dsgoorevitch Reviews

Seconds (1966)

Great cinematography and acting but there's a gaping hole in the whole thing

[7/10 · 22 July 2022]

The opening scenes are extraordinary. Very innovative photography shows the man's depressed inner life. Shifting angles show a man looking at himself from the outside. He's just going through the motions of living. It's superbly disorienting.

It seems understandable that such a person would be a good candidate for the strange service offered by "the company" - a new life in a new place and a new body radically altered by plastic surgery.

But, although I understand it's a move and I'm supposed to suspend my disbelief (and doing so makes it a fine movie to watch), I find myself annoyed by nagging questions.

A depressed milquetoast doesn't seem to be the type of man to take a risk on a new life. Suicide, definitely, but a new life? And if such a man, a weakling, slid into a new life, isn't it a foregone conclusion that he would fail in that one too?

And the economic business is a problem I can't shake. A man has a little money put away, a trust, maybe, stocks, insurance, but how on earth could "the company" wrest away a significant portion of it from the widow? It's idiotic. And the money "the company" spends! It's a lot. But Hollywood's notion of political and economic reality has always been weak.

One last thought. When the character played by Salome Bey reads his tea leaves, she says that he still has a key left unturned. You said it, sister! Only. This guy never turned that key in his life. He couldn't turn the key in his second life either so they killed him.

But maybe that's the point. It's all about the money. The losers they pick are destined to lose but the company keeps rolling in dough. In the end, he couldn't betray anyone to take his place the way his old friend Charlie betrayed him. He has a little integrity and that makes it hard for me to believe that he didn't just say, upon watching the blackmail tape, "Go ahead. Show it. This is crazy."

He's helpless or not helpless. It doesn't hold. But it's still a very good move... the first time you see it.

The Lobster (2015)

Pompous, pretentious, sadistic, bitter, and trite. Funny as a dose of acid reflux.

[1/10 · 5 June 2021]

Usually, when we see a dystopian film, we can see how we might have gotten into this future we're being introduced to. It is that knowledge that makes the film or book understandable. Not in this film.

How such a world came from, how it progressed, and what force would make the characters (such as they are) submit to the indignities they accept hasn't got so much as a breeze to hang its hat on.

It is this that makes the film such a profound failure. There has to be a mechanism by which the characters are forced into making the choices that make their lives.

Neither of the two dystopian "options" the characters are offered bears the slightest resemblence to the world I live in. Nor is either of them bounded by a mechanism that forces the action.

The mechanism doesn't have to be rational. But it does have to be recognizable. The Trial isn't rational but its bureaucracy is all around us. 1984, Brave New World, Blade Runner all have clearly understandable backdrops: political lies, Eugenics, AI and robotry.

Nor is this a comedy even in a technical sense. I won't say why because it might involve a plot spoiler.

My objection is not to its darkness. Hour Of The Wolf is dark. It's a masterpiece. I love dark films as well as bright ones. But this is not dark: it is twisted and sadistic, bitter and cynical to the core. Its humorlessness itself does not succeed in it pretense to wisdom. The mock-sex is supposed to signal us to the superiority of the filmmakers and, by extention, ourselves if we can reach high enough into the bottom of the gutter where they dwell.

Because it is well filmed, and the musical score, repetitive and portentious as it is, is well-made, many seem to like it. My theory of that is that the film is meant to represent a viewpoint of people who fancy themselves elitists, far above the lowly world of ordinary people. There are lots of people willing to sell their souls to get into any club at all, let alone one that promises a taste of the elite. I feel sorry for such people. Leaves that blow in the wind.

Blue Steel (1990)

Don't worry. It gets worse.

[3/10 · 11 December 2020]

If you think the characterizations and faux-religious nonsense is bad, don't worry. It gets worse, more implausible, and whatever was invested in character formation (in one and only one character played by RonSilver) is spent on preposterous loose ends and, naturally, a lot of squibs.

