Almost too good to be true ... Ten Stars!

Rating: Null/10 (13 October 2017)

PLAYING KETCHUP. WITH Hollywood FLIXX. MISSED IN L.A.
Behind The Candelabra was viewed in Budapest on August 20, 2013. At long last, the Liberace Story, starring Mike Douglas as Lee-Berace and a bleached blonde Matt Damon as his younger lover, with Debbie Reynolds as Liberace's mother, also Rob Lowe as a sleazy pretty-boy dietary and beauty adviser looking too young to believe. A lush-plush Weinstein production that was surprisingly good. Viewed at the Pushkin Mozi in Budapest in a nice intimate 77 seat theater. This is the best work Douglas has done since Wall Street - kind of an amazing comeback for an actor who was on the ropes both career-wise and physically with cancer only two years ago. Douglas is spot-on as Liberace all the way and Damon is a sufficiently convincing bi-sexual lover. -- 180% removed from his usual Action Hero screen persona. The film was probably rejected by many people who just couldn't see ordinarily macho heroes like Douglas and Damon on screen as gay lovers, but director Sonderbergh makes the most of this counter to expectation casting. Damon also played a non action character in Sonderbergh's last film about fragging ...so it looks like Matt is now trying to be accepted as an actor, not just a star.
There is plenty in this pic for the gay audience to chew on but aside from that this is a slam-bang biopic of one of the most flamboyant and popular entertainers of the mid XX century -- now perhaps largely forgotten because sexual gaieté has become so mundane that many may have forgotten how outrageous it was was for a figure so much in the public eye as Liberace was to flaunt it back then. Today this would be a story about gay marriage -- back then the issues were much more complicated.
The pic only deals with the late career of this amazing showman from 1977 to 1985 when he died of AIDS. A newspaper headline announcing the early death of macho actor Rock Hudson Is seen momentarily to underline the fact that LIberace's demise from AIDS marked a turning point in public perception of this plague - especially in the entertainment world.
Douglas is simply excellent -- arguably his best film ever!--but I would attribute Damon's success in portraying a gay to Sonderbergh's direction. The whole picture has class, while it could easily have been a cheap portrayal of a screaming drag queen catering to the Gay&Les crowd, which it most certainly is not! Some of the nude in bed scenes, man to man kissing scenes and the discussions between the actors of who gets to do whom and why in masculine love making may make some male viewers cringe, but this is one of the many things that makes this picture so true to life -- too true in fact for it to have been the box office smash it should have been. Also, the reconstruction of Liberace's on stage performances in Vegas with some amazing keyboard pyrotechnics is alone "worth the price of admission" and Douglas shines in all of these scenes -- to the point where you forget that this is the actor Mike Douglas! Bottom Line: One of then best pictures of the year, and Mike Douglas deserves the Best Actor Oscar without a doubt. If he doesn't get it somebody ought to eat their shoe ...