I was not prepared for this film to be as batshit crazy as it.
This is six years before Taxi Driver, but it might as well have been Robert De Niro's audition tape for that Scorsese classic, as we see him here in one of his first roles, portraying an extremely disturbed Vietnam veteran in this early feature by Brian De Palma.
Hi, Mom! Begins as a twisted version of Rear Window, if the James Stewart character would have been an aspiring porn director/actor played by Robert De Niro. There is a horrifying, "I can't believe they did that" sequence with him joining a black theatre, performance art, urban guerilla group. And it ends with De Niro going full Travis Bickle.
This film is incoherent to the point of being more a series of skits than a fully realized narrative feature. It has a very offbeat, deeply cynical sense of humor and shifts from being very funny to extremely disturbing in the blink of an eye; often it's both at the same time. De Palma satirizes sensationalist media, our obsession with sex and violence and puts on some film some of the most provocative material regarding race relations in America that I've ever seen.
For some people, Hi, Mom! Might be an unfocused mess of a movie. For others, it may be an exhilarating and bold masterpiece. I think I sit somewhere in the middle, but in any case I won't forget it anytime soon.
This is six years before Taxi Driver, but it might as well have been Robert De Niro's audition tape for that Scorsese classic, as we see him here in one of his first roles, portraying an extremely disturbed Vietnam veteran in this early feature by Brian De Palma.
Hi, Mom! Begins as a twisted version of Rear Window, if the James Stewart character would have been an aspiring porn director/actor played by Robert De Niro. There is a horrifying, "I can't believe they did that" sequence with him joining a black theatre, performance art, urban guerilla group. And it ends with De Niro going full Travis Bickle.
This film is incoherent to the point of being more a series of skits than a fully realized narrative feature. It has a very offbeat, deeply cynical sense of humor and shifts from being very funny to extremely disturbing in the blink of an eye; often it's both at the same time. De Palma satirizes sensationalist media, our obsession with sex and violence and puts on some film some of the most provocative material regarding race relations in America that I've ever seen.
For some people, Hi, Mom! Might be an unfocused mess of a movie. For others, it may be an exhilarating and bold masterpiece. I think I sit somewhere in the middle, but in any case I won't forget it anytime soon.