Kathryn Bigelow likes squibs. I get the feeling she thinks the way to make it is to have action movies with no character, lots of blood, and music that cues the audience to feel this or that way. Sort of like Pavlov's dogs.

I imagine this director to be profoundly cynical about human life. How else to explain a scene where the bad guy is digging for something in the park and then, next scene, the detectives are in their cop car, frustrated that he got away? Where are the shovels? Where is the digging for what he was digging for? No one knows because nothing happens.

The whole movie was like that. But it deserves one star because it got me to watch it, waste of time that it was. The Hurt Locker, for which Bigelow astoundingly won a best picture, couldn't hold my attention for 10 minutes. I tried more than once but soldiers about whom I know nothing do not turn my crank or automatically trigger my empathy.

In the end I concluded that Bigelow put together a "moral drama" worthy of a dull witted middle school child. Good=female cop, Bad=psychopath=male=stock broker (capitalism)=murderer=religious fanatic.

Heat (1995)

Trash

[1/10 · 30 September 2019]

I can't watch more than 30 minutes of this. And it goes on another 2? and a half? Yikes! Ashley Judd's incompetent performance does at least, though unintentionally, deliver one of the funniest lines ever: "Like, as in risk versus reward, baby!" Well, she got into her outfit well. Too bad that's as deep into the character as she managed to get. Al Pacino sleepwalked through this as he sleepwalked through so many roles, more or less playing the exact same guy with exactly the same gestures. Even putting the soap in the soap holder in the shower he's not in character. He's Al Pacino playing Al Pacino playing a crook. He stayed in this same role to sleepwalk through "Insomnia." Exact same guy. Same gestures to a T. Identical. How is that acting? Robert De Niro's love scene is simply unbelievable. It's preposterous! This guy has the sex appeal of an anvil. How a beautiful babe could get passionate about this lump of dirt is beyond me. Not only is he ugly but he's surly to boot. Did these guys mail their performances in or did they use a pay phone? Anyway. To torture or not to torture? It depends on whether or not I have insomnia tonight.

Singularity (I) (2017)

Not quite incompetent enough to be so bad it's good

[1/10 · 24 June 2019]

I've watched about 20 minutes of this preposterously written and conceived turkey, wondering if I should go on. Even the titles, the voice-overs, and the news reader, are badly done. The first shot of a woman in a room with what I take to be our future hero, his mother, I presume, with an oxygen tube, looks exactly like it's shot in the corner of a sound stage. You can almost smell the Klieg lights, Even seated, I'm afraid I might trip over the lighting cables. It's that bad. Now, when Guy Maddin shoots this way. ("Careful," "The Forbidden Room"), it's intentional. You're supposed to laugh at these strange cowardly creatures who live as if the world would crash in if they raise their voices. It works as a metaphor. It's all those people who live this way and look terrified if you walk onto a bus without staring at the tops of your shoes.

But there's no metaphor here. This professes to be the real thing. John Cusack.. What can he be thinking? Does he believe in this nonsense? Does he believe tech people are slightly less than one-dimensional monsters? His performance gives "wooden" a new threshold under which to limbo.

Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story (2015)

A long seemingly aimless movie surrounds a five-second political advertisement near the end (I won't say what)

[1/10 · 28 December 2018]

Only the French can make a movie entirely about sex this aimless, pointless, thoughtless, pretentious, and boring. The metaphors were crude, obvious, and unimaginative. The "conclusions" were like something one finds on a milk carton, a cigarette pack, or a fifteen-second commercial message from the local public health office. The writer couldn't be bothered to do elementary research so used creative giants like Van Gogh and Nietzsche as throwaway figures who "died of syphilis," showing a level of arrogance, entitlement, and hubris that makes silly American kids in their flicks look positively dutiful, mature, stoical, and heroic by comparison. Van Gogh died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the belly, not syphilis. There is no evidence that Nietzsche ever had sex, period, a level of loneliness so heartbreaking it underscores my conviction that the writer of this trash, standing on tiptoe, couldn't reach the bottom of either man's boot.

