Movie Review: Boogie Woogie

Despite it's awful title (referencing a painting that has hardly anything to do with the main plot of the film) this is a pretty damn entertaining movie. Why? Well, frankly...because there's lots of good-looking people having sex in it.

And, seriously, when it comes to the female cast, this film is stacked: Gilian Anderson, Amanda Seyfried, Heather Graham, Joanna Lumley from Ab Fab, even an appearance by Charlotte Rampling. As for the dudes, there's a bunch you'll recognize by face if not by name: the creepy murdering dude from the U.S. version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, for one.

It's set in the Contemporary Art scene in London, present day. No, to answer your question, it's not a porno...though there is a fair bit of skin in the film...it's mostly just that it's extremely laden with sexual tension and the suggestion of sex (the camera fades out as two people begin to disrobe, etc.).

I mean, I didn't know you could cram so much cinematic lust into a 90 minute film. You've got Young-on-Old, Woman-on-Woman, Man-on-Man, Extramarital, Servant-on-Mistress, suggested, implied, unrequited, brokenhearted, you've got it. The film is, in fact, driven by the fires of its characters' loins.

Furthermore, the art world is always a fascinating one to inhabit for a few hours. It's so superficial and fluid: you're up one minute, you're down the next. Only the sexiest and most unscrupulous will survive. So much money and so many good-looking, creative (if totally soulless) people circulating that it's difficult to draw your eyes away for a single moment.

Plot-wise? Meh...I've got a sense the film was edited to death. Meaning (and this is purely a guess), that the original script included a lot of subtlety and intrigue that didn't make it into the final cut. They went, instead for T&A. Specifically Amanda Seyfried's "A" and Heather Graham's "T"

Why do I say this? Because of the number of undeveloped or underdeveloped sub-plots. This movie slid below the radar for obvious reasons: it verges on being exploitation film, with not much else of substance to hold it together than the tragic but almost buried sub-plot about a frustrated wanna-be gallery curator played by Alan Cumming, who plays the charmingly awkward geeky type to a T.