kpd1

Let me preface this review with this: I gave the film a 10, and i laughed till i nearly wet myself. Now... As much flak as this film caught over being an excuse to use to profanity, it turned out to be one of the most barbed and pointed satires of the last several years. Wildly absurd in its parody of the current "Moral Majority" as more Squeaky Wheel than Defender of Righteousness, the film takes turns slapping the Holier Than Thou in the face with sheer defiance (Fart jokes by the bushel) and needling them with the pinpoint accuracy of a master fencer (The MPAA banning profanity but allowing graphic violence.)

Also to their credit, Parker and Stone are unafraid of pushing the envelope of taste, forcing the audience to draw a line of That's Just Not Funny, It's Sick somewhere in the sand. Be warned at some point this film will either shock or offend you (The line about being stabbed with a coat hanger while still in the womb drew a huge gasp the night i saw it).

The musical numbers are so big and brash as to top any since Disney's Beauty And The Beast; and they are riotously funny.

The ideal espoused here is one of honesty above piety. The question begged is whether to lack shame is to lack decency. With the entire dilemma shown through the eyes of small children (which is where the hilarity stems from) the end view is an optimistic Yes. But given the hullabaloo surrounding this film, as an adult i am not sure i agree.

Robert Towne, best known as the writer of Chinatown, directed this backstabbing corkscrew of a film from his own script after several notable directors didn't meet interpretation. A dark brooding piece, that is as meditative and murky as it is tightly written for suspense and twists, Tequila Sunrise focuses on the expectations that conventional mores place upon our freedom to interct and even love whomever our heart bids us.

Gibson plays a drug dealer with, if not a conscience, at least a code of some sort of ethics. He is raising a son and wants to retire from illegal activities so that he may be a good role model.

Russel plays a narcotics cop bucking for a promotion. In order to get his promotion he needs to bust the area's most notorious dealer... guess who. Problem: he and Gibson and childhood mates.

Pfeiffer is a woman caught between them, each one wanting her for different reasons. Raul Julia and J.T. Walsh complete the central players in a fine ensemble on people with agendas that may be worth sacrificing the alliances they have made along the way.

As the various subplots tie themselves into impossible-to-unravel knots, every character will be forced to question what it is he or she holds sacred. Tough and even regretted decisions are made. Friendships are made and dissolved, hearts are broken, revenges plotted...

Gibson is at his best here, Pfeiffer brings great depth to what could easily have been little more than a trophy role. Walsh and Julia are so poker-faced that an audience member who succeeds in reading all the angles should account himself no more than a lucky guesser as they leave you very few clues to work with.

Ironically, despite the desires of Gibson and Towne, the ending had to be altered to please test audiences. Later critics would harp severely on the final shot, the reviews keeping away significant audience. While the ending may be unsatisfying to the typically cynical noir fan, it does not change the fact that this a far-above-average genre flick with an excellent cast and a superb script.

Worth a watch, worth several.

In one of the bravest parodies in some time, Shane Black unflinchingly holds an ironic looking glass up to the box office hit machine that made him rich: the action film. It perhaps came a bit early for public consciousness to be ready for it, and so wound up showcasing (in hindsight) more of Black's prescience than his market savvy.

In an out and out clever spoof of not only the action film industry but of the slavering fans of action, Schwarzenegger is brilliant casting. The fact that he never quite seems to get the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the whole endeavor makes it all the funnier. (The daydream sequence of Hamlet as an action flick is hysterical!) Director John McTiernan (Die Hard, Hunt For Red October) strikes a nice balance between the tension of the plot and the relaxed atmosphere of the spoof. If you saw it before and just didn't get the thrill ride you were expecting, that's probably because you were the butt of the big inside joke that was this film. Try it again.

Surprisingly good script, with solid tight direction. Performances settle undaringly into the conventions of the genre, and for those who want to see the familiar unwind before them once again, this film will more than satisfy. Die hard noir buffs who insist on being astonished every time out by every twist and double cross will find this is no Maltese Falcon by far. And likewise those who dislike noir will find this gruesome and disgusting (both physically and morally).

David Mamet has, as a writer, always been obsessed with minutiae. What are the far reaching effects of an insignificant action? What are the consequences to the smallest choice? He has expressed this through subjecting his audience to tedious repetition, forcing us therefore to study the differences between the similar. He has illustrated the nuances of the con, making the unimportant into the superbly important. Sometimes it works, other times it does not. For some people it works, for others it does not. But now Mamet has finally achieved what is inarguably his finest directorial effort to date. He unfolds his story delicately, but with such acute insight (he wrote the screenplay) so as to have no point become belabored. His dialogue is swift and efficient, as is his trademark, though without the bluster and profanity many have mistakenly come to expect. And soon one is wrapped up in a journey into the morals of man and modern society, and quite powerless to affect the outcome of that journey. While certainly suspenseful, it makes one understand what Joyce meant when he claimed all great art should satisfy more than urge.

Back before he was The David Mamet, a struggling playwright in Chicago scribbled out this groundbreaking work of trust and deceit. It established the "trademark" Mamet style of dialogue (called "eloquent stammering" by a critic at the time) and played like a locked closet full of backbiting hounds. When poverty gets so extreme that there is no one to feed off but your own kind is when the story starts, and from there wanders into the dark corners of the human psyche. Con erodes into cheat and friendship dissolves into necessity as Franz and Hoffman are terrifying in their ferocity. I'm not talking the "ooh! look how much fun we're having jumping in our chairs while we eat our popcorn in this nice safe theater where the monsters aren't" scary. I mean the kind that makes you look twice at everyone you see for weeks on end. For fans of his work this is a must.

In what is perhaps his most technically skilled piece of writing, Mamet gave us a superbly accurate glimpse into the fearful steps toward armistice in the Gender War as it was perceived to be happening in the early nineties. By locking the two combatants in the same room with high stakes on the table for hours on end he was able to magnify the fears behind their bluffs and the rage behind their acquiescence. On the page the author held a mirror up to the hypocrisy of both sides and refused to let it go. Moreover with a skillful interweaving of speech, he turned the cacaphony of an argument into a symphony of discontent. Then came the movie... Apparently not trusting his own skill as a writer, of the laudable talent of his actors, here directs practically by metronome, locking his actors into a simple rhymic recitation of the lines. The overall effect being that every syllable of this immense work is illuminated for our examination, and it is boring. Mamet himself once commented that cinema was a melodramatic art form and he would rather read anything even the dictionary than go to a movie which tried to make him think. Then he yanked the guts and lifeblood out of this potent script and left the rest like a fossilized remnant of what it could have been. A shame.

Glowing reviews are pretty much universal for The Godfather, and nothing I can say here could even significantly ad to the mountain of (well deserved)acclaim given to this masterpiece. The acting is superb: Brando is breathes subtle grace into the title role, Pacino gives an epic performance, Caan would never be this good again, nor would Talia Shire, Cassavettes is unflinching, and the constant analysis of every angle running behind the eyes of Robert Duval absolutely makes the film. Coppola, as always, is given to the grandiose, but here it fits like the proverbial glove, and he guides smoothly from ultimate tension (the "gun-in-the-toilet" scene leaves me dry-mouthed in fear even after the umpteenth viewing)to ultimate calm. The score is by now a classic, but like the entirety of this work, never satisfies merely on the memory of what it WAS but always fresh with what it still is. Overwhelming every time.