Lullaby for Pi (2010)

It gives "art film" a bad name

[1/10 · 24 November 2018]

The film begins with a woman gaining access accidentally to the wrong apartment where there's a stock super-wise-man who hands out the keys. The invaded tenant is watching a cult favorite in his underwear. He asks if she's been sent by his friends to cheer him up. That is the first and last part of the move that rings true, that she's offended by the implication that she's a prostitute. But she forgives him quickly since she's in his room and made the error. Too quickly. She starts watching the movie too quickly too and, too quickly, finds it amusing. That's as good as it gets. She moves in too quickly and stays in his bathroom and he accepts that all too quickly because I guess he doesn't need to use it. Everything has to be established too quickly because not one character or relationship has an ounce of reality. Everything about this movie is forced because it's a compendium of cliches and stock sociological issues-du-jour. Point made! On to next point! Oh? It's a metaphor? For what?

The movie moves like quicksand. That would have been a good title: Quicksand. A lot of struggling and it just goes down, down, down.

Total Recall (I) (2012)

Utter trash

[1/10 · 20 October 2018]

Everything about the 1990 version is gone, especially the well-paced action. Verhoeven can make 3 hours seem like half the time. This version shows stock shots of stock emotions in stock sci-fi settings that took very little imagination to construct. The music is the monotonous trash of a B move or worse. They couldn't even hire a decent musician to write a score? Dorothy Parker once said about a Katherine Hepburn performance, "her emotions ran the gamut from A to B." Colin Farrell doesn't quite get to A. I wonder if an animated actor would have more or less soul. They did it for a buck. They spent some and made slightly more, unfortunately, assuring us of more soulless remakes. Watch the original.

The Beach (I) (2000)

Shallow would be a compliment. In fact, it's mindless.

[1/10 · 19 January 2018]

Well, Hollywood gave us a good self-portrait of what self-involved human-hating parasites they are.

None of the "romance" has the slightest feeling or passion. It's all possessiveness or like going to the toilet: a mere bodily function. To call it "love/adventure" is to insult both love and adventure.

What adventure? The narrator (the narration done in a voice absent of affect) tells a tale of someone pretty mindless who travels somewhere and finds something a little less interesting than Woodstock or Burning Man.

There is no reason for anything being what it is. No character development because there were, frankly, no real characters.

Even death is portrayed as "naturally" justifiable, even murder. But mostly just meaningless.

The last line the narrator says was laughable. It reminds me of the 10th rate bit of BS I saw written on a restaurant wall near my house: "In the infinite moments it takes to read these words, you will have lived forever." Like the pseud-koan on the wall, not a single part of that or this movie is true.

Hollow, empty, dishonest. No such people exist, have existed, or ever will exist. Save your time.

Takers (2010)

Utterly boring. Waste of a great cast.

[2/10 · 21 June 2017]

The characters are stock and the director/writers seem to think they're giving depth to characters that are as thin as photography paper. There are no relationships in the movie that are not clichés. The emotional manipulativeness is laughable, especially when the violin music comes in. Oh. Am I supposed to care for them? Who, exactly? There are no people, really. We haven't been shown anything about them, except for mama rehab, and even that's a cliché, which is a waste of an excellent dramatic actress (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) I first saw in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies and has never been less than perfect. Even here. But wasted. Idris Alba. He's way too good to be used as a cardboard cutout. So is Michael Ealy.

We're supposed to like these criminals because they're successful criminals. That they live by taking from others... well, there's a nod in that direction but only a nod. And we can't tell what the creators intend us to feel about that. Maybe they're nodding off. I know I nodded off while watching this malarkey. They intend us to like them because they know how to invest their money wisely, sort of like how Michael Cimino wanted us to like the working men in the first half hour (a half-hour!) of The Deer Hunter. (They're real people, these workers!)(No kidding. Yeah, I've worked blue collar. A three minuted shot would have said the same thing). But the good bad guys can't resist the temptation to do another job. That's the McGuffin.

