Potted

Hm. I'll have the reserve judgment re: the Singing Detective remake after all: director Keith Gordon is no dope, for all that he was in Jaws II...

Most interesting tidbit, though, comes from Roger Ebert as he begins his annual dispatches from Sundance—the screenplay for Gordon's film was adapted by Potter himself, as one of his last projects. It's been purposely and purposefully Americanized and updated; the writer/hero's fascination with the pop music of the 1930s has become a love for 1950s rock'n'roll. Be interesting if the film's entire cultural lens has been shifted forward: the tough-guy noir movies and crime fiction of the Fifties share a certain cultural currency with the detective pulps of the Thirties (the story's other important touchstone), but regard it from a slightly different angle—less sex, more outright desperation.

I'm optimistic, but guardedly so: though Potter himself was a teenager in the 1950s, he always identified himself with the pop culture of his parents' generation (perhaps most vividly in Pennies From Heaven, which he also adapted, not entirely successfully, for Hollywood). It will all depend on how the screenplay conveys the escapism and the nostalgia.

What is wondrous and heartening, though, is the sheer amount of work the man got done while under his "death sentence"—not only this screenplay but also the linked miniseries Karaoke and Cold Lazarus—all while caring for his wife (who was also dying of cancer) and settling his affairs, and all before early afternoon, when pain, fatigue and liquid morphine would put him away for the day.

So this could be tremendous, a genuine re-imagining of the story... or it could be the Second Coming of Cop Rock. I remain unconvinced—just as I remain unconvinced, even after watching his fine, subtle performance in Signs, that Mel Gibson can do justice to a role originated by the marvelous Bill Paterson.