Review of Rose, The

Introduction

Bette Midler plays, The Rose, a character inspired by Janis Joplin (in no way is this the story of Joplin), who lived her life with the excesses of booze and drugs. We see Rose perform on tour and get to see how hard life is on the road and the way she handles it. When she wants time off however, her manager (Alan Bates) refuses and it plays on her. Meanwhile she meets Houston Dyer (Frederic Forrest). He`s a drifter with whom Rose takes a veritable shine to and the couple are inseparable, for a while. Her rock and roll life drives a wedge into her personal life and spoils things, this coupled with the incessant boozing and drug taking makes things all the more difficult, right up to Rose`s demise.

Video

Presented with a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer, this DVD shows a clean pair of heels. The concert performances in particular are vibrant and well shot with a good level of detail coming through. There is some dirt about but not too much that would be a distraction.

Audio

This comes with a DD4.1 soundtrack and on the whole it`s not bad. The concert performances are loud and brash, and while the music isn`t to my personal taste, it covered the front soundfield well enough. The dialogue could be clearer since I had some trouble hearing everything in some of the quieter scenes.

Features

Static menus lead to chapter selection, trailer and language selection where you can enable the director commentary track. Nothing fancy here, dull menu and dull stills. The trailer is the usual glorified advert and is boring. It`s also so long at three and a half minutes that it should have chapter breaks.

The audio commentary with director Mark Rydell is quite interesting and I enjoyed this moreso than the actual film itself. He talks about the production, the aims and give detailed about the film.

Conclusion

I didn`t think that much of this film. I know that Bette Midler was Oscar nominated for her part, but I just don`t think much of her performance or this film in any respect. I hadn`t heard of this movie before receiving it on DVD so watching it was going to make for an interesting session. In a word, I was bored by it. There`s a lot of potential here but I felt it was wasted by boring dialogue and dull scenes (I even fell asleep once). The music too sounds mediocre so the concert performances are reason enough for me to skip to the next chapter, talk about a turn off. There`s nothing new in the story and it`s just another tale of showbusiness misery.

I always have an image of Midler as a short and brassy woman with a huge mouth stomping around. This brazen image hasn`t helped here and I still can`t stomach her acting, let alone her singing. Maybe it`s just me. I`ve read lots of glowing reviews of this film, mainly from Americans, but it just didn`t click with me.

If you`re remotely curious then by all means rent it. Otherwise steer clear and spend your money elsewhere.