Weeds (1987)

I have a feeling that I might have wanted to see Weeds on the stage rather than a in movie theater.  That way its songs could reverberate in my soul a little better.  They feel more real than the rest of the film.

This is not a movie that I was dying to see, and so it is a movie that I’m not enthusiastic about sending you to see.  Although in the panoply of movies about cops and shootouts and wiseacre kids and gimmicks and formulas this might be something a little different.  I know that I sound ambivalent, but is only that I can see the potential in this film.  It doesn’t get there and so I’m left with mixed feelings.

Nick Nolte plays a prison inmate serving a life sentence without possibility of parole at San Quentin.  Years have gone by and he’s seen men leave the prison one way or another.  His realization that he will never see the outside world has led to two suicide attempts, and after seeing a performance of “Waiting for Gadot” he begins to indulge in the prison library, brushing up on Russian literature and the works of Nietzsche he beings to formulate the idea of putting on a show with some of his fellow inmates.

I was entertained by the productions that he puts on, so much so that I almost wish that they  had been the entire movie.  The musical numbers feel crude, which is how it is suppose to be.  The rest of the movie is trying to feel the same way, but I felt a little too much polish.  This is a movie that takes place at San Quentin but things feel a little too sane.

There is a good movie here, but outside of the music, it drags.  The drama is a little too slow, and as I say a little too polished.  Weeds didn’t need trimming, it needed a larger does of reality.