Word: julius
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...hero, Julius (Kevin J. O'Connor) is a stuporous New York City punk in high-top Keds and a greasy leather jacket, who has just lost his job and wants to become a musician. Somehow he convinces a bandleader, Keith Burns (Buster Poindexter, a.k.a. David Johansen) to give him his "big break" if he can locate a reclusive acoustic guitar maker, Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin), who has mysteriously disappeared from the New York music scene...
...this happens in about the first 10 minutes, and then it's off on the yellow brick road, in this case the New York Thruway, to search for Elmore. It's here that, according to the press kit, "the realities and illusions of the open road confront Julius with his own fears, with who he is, as opposed to who he thinks he is, with losing himself in order to find himself..." and so on and so forth. But believe me, it isn't nearly that exciting...
...disappearance of an acoustic guitar maker really the best premise for a rock-'n'-roll quest film? Buster Poindexter's band, which gets to play for about 15 seconds, uses an electric guitarist anyway, and you can hardly hear him under all the brass. In addition, Julius himself, who gets a chance at one point to croon a bit of a folk song, proves himself an impossibly bad musician, so a "big break" hardly seems in order for him even if he could find Elmore Silk...
Worst of all, Julius' "voyage of discovery" is tortuously boring. Where Dorothy meets sympathetic souls on her way to Oz and shares adventures with them, Julius just keeps bumping into rock stars who stay on screen long enough to do quick, generally wooden cameos. Thus Julius meets Tom Waits, who plays Elmore's sleazy brother, for about five minutes, or long enough to get ripped off by him. Then Julius meets Dr. John, who plays Elmore's sleazy brother-in-law, for another five minutes and is again ripped off. Leon Redbone gets about six minutes as a silent Canadian...
Actors seem to agree. Julius Caesar is in rehearsal with Al Pacino and Martin Sheen, each working for $400 a week. Papp is lining up Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline for Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps at the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where he regularly mounts a summer season. And A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose opening last week officially launched the series, features F. Murray Abraham (Oscar winner for Amadeus), Elizabeth McGovern (Ragtime, Ordinary People) and Carl Lumbly (TV's Cagney and Lacey...