paul2001sw-1 The persecution of gay people in the 20th century had some strange side-effects. Take the career of Liberace, the celebrity pianist, who styled himself according to the most outre social conventions of the gay community, but sued anyone who mentioned his sexuality. Liberace also had a series of semi-contractual relationships with much younger men, which one can see as the sort of thing a certain type of rich person might chose to do, but which surely seemed more natural in a world where a more orthodox relationship was socially prohibited. Steven Sodebergh's film shows us scenes from Liberace's life, but also portrays a very odd person and it doesn't really manage to make us feel sympathetic at a personal level, however much one acknowleges the potentially hostile world he had to navigate. Perhaps a full biopic, showing how he became the man we see in this movie, would have been more revealing.

leethomas-11621 One of the funniest (and most tragic!) movies ever. Two heterosexual actors play the gay leads magnificently.

alexdeleonfilm 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 ...

svenrufus Let's get the good bits out there first. I thought Matt Damon and Michael Douglas were both very good in their roles, Douglas especially going against type. That was impressive. It was well filmed, and the sets were every bit as striking as you'd expect given the subject matter.But despite all the glitz of what I was looking at, the overall was rather drab and workaday. At first I was thinking that was perhaps a reflection on the fact that the rich and famous also live fundamentally normal lives, the same stories played out in terms of relationships and human weaknesses, so the mundane nature of their experience can't really be hidden by the shiny baubles and jewellery, but in the end I feel that there was something else missing from this.A bit like Liberace himself perhaps, this is a film that depends more on style than substance. 'It looks fabulous, so maybe no-one will notice how thin and meagre the rest of the work is' appears to be the underlying ethos for the film, and that's disappointing given the personnel involved.I can't quite get my head round why that is. It could be that the source material is not the full picture given how one sided the account really is (I only found that out after seeing it and that struck me as a possible issue straight away.) Perhaps the fact that it was supported by HBO rather than a more experienced film studio gives it a more televisual, functional feel than might have been achieved elsewhere, but I don't really know why that should be the case, other than the fact that I don't watch any TV any more, partly because it leaves me feeling like what I watch lacks something vital, similar to the way this film makes me feel.I was looking forward to the film, and am glad I've seen it now, but it didn't live up to my expectations.