As Good As It Gets

A different way of telling a story

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Musically this is not all terrible. Arrangements are in a spare, energetic dance club style (I'm sure there's a name for it, but I wouldn't know) well-suited for giant venues. It's better than many of these (occasionally awful) songs deserve, and only "Toxic" (a terrific single) is diminished by this treatment.To break up the potential monotony there's a dull wraparound story that will have the viewer wishing for some monotony.The stage show surrounds Britney with excellent dancers, which has the unfortunate effect of making Brit look like a well-rehearsed non-dancer going through the motions but not really caring about what she's doing. Brit and dancers act out little vignettes during the music, Brit emerging from a disco speaker, sitting on a cute motorcycle, in a cute car, and so forth.Brit does a duet with a videotape of will.i.am where he says he's the (going from memory) "big fat bass" and Brit says she's the tweeter. I find myself wondering if this is metaphorical, but find no other signifiers; then I wonder why I'm wondering.No musicians are depicted, and the only pretense of this being a live musical performance is the head-worn wireless microphone. I'm told at least one song was sung live at each concert — if any such performance was captured here, it was re-dubbed later because Britney's lip-syncing is unconvincing throughout the show.Almost any healthy young woman given couple months' rehearsal could do about as well. Britney comes off entirely blank, the performance failing to project any personality. It's as if no audience showed up, but her tyrannical manager/father made her do the show anyway, and she didn't know it was being recorded.Aside from liking a couple of her songs, I have few preconceptions watching this, and found her uninteresting as a singer, performer, sex object or campy failure. It's hard to ignore this because she's the focus of the show, making the flashy spectacle seem especially empty.If you need a comparison, Kylie Minogue — whose music is as occasionally interesting to me as Ms. Spears' — pulls all this off quite well in the two videos I've seen by her, "KylieX2008" and "Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour". Her shows have the same lip-synced minimal pretense of live music, with tons of dancing and flashy staging and costuming and sensational if meaningless imagery, yet the exuberant Minogue is totally on top of it, where Spears looks drained and lost.