was on dueling pianos. But that wasn't music. It was just garbage. The worst part is that Jeff Bridges is whining the entire time throughout the movie how he wants to be a real musician instead of playing the garbage they have to play at the clubs every night, but I could hardly hear the difference from his crappy club music and this passionate piano rock. Golly, at least play something classic rocky. I mean, I've heard it before, but it was better than that malarky you were feeding me earlier.

Honestly, there was nothing really going for this movie outside the fact that it had two actors from 24 in it well before 24 was even a remote idea. That's the big beef. I think that this movie really suffers primarily from predictability. Unfortunately, that is probably what makes people really flock to this movie. This is meatloaf. It is worse than meatloaf. Meatloaf at least tries throwing a curveball from time to time. This is absolutely formula down to the moment. Now, I'm not saying formula is a bad thing, but this movie leaves nothing to the imagination. I could have planned out the beats moment for moment and that left me bored as a twig. It didn't help that Michelle Pfieffer was the leading lady.

There's something about the 80's that allowed actors and actresses to play stereotypes. It was actually encouraged that people not play at all close to reality, but rather these two dimensional stick figures in the guise of having some degree of acting ability. For a while, this is the kind of stuff that passed for drama and that makes me wonder what the hell people were swallowing at the time. I mean, look at it: Musician who wants to be an artist but is an asshole, overly cheery yet kind of greedy brother who is balding, hooker with a heart of gold, plucky young girl who wants to learn piano lessons and breaks down the walls to the hardened piano players heart because her mom is kind of a prostitute. DOES ANY OF THIS SOUND LIKE IT IS ORIGINAL?

The answer is no.

I had to clarify that just in case people didn't get that it was rhetorical so I broke the rules and gave it an answer. I'm sorry, but these kind of movies make me cry when I think of all the stuff that could have been done in place of this movie. You know that there is a movie just sitting on a shelf somewhere that is absolute gold and will never be made because The Fabulous Baker Boys needed an ounce of attention. That ounce of attention was already too much. If you couldn't guess by my already scathing look at this movie, I really detested this movie. Now, I like romances, but for some reason, all of the great ones were taken a long time ago and all of the ideas just turned dumber and dumber throughout the ages. The eighties absorbed all that garbage and produced stuff like The Fabulous Baker Boys. Don't worry guys. You'll have to see it someday if you have a girlfriend. I'm just the chump who had to watch it on his own.