Then there's the even bigger flaw: the cinematography. Shooting documentary style has worked. It has also failed. Here it fails big time. The supposedly exciting scenes are rendered into bland pastiches that are sometimes confusing. What they really needed is some crane work, some Steadicam work, something that acknowledged they were shooting a narrative. Just one shot like the camera moving around the chauffeur trapped without knowing it in the underground garage in Die Hard would have done wonders. Don't you know you're shooting a STORY? I asked the screen. The screen continued to treat me like an idiot. Then I nodded off again. During the "exciting part."

The film IS a narrative. But it's shot as if it's not. Catching every breathless moment with a shaky camera is only drama if something is invested in it. The last time it really worked was The French Connection.

Pass.

Blackway (2015)

World of men, evil: world of women, sheer delight

[2/10 · 14 June 2017]

Pure BS from start to not-quite-middle. PLOT ALERT: I didn't watch long enough to spoil it as I don't like wasting my time.

When a guy kills your cat, get a gun. When he cuts the head off your cat, get a GUN. He is insane. He is psychotic. GET. A. GUN.

This would be a very short movie if not made by a Hollywood intumescent. Get. A. Gun.

But no. We have to have a female character say. "No guns please, we're enlightened victims." The last shall be first and whatever the heck else you wanna put in there. Give me a C. A bouncy little C.

Hopkins must have grown up very poor. A lot of English actors are like that. Can not turn a movie down. O'Toole was like that. So is Caine.

Will I watch the rest and "be fair?" Maybe. I'm curious enough to know how BAD this is gonna be. Yawn.

Time Out of Mind (2014)

An extraordinary and successful attempt to portray a very difficult reality

[9/10 · 18 November 2015]

Films like this are hard to do. Usually they're preachy and full of schlock: they manipulate you, tell you how to feel. This one doesn't.

I ordinarily wouldn't want to watch something so painful but, from the very first shot, the eye of the camera is so intelligent, it compels me to look in every quarter of each frame.

The pacing is superb and shooting through the window, noise, the city: it's genius because it gives us just the right distance to see what we see every day directly in a protected way. Thereby it allows us to be engaged on our own terms without being threatened.

This film is meticulously made. The performances are the best I've seen by each of the major players. I hate Richard Gere. I have never liked a movie or performance he was in. But this was an exceptionally deep and understanding portrait I didn't think him capable of. Seeing Ben Vereen was a treat. Haven't seen him in years. Annoying, well-meaning, comforting, strange, he functions a bit like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. But he stops shy of being like Klugman in "The Days of Wine and Roses," a great movie 'til it became a 12 step program advertisement. This film makes no such error. Vereen's character never says a thing I haven't heard or thought myself.

It's a mystery why so few people love this. Some people thought it too slow, not action-paced. They know what they like, I guess, and this wasn't it.

How to tackle a film on homelessness. I didn't think it could be done. I was wrong.

To the Wonder (2012)

Not just a masterpiece but, for me, possibly the greatest movie ever

[10/10 · 3 October 2015]

I loved Badlands so when Malick finally came out with another film, The Thin Red Line, 25 years later, I was excited. I was on dialysis at the time when it came on the TV. The first half was Shakespearean in scope: I had hopes to see another Badlands and the first half exceeded that tremendously. But dialysis ended and I had to go. When I picked up the movie later, I was disappointed. Maybe it was only because it was split that way. But I've tried since and... no luck. So I was filled with apprehension when I began to watch this one, To The Wonder, another long wait, a dozen years but gladly only half the first.

