I need to start giving up hope for movies that have long been delayed for a theatrical release. In November I walked into Southland Tales trying to be as optimistic as possible, ignoring the bad buzz and the 18-month delay, but was ultimately let down by the final product. And now there’s another long-delayed film, also starring Mandy Moore even (who had quite the busy year in 2007, 5 films and not a single good one), entitled Romance & Cigarettes, finally making a limited run around the country. I remember reading about this movie my freshman… year… of… college, almost four years ago. Kate Winslet is one of my favorites, and I always like to keep up on her new films (although All the King’s Men and Flushed Away have strangely passed me by…). This film was shot in the Spring of 2004, and I remember when the first pictures of her appeared on the Internet. Wow, I thought. This movie is going to be fantastic.

Then three and a half years went by and I kind of forgot about the movie. I’ve looked it up every once in awhile on IMDB, but I assumed by the end of 2006 that the movie would eventually just be released to DVD, if that. The funny thing is that throughout this whole period I was always interested in seeing this movie and never thought the delay was due to the fact that maybe the movie was just a bad film. When I heard earlier this year that the actor-turned-director of this film John Turturro was finally just going to release the film himself (like David Lynch with his new film Inland Empire), I got pretty excited. Finally! What is this movie all about? I can’t wait to see! Mostly I wanted to see Kate Winslet strut her stuff and see Christopher Walken dance even more than he did in Hairspray. I really just wanted two hours of entertainment. This movie sounded like fun. Is it? Eh, not so much.

The first half of the film is occasionally entertaining, with a few cute musical numbers, but really, aside from Winslet’s daring, crude, and frankly pretty weird performance, there’s very little in this movie that will stick with me (in a good way, at least). This has to be the one of the most amateurish major movie musicals I’ve ever seen. Turturro is a gifted actor, but he seems lost amidst the circus that unfolds in this movie. He jam-packs the movie with about fifteen characters (most played by well-known A-list and B-list actors) and then gives them next-to-nothing to do. There is very, very little plot to the movie, mostly just concerning a love triangle with Winslet, James Gandolfini, and Susan Sarandon. There’s little entertainment value to be had because there’s not a single truly interesting character in the bunch, and there’s not a storyline to care about!

The musical numbers are a sham. Only the first one, involving Gandolfini and many male members of the neighborhood singing a song about love, and one toward the end, where Winslet sings in shallow water, have any real visual style. The rest look really thrown together, as if the director and editor didn’t really know what to do with the footage they compiled. There is disappointment to be had when Winslet, about forty-minute minutes into the movie, finally gets a musical number to herself, and then there’s nothing really done with it. She just dances around a bedroom, traipses down a hallway, and screams outside a building. Lame. And a good deal of enjoyment value is taken away from my dislike for many of the songs. They are not very interesting or memorable. Compared to the music of Hairspray and Once, the songs here are pretty subpar. The biggest sin, though, is that the music rarely moves the story along. The characters literally just stop and sing how they’re feeling. It almost feels as if Turturro knew he only had a 30-minute movie and decided to turn it into a musical to make it full-length.

The actors all do what they can, but very few make an impression. Winslet is the only one who succeeds, even though the character she plays is foul-mouthed and a little bit annoying. I loved all her material because Winslet truly jumps into the movie and immerses herself into this nothing role. She looks the sexiest and sluttiest she ever has. She wears red and lets her boobs hang out all over the place. It was hard to watch the movie thinking about her completely different work in movies like Little Children and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it’s astonishing what she does with each role she plays. Even in a fairly lacking role like this one, she does the best she can. We never really care about her character, but she has a lot of fun with it, and we have fun right along with her.

The rest of the cast ranges from just fine to horrendously bad. I don’t know what planet Mary Louise Parker was on while making this movie, but she probably just took one piece of direction from Turturro (”You’re the weird sister”) and did what she could with it. Mandy Moore, looking about 12, has absolutely nothing to do. Steve Buscemi has a couple funny lines but offers little. Christopher Walken, who literally struts into the movie for a few scenes and then struts right back out, has basically no reason to be in the movie except that he’s cool. And he’s Christopher Walken. Strangers With Candy’s Amy Sedaris plays the most annoying character in a movie this year, as the next-door-neighbor. The two leads, Gandolfini and Sarandon, aren’t terrible, but the script gives them very little to work with. There’s a lot of mediocre material in the film, a movie that should’ve been nothing short of great with a cast like this.

And then there’s the last half-hour, which strangely turns downbeat and sour, with one long talky scene after another. After an hour of tame musical numbers about nothing, we’re suddenly supposed to care about these characters? Some people might respond better to the end because all of the flash disappears and we’re finally given a few scenes that offer actual acting. But by this point, we have zero investment in the story and characters, and we’re just quietly waiting for the movie to wrap it up. But it goes on and on. Five scenes too many. The movie doesn’t head into Southland Tales territory with a 2 1/2 hour running time, but it’s far longer than it really needs to be.

2007 has been the year of the musical, and for that I’m grateful. I didn’t completely fall in love with Once, but it has a lot of merit and a terrific soundtrack. Hairspray was by far my favorite musical of the year and of the last few years. Sweeney Todd I haven’t seen yet but will very soon. Romance & Cigarettes may be the bottom of the barrel this year when it comes to musicals but at least there have been a handful to choose from, as opposed to previous years where something like Dreamgirls is the only option. I liked Kate Winslet in this movie, but very little else stuck with me. It’s a bad film, poorly written, amateurishly choreographed, and terribly put together. The movie was delayed nearly four years, and I hate to say it, but some movies deserve to just stay on the shelf.