Somehow
the bloviating Eric Jonrosh manages to spoof something that never really existed:
the epic jazz film. Of course there have been plenty of jazz films (mostly
indie and arty), but even I’m not sure I would recognize riffs on Paris Blues, Mickey One, A Man Called Adam,
and Sweet Love, Bitter. Still, there
are enough swinging noir conventions in the Peter
Gunn tradition for the scattershot satire to take aim at. Being a jazz
musician is dangerous work, especially for a cat suspected of murder in the IFC
miniseries, The Spoils Before Dying (trailer here), which releases
today on DVD.
Rock
Banyon is a Hard Bop piano player, who scrupulously resists the advice of his
agent Alistair St. Barnaby-Bixby-Jones to record a “with strings” album, a
surprisingly hip jazz reference. Of course, Banyon will have more pressing
matters on his mind when the police threaten to fix him up for the murder of
his former lover and on-again-off-again vocalist, Fresno Foxglove (a.k.a. “the
Topanga Songbird”). She was shot down alongside Wardell, Banyon’s tenor-player
sideman (a possible Wardell Gray reference). However, Wardell was found with an
alto saxophone rather than his tenor, which is a rather promising jazz
Macguffin.
Had
Spoils been edited down to ninety-minute
feature, it could have been a smart, tight jazz mystery send-up. Unfortunately,
there is a considerable amount of dead wood in the six twenty-one minute
episodes, notably including the frequent product placement gags, which are
really not appropriate to the era. Even more annoying are the framing
sequences, starring Will Ferrell as Eric Jonrosh, the supposed author of the
original bestselling novel and director of the long lost European film
adaptation. Frankly, the most unforgivable crime in Spoils is the wince-inducing shtick Ferrell indulges in as he
hammily portrays Jonrosh as part Orson Welles, part Norman Mailer, and part
Harold Robbins—make that the worst parts. There is no question Spoils would be considerably more
watchable without him.
On
the plus side, Michael Kenneth Williams is all kinds of cool and hardnosed as
Banyon. Kristen Wiig wilts beside him as Delores O’Dell, a tangentially
involved vocalist who becomes Banyon’s love interest. In contrast, Marc Evan Jackson
and Steve Tom get disproportionate laughs as the cops dogging Banyon. Michael
Sheen also finds humor in the potentially tricky role of homosexual extortion
victim Kenton Price (say, that’s not intended as a Stan Kenton reference, is
it? Remember his band was sometimes denigrated for lacking “manly” swing).
Frustratingly,
Ferrell also turns up late in the sixth episode with a cheap shot character
assassination of J. Edgar Hoover. Yet, even more problematic is the in-jokey
casting of Chin Han (so memorable as the villains in Marco Polo and Serangoon Road)
as the Mexican mystery man, Salizar Vasquez DeLeon. Still, when Peter Coyote supplies
the voice of Dizzy the Cat, Spoils
definitely has something to hang its porkpie on.