This time there was nothing to stop me from watching it whole. From the beginning it was captivating and, without having to have anything spelled out (Malick does not insult the viewer's intelligence), the story presents itself simply and clearly. Every turn of the plot is announced with the subtlest of feeling, imagery, music. One doesn't need to be told when it's over, when a character is too afraid to be where he ought to be and at the end, listening to the voice-over, I'm praying for it not to end. And that too is part of the movie.

Some of the actors have flaws as actors. Malick uses those flaws to mold the characters to their skins. I have never liked Affleck, for example, but what I dislike about him was perfectly the character. Brilliant casting!

Many masterpieces end with a feeling, "This is it! This is what life is!" but this one was not just what life is but what life is in its totality with nothing left out. I'm overwhelmed.

This film is about commitment, not just to others but to life itself. Love life, it says, because life loved you by giving you life, by giving you its self.

The Nightcomers (1971)

A sadly underrated movie. Pure genius.

[10/10 · 18 April 2015]

To my mind, one of the most underrated films of all time, due entirely to the fact that reviewers, amateur and professional, just cannot face reality squarely. It is an unqualified masterpiece, written by Michael Hastings, that speaks of, among other things, the impressionability of children, the necessity of intimacy over artificiality, of direct education rather than only book learning, the brutal reality of sex over the dreaminess of what we merely wish for, the question of death and what it is and many other issues including class questions. This prequel to The Innocents (the film version of the Gothic Henry James novel, "The Turn of the Screw") brilliantly answers the question of how Flora and Miles came to be possessed by the spirits of the gardener and governess and it does so in a non-mystical way that sits side by side with the mystical notions of it, which it cleverly dismisses. This act explains the underlying nature of Henry James's sideways attack on the conventions of his day and strips "The Innocents" of its reality-substitute. Such substitutes will never be enough for us to live life in reality. "Last Tango In Paris" was a kind of bookend to this but Tango was far too literal. This metaphoric telling of life and death as it really is should have been celebrated. It would have and will continue to be but not by cowardly crybabies who can't or won't face life.

Babel (I) (2006)

A Post-Modern Train Wreck

[1/10 · 3 August 2013]

This author/director has no friends. If he did, they'd say "This doesn't work! You've got to cut it differently or make three different movies." The care with which the film was made perhaps explains the head-scratching poverty of it. He must have thought he'd only have one chance to make a movie, had three ideas and didn't have the wisdom or confidence to split them up. As soon as the initial incident occurs I have only one concern. But instead of staying where the interest is, the director takes us from the heart of the movie and moves us from pillar to post and back again to barely tangential contacts with the main event, weaving way too much detail until I no longer care about any of these stories. Each story has potential on its own but their combination was made on the flimsiest of premises, the cliché that we're all the same all over the world. Like we don't know.

What the author doesn't know is that we can't switch emotions at the snap of a finger and... that scene with the bedpan..." I mean, what was he thinking of? How many times does a director have to switch between loud music and silence to tell us that deaf people can't hear? Like we don't know.

There was one and only one truly moving moment involving a phone call and I had to wait through a very long movie to see it, my mouth dropped round my belly-button. This had the perverse fascination of a train wreck. What was really sickening was that all this effort apparently was made just to show how stupid Americans can be. Like we don't know.

Like other people can't be? Remember the cliché? We're all the same?

These two pieces of agitprop fail even to prop each other up: hence the complete failure of this movie which, though posing as a loving essay has more than a little hate and bile at bottom. But angelically so. Wink-wink. Nudge-nudge.

It isn't even honest.

Stand by Me (1986)

A movie without one authoritative line of dialogue - miss it

[1/10 · 10 December 2011]

A complete waste of time. From the opening to the end, a narrator (it sounds like Richard Dreyfus's voice) utters cliché after cliché.

