waldorfsalad

A big elegant movie, beautiful in every sense of the word, a fascinating story of the man who created Las Vegas and Warren Beatty is perfect in this movie. If you're not a huge fan of his, as I am not, you'll still appreciate the great talents of this star who is not necessarily known for his acting prowess. He is a joy to watch with the gorgeous Annette Bening Beatty. They have a great chemistry and all the actors involved were fantastic, there were many oscar nominations for all aspects of this film, acting, costumes, best film, best director, but when I saw that that Elliott Gould was not nominated for his wonderfully moving performance as Harry Greenberg, I was very surprised. Maybe it was just too small of a role. But it's a movie to be savoured and worth seeing on DVD, if anything just to appreciate the stunning photography.

It's true that M*A*S*H is one of the great classics of our time and a very, very funny movie, but one thing's for sure, you won't see a movie like this made again in our politically correct times. The movie smacks of homophobia, sexism, racism and just plain mean-spiritedness. What's interesting is to see the examples of the idealized masculinity; Hawkeye and Trapper, and the failed masculinity; Frank Burns, Henry, and Radar. It's so clear-cut and could be one of the subliminal reasons why the movie has held up so well in people's minds, not only for Altman's brilliant direction and the pleasure of seeing Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland together. And it's certainly not the best work these two fine actors have ever done, it's their biggest grossing movie, let's not confuse the two. It