Phil Spector (2013)

If you're thinking this film is about the trial of Phil Spector, it isn't. It does, however, contain a lot about preparing for the trial.Helen Mirren is Linda Kenney Baden, who reluctantly takes on the murder case of Phil Spector, who is accused of killing Lana Clarkson in his home. Spector claims it was suicide.Baden reluctantly finds herself believing him, as she performs a series of experiments that to her prove he could not have done it. Though trying to talk with Spector is very difficult, she also finds herself liking him.This is a good character study, if a little on the slow side. It would have been dreadful without Mirren and Pacino, however. Pacino plays Spector as a pathetic has-been who brags about his past accomplishments as he sits isolated in his home,"The Castle." He loses his temper often and goes off on tangents. "Would I have lost everything for her?" he asks Mirren about Clarkson. Because of his crazy behavior and history with guns and women, Spector is in a lot of trouble. The film brings us through the mock trial and Baden's attempts to have Spector take the stand to see if he can do it. It's a disaster. On the day of the trial, he shows up in a huge fright wig and looks terrifying. Baden has her work cut out for her.Mirren is wonderful as a woman with a cold that turns into pneumonia who is nonetheless vigorous in her defense. The best scene is when she receives a suggestion from an associate. To illustrate a point, she shows a young attorney the yellow piece that used to go in the middle of a .45 record - he doesn't know what it is. She shows him a .45 record and he guesses, "something for the computer?" She turns to her associate and says, "None of these people are going to know what you're talking about." Mirren is masterful.In the end, which is not part of the movie, the first trial was a mistrial, but Baden could not take part in the second trial and he was convicted.This HBO movie is worth seeing for the performances. It is slow at times, but then again, it's not very long.

Dramatization of events in the murder trial of once-famous record producer Phil Spector, who was accused in the shooting death of struggling actress Lana Clarkson in his Hollywood mansion in 2003. Cable offering from HBO Films (who open the movie with a disclaimer!) is a triumph for writer-director David Mamet, who succinctly examines the events of the case, coming up with no motive for murder on Spector's behalf. While typically over-the-top during the course of the proceedings, Al Pacino still manages to give a mesmerizing performance; his portrait of Spector is, by turns, strange, sad, deluded, self-amused and amusing, and utterly out of control. Spector is a lunatic, but does that make him a murderer? Mamet isn't so sure, and provides for us great food for thought. Helen Mirren, as defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden (with a nagging cold) is nearly as masterful as Pacino. Nominated for 11 Emmy Awards, the film surprisingly came up empty-handed; nevertheless, a superlative achievement.

The acting is excellent but why these actors made this worthless film is beyond me. Spector himself is a sicko character in real life and Pacino shows Spector for what he is but this film just sucks. The biggest moments (and it was expected) is when the topic of the Beatles comes up. Invoking his relationship with the Beatles as if he was of importance in their career, he wasn't. He was just another loony they met along the long winding road. The soundtrack is expected, the historical references are expected but would have to be verified as it appears some poetic license was used here and all the references are from Phil's demented memory of what might have happened. All in all it's a film about an uninteresting character that got away with years of indulging his own ego until it caught with him, unfortunately at the expense of a young woman's life. The film will make you happy the Phil Spector is rotting in a cell and hopefully being treated like the scum that he is.If you need to puke this is the film for you....

David Mamet's HBO film Phil Spector is less about the famous Wall of Sound producer than about Mamet himself, the screenwriter and director.The film as Mamet's meditation on a few themes beyond Spector's case.The primary theme is Mamet's familiar reaction against liberal right-think. He demonstrates the liberal's reflexive assumption that the woman must be the innocent victim, the powerful man must be the killer, especially if the woman is poor and the man is rich. Against this kneejerk and righteous bias any scientific evidence has no effect. With Talmudic rigour Mamet calls the rich to be accorded the same justice as the poor. So must the freakish. Here Mamet's Spector joins the long line of respectable crazies he cites, from Lenny Bruce to Jimi Hendrix to the pre-Yoko bald hermit John Lennon as free spirited eccentrics to whom justice must be paid.Finally, the film coheres with Mamet's controversial recent defense of the present gun "regulation" in America. Mamet discourages the assumption that a man who owns guns in necessarily responsible for any fatal mishaps they may cause. It also defends the apparently unbalanced -- in this case the creative -- against prejudgment. Don't go to this film for any truth about Spector and his failed date and the trial. True to the dynamic of fiction, Mamet's subject is about the larger interplay of elements of which the Spector history may or may not be one instance. His subject is the prejudice by which even -- or rather, particularly -- the righteous can blind themselves to any alternative reality and preclude justice. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.