I could parse it and present several examples but one will suffice since it isn't worth more time than that. When a junk yard owner insults a boy and his friends drag him away he calls for them to come back. For what? This would not and does not happen in real life. The mean old man should laugh. That's how it happens in life and how it should have be written but since the "author" had to present us with the bonding of the boys (saving one from suicide wasn't enough) he couldn't leave "the plan," the plan he no doubt read in his copy of "Screen Writing For Dummies." The author seems to know exactly nothing about people except this: he wants to be a writer. In one pathetic scene (author's massage!) one of the boys suggest he might write about their pathetic little souls if he grows up to write.

Why not? There was quite an important event they were witnesses to and, if you can't write about that, what can you write about?... assuming one can write.

But this author can't. Still, the movie is something of a miracle. How did someone with such a bad script get the money to make this high-school level fluff? It's one thing to write about childhood but shouldn't the writer grow up first? Shouldn't he, at some point along the way, have learned something that can inform his important event with meaning?

The King (2005)

Dreamlike and realistic at the same time

[10/10 · 26 November 2011]

I just wish I could find that recording by Dolly Parton singing "Peace in the Valley" that opens the film. What a great setup, a young kid getting off his ship, visiting a prostitute with his pay, then wandering into the town of his biological father, a lay preacher who serves the king of kings and has a wife, a son and a daughter, all of whom have a fateful meeting with "the king," his illegitimate son whose name happens to be Elvis.

This is one of my favourite movies of the decade. The motives of the lead character are hard to understand. He seems to drift from one act to another. It is impossible to determine if he has a plan, if he's amoral or if he's so mentally limited he doesn't understand the consequences of his actions. He seems genuinely pleasing and full of good qualities but his actions certainly speak very loudly in the contrary direction.

This is a deep film and one that goes to the core of American life, which is, I think, its real theme. Some movies just don't make it to consciousness right away and they're my favourite type. It reminds me of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in that sense.

When I saw the credits I didn't believe my eyes that William Hurt was in it. I had to watch it again. Yup. He can act! All the actors were superb. There wasn't a single cliché about people here. They were all real. And yet the whole things drifts like a dream.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Misguided, at best, perverse at worst

[1/10 · 30 October 2011]

This is nonsense. A love story with a vampire. It ends with a boy going travelling with his vampire girlfriend whose touch is cold and who "can't help killing" unlike all the evil people in the West who kill out of choice. If this is the author's message it's pathetic. Some nice people are killed here: people just out having a good time.

The only moral act is the infected woman's act of asking the hospital attendant to open the curtains, sensing that the light will kill her. It does. Good on her.

This is Sweden's suicide note. Perverse. I only gave it one star because there was nowhere to enter what I think it deserves: -7.

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Torture

[2/10 · 13 February 2011]

This is what happens when you give a mediocre director like Cemino an unlimited budget. There is no incentive to be creative, to put two characters or events together, to achieve symbolic depth and to get it all done in 80-100 minutes. Instead of that you get only the dreary concept picture about the good immigrants and the bad settlers, especially the vested business interests.

In The Deer Hunter, Cemino spends an ungodly amount of time showing us just what great guys the 4 working men are. I've worked with my hands so I know exactly how great working men are: they're about as good as anyone else.

Kris Kristofferson is one of the best songwriters going. I love him. I have and listen to his music. I wish he'd write more songs and sing more. But one thing he can't do is act. He's about as good as Kevin Costner (except in Tin Cup). Picking Isabelle Huppert to be the whore with the heart of gold made as much sense as washing your wool sweater in sawdust. Christopher Walken's talents were, once again, wasted. He's believable with unbelievable words put into his mouth. Someone should cast him and Juliette Lewis as father and daughter. You wouldn't need a script: they can both act in air.

The good news is there were two magnificent scenes, both of them dance scenes. The movie is worth seeing once just for the scene with the fiddler and the immigrants dancing on roller skates. Unfortunately the rest is badly acted with cardboard characters whose only purpose is to illustrate the immorality of the privileged classes... zzzzzz

Another piece of good news is that it lasts only two and a half hours! That's a lot better than Costner's Dancing With Wolves which lasted three hours and one minute. Two and a half hours of propaganda is better than three hours of Hollywood's Enlightened self-worship. In fact, the movie was sort of watchable. It was watchable in the way the wine store clerk turns his face away when he tells you a wine is "drinkable."

