Poly-ish Movie Reviews - Episode 34: Blow Dry

Could Alan Rickman possibly have started in a poly movie?!  Joreth reviews this unusual film to see if a happy polyamorous V or triad family can be found among the backstabbing, vicious world of competitive hair styling.

 

I don't know where this movie came from. Did you know that the Netflix DVD queue has a limit? I forget what it is now, but I've maxed it out. On more than one occasion. It's around 500 DVDs. Eventually, movies become unavailable on Netflix, and if it's in your queue when this happens, they get moved out of the queue and into another queue of movies "waiting" to be added back to Netflix, freeing up a slot on my regular queue for more movies.

Other movies have not yet been added to the Netflix library but they somehow use the User interest to help them get the rights? I don't know if it actually does something to get the rights, or if it just tells them how to gauge what movies they should be fighting for, or what. I've been a Netflix member for so many years, and their system has changed so many times, that honestly I can't remember which of these movies used to be available and isn't now, and which never were but Netflix gave me the opportunity to express interest in.

A few months ago, I took a peek at my "waiting" queue and I was shocked at how long it had gotten. With Netflix cycling out so many movies every month, I got concerned that some of these movies would never make it into the queue, or back into the queue. So I went searching for a bunch of alternative sources.

Usually, when a movie has been in my queue long enough, I forget why I put it there. It could be a potential poly movie, or it could be a skeptic movie, or it could be a Netflix recommendation based on something else I added, or it could be something that someone recommended for totally unrelated reasons. But I can often guess why I put it on the queue based on what was added just before or just after it, since I'll often add similar movies in batches. Without that associative reminder, though, I may have a movie here without really remembering why I have it.

All that to say that I had no fucking idea why I had this movie lying around, so tonight I watched it just so I could identify it and move it to an appropriate place (the trash bin, if I didn't like it, or my movie shelf, or one of my collections, for instance).

When it started up, I had even less fucking idea why I had this movie lying around. I couldn't tell if this was satire or serious? It reminds me of Cuban Fury, in that way. Cuban Fury is supposed to be a satirical dance movie, but even though it's poking fun at dance movies, it turned out to be actually a good dance movie with some really amazing salsa dancing. It's less satirical in that over-the-top Saturday Night Live kinda way, and more satirical in that "we know that we're making fun of a genre but we're going to do it utterly seriously", Shaun of the Dead sort of way.

Blow Dry struck me as the latter sort of movie. It's about a national hair styling competition in Britain, staring ... aw, shit, who isn't it starring? Alan Rickman, Natasha Richardson, Rachel Griffiths, Rachel Leigh Cook, Josh Hartnett, Bill Nighy, Warren Clarke, Rosemary Harris, Peter McDonald, and freaking Heidi Klum. A tiny, pissant of a British town who doesn't give two shits about high fashion or hair wins the rights to host this national hair competition. So all the pompous, Capital City-esque hair designers come to the sticks in their gold lame and glitter (much to the total apathy of the townsfolk) including the trite and overdone Villain - a hair dressing diva who is legitimately talented but not above resorting to dirty tricks to ensure that he wins the trophy.

The opening scenes were so ... Hairspray / A Dirty Shame / John Waters campy that I spent the first several minutes just boggling over why I thought this was important enough to acquire in the first place. But I liked Hairspray (the original), and I liked Cuban Fury, so I kept watching.

The basic plot is that Alan Rickman's character, Phil, used to be a star hairdresser with his wife, Shelley a decade ago, until Shelley ran away with their model, Sandra. Now, Phil, a devastated and bitter man, cuts men's hair in his barber shop with his son in this town as far away from the glamorous hair lifestyle as possible. Shelly runs her own salon with Sandra in the same town, and is estranged from their son, Brian, because of his dad's bitterness about being left by his wife on the eve of the big competition 10 years ago.

On the day that the mayor of the town makes the big announcement that they will be hosting that year's national hair dressing championships, Shelley gets the news from her doctor that her cancer is no longer in remission and they have exhausted all the options other than to make what time she has left comfortable.