the audience applauded

So much average

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This is a very poignant movie about the loneliness that pervades the human condition, and how seemingly coincidental events can affect people whose paths otherwise wouldn't have crossed. Jessica Biel gives a stellar performance as an exotic dancer (it seems she did her own dancing) who has unresolved family situations. Forest Whitaker is another main character whose performance is compelling as a grieving widower. Ray Liotta gives a haunting portrayal of an ex-con seeking some closure. And Eddie Redmayne portrays a mortician who also likes giving puppet shows for children's' entertainment. Lisa Kudrow also does well in a supporting role. I think it's a very well written and executed drama.

..... the acting is excellent. But the plot loses direction about three quarters of the way through.Four different people with four different stories. At some point I thought these individual stories would all connect somehow. Not so.What we see is a man who lost his faith in God, an ex-con who just wants to do a nice thing, a transvestite, a stripper, a puppeteer who runs a failing funeral home, and a very ill child.Two of these people eventually get together but in the process three people die and one man just seems to go off mentally.To watch this movie you have to want to see what will happen to each person but the process is slow and involved.

The comparisons to Crash (a great film) are inevitable. Powder Blue has a stellar cast in a story that is really a collection of stories that sometimes interconnect.Forest Whitaker, Jessica Biel, Ray Liotta, Lisa Kudrow, Patrick Swayze et al. populate the dark world of Powder Blue. From the first scenes, we realize that this world is filled with crime, violence and poverty. This world becomes a "character" in the sense that it has as much (or more) to do with the motivations and actions of the characters as other characters do.The first character introduced is a man, played by Forest Whitaker, who is living on the edge of desperation and hope. As the stories develop, we find that most of the characters are similarly dealing with issues of mortality and day-to-day negotiations with an uncaring world. Everyone is hurting.Most viewers can probably identify with the sense of desperation that pervades the movie, either because they have experienced it or because they were in situations that could have taken them down a dark path. Thus, the film has an inherent honesty. Some viewers may not want to visit the demons that this film will resuscitate. But there are positive moments and acts of kindness in Powder Blue. For some viewers these moments may "redeem" the movie.Overall, the acting is excellent. Although I thought Jessica Biel embodied her role as a mother who strips for a living, I felt that a few of her scenes were less convincing.

This movie is one of a number of pictures in the last five years that attempts to mimic "Crash." You know--tell a number of little vignettes and then tie it all together at the end of the movie in some way that purports to represent the meaning of life...or something like that.This ain't no "Crash." This is one of the most pointless movies I have ever seen. It wanders all over the place with soap opera like clumsiness. The people who made this awful waste of celluloid must have had a checklist in front of them. A very large checklist. Let's see--there is the single mom with the dying child who's forced into prostitution to save the little nipper. There is Grandpa, just out of the can, looking for redemption. There is the man who wants to be a woman who ultimately kills himself, because no one will love him. There is the man who goes door to door looking for someone who will shoot him in the heart for $50,000, because he took his eyes off the road and killed his new bride. They even remembered the struggling waitress with the hillbilly ex-husband and a dorky white kid who is desperate for love, but my God, they forgot to include an incest victim (although they almost got there).And just for good measure, like your local evening news every night, they did work in a missing dog story.How can anyone watch this stuff? It is so contrived that it's unwatchable.One last question about this movie. What is this fascination about snowfall in Los Angeles with these Hollywood types? It was kind of cute in the remake of "Father of the Bride." It was kind of interesting in "Crash." It was downright silly in this movie, especially when Grandpa dies in a snowdrift the size of which they would never get in LA. We get snowdrifts like that here in Minnesota, but I have yet to see one that is blue. We also see powdery snow here and I can tell you that it doesn't look like the gravel at the bottom of your fishbowl.Blue Powder is truly one of the worst pictures I have ever seen. By the time we get to the scene with dead Ray Liotta teaching the dead little nipper how to fly a kite on the beach, I couldn't stop myself from laughing. It got only funnier when the dorky white kid was kissing the prostitute Mom at the bus stop with two tickets to Paris in her hand. This was really one of the most horrendously dumb movies of the decade.