Well, as I predicted I heard the song "Artificial Flowers" for the third time! But maybe it doesn't count because it was Kevin Spacey singing, not Bobby Darin. Last night I was feeling a little bummed, so I did what I always do.

I went out and bought butter tarts and rented a movie musical. I should have loved this Bobby Darin biographical movie, (co-written and directed by and starring Kevin Spacey) but I didn't.

I enjoyed it and glad I saw it but I don't think I'll need to see it again. According to the note at then end credits, it wasn't "strict" re-telling of the Bobby Darin life story, but a creative reenactment. I found out all sorts of stuff I hadn't known before (but to be honest I didn't know much about his personal life to begin with).

The woman he thought was his mother was actually his grandmother and the woman he thought was his sister turned out to be his mother. For some reason I'd had the impression he was a "bad" guy, beating up Sandra Dee etc., but the movie shows exactly the opposite. According to the movie, he had a real relationship with Sandra Dee, with real love and he was a "good" guy, if not perfect.

Apparently Sandra Dee never remarried -- and remained in love with Bobby until she died on February 20 of this year (Bobby Darin died in 1973 after heart surgery). His early death stemmed from the rheumatic fever he'd had as a kid (he wasn't supposed to live beyond 15.) Again, for some reason I thought it was hard living that did him in! So I was glad to get all this new information.

Two things bugged me about the movie.

Firstly, Kevin Spacey was too old and lacked the performing charisma to carry off Bobby Darin. I longed to hear the original tracks. Ironically Kevin Spacey's insistence to sing and perform all the songs really highlighted what a talent Darin was, since Darin didn't have that amazing a voice, but had "it". This is well described by his son, Dodd:

"Not to denigrate other artists," Dodd Darin says of his father, "but other people of that early-Sixties era, they just faded, because they really were kind of homogenized. This artist, my dad, was different. He came from the gut. Because he didn't have a great voice, he didn't have Fabian or Presley's looks. But what he had was the desire and charisma and talent. When you saw him on the stage, he was ten feet tall. All that came through in the music."

The second thing was the artificial/fantastical construction of looking back over his life. This worked beautifully in De-Lovely, but in Beyond The Sea, seemed forced and overly constructed. Go figure.

I think I'll go listen to "Artificial Flowers" and get my real third time in...

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