Which actors do you find funny regardless of the  context? I’d love to know.

George Gallo is classically trained. As a teen, he studied painting with an old master and this experience serves as the auto-biographical blueprint for Gallo’s feature, LOCAL COLOR. (As a screenwriter, Gallo is best known for MIDNIGHT RUN and BAD BOYS.) In the movie, Gallo is renamed and portrayed by Trevor Morgan. Armin Mueller-Stahl is Nicoli Seroff, the kid’s crotchety tutor. As a director, Gallo’s approach could be qualified as “old-fashioned,” the same knock on the fictionalized Seroff. The wide-screen compositions are lovely, but everything else from the dialogue to the score underwhelms due to its strict representational handling. The logic of the choice is sound; it mirrors the lessons learned on screen. However, the script’s sentiment feels unearned in part, perhaps, because Gallo is so certain of the impact the encounter/s had on him that he forgets to translate it fully for the audience. This portrait of an artist as a young man tells us clouds aren’t really white but fails to show us the pinks and purples of the people below them. Instead, they are vanilla. That said, vanilla is awfully popular and if you are a fan of coming-of-age tales, LOCAL COLOR just might sate your sweet tooth. Surely, Mueller-Stahl frames his curmudgeon in such a way as to make you wish for a similar… brush with greatness.

Gallo had made four features before LOCAL COLOR (including 29TH STREET and DOUBLE TAKE), but I wish he’d turned this story over to a “progressive” filmmaker, one who could have re-envisioned Gallo’s life story… in the abstract.