But since I found the advertisements for AbDoer, the Magic Bullet and Herbal Magic a relief while watching Costner's epic, I figure Heven's Gate is three times better than Dancing, which is why I give it, roll the drums, three stars.

Dances with Wolves (1990)

Another Hymn Of Self-Praise From The Enlightened Saints Of Hollywood

[1/10 · 13 February 2011]

What a preposterous movie! From the very first, every Union soldier is a dolt, stupid, vain or cowardly. The Confederates are yahoos. Only Costner's Lieutenant is an Enlightened One. No wonder the Hollywood crew loved this cliché ridden rubbish; badly written, badly acted, badly shot (like a TV movie) with bathetic music that telegraphs messages along with the anvil necessary to deliver its sordid point on the heads of mindless audience members. The narration is delivered with a deadpan and passionless voice that sounds like something that has long been drowned in deep water.

I think I liked Costner once. Yes, it was in "Tin Cup" where he played a bone-headed golfer without an ounce of subtlety or common sense but, with plain hard work "gets there" if you consider being a loser getting there. Who knew that Costner really is Roy McAvoy, shooting, shooting, shooting to get that ball on the 18th green, never laying up but going straight for the hole with blinders on.

A wonderful self-congratulatory hug from all the people in Hollywood to all the people in Hollywood. Kiss-kiss. How do I look? Make-up!

WUSA (1970)

An American Masterpiece, about to be released on DVD Dec 7, 2010

[10/10 · 11 September 2010]

This one of my favorite movies of all time with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Antony Perkins, Cloris Leachman and Pat Hingle all at their best. Reinhart (Newman), a man who's washed up as a musician becomes a "communicator" at WUSA, a right-wing radio station in New Orleans. He is not an ideologue himself –not a Rush Limbaugh character– just an employee, a DJ– I think he reads the news. But the fact that he works there at all paints him a right winger to his antagonist played by Perkins. The film contains some of my favorite lines of dialog in film, like when Reinhart gets the job and Leachman is thrilled. "Yeah, just great. I'm part of a pattern in someone else's head." He's long past being thrilled.

There are two important and tense scenes between Perkins, a do-gooder who lacks the basic confidence that gets Newman shacked up within minutes of his arrival in New Orleans. In one of them, Perkins stutters through his outrage, wanting to know what's going on at WUSA. Newman coolly listens and responds acidly: "I understand your situation... because I too am a moralist." Perkins responds with a smirk and an "oh yeah, right" which Newman cuts off, "...but there IS a solution to your dilemma..." to which Perkins stammers "a-a-and w-w-w-what w-would that be Reinhart?" Newman's smile disappears and he responds with his thumbs down: "Drop dead." He repeats the line with all the rage and contempt he can muster, all his feelings so twisted inside him that he can barely function. The feelings Perkins needs to make him feel competent Newman has felt too and they have hollowed him out. Newman's not right wing. He's just beat. Dropped out. If you don't know that, you don't understand where Reinhart's coming from. He's a sleepwalking man but mostly he is as disappointed and disillusioned as a man can be. Unfortunately, the character played by Perkins is much better at retaining his illusions with tragic consequences.

This movie is about ideological exhaustion and the delusions of the ideologically pure, both left and right wing.

What is so good about WUSA for me is that it's the only time, other than Hud, when Newman was an actor first, a star second. And this one's the grittiest. The reason for its unpopularity is that it is uncompromisingly honest about a political situation which to some extent still exists today. It really comes down on neither side of the political divide or, to be more accurate, pretty gruesomely insults both, thus satisfying no one who expects a movie to be partisan. It's ironic that it's hated because it is a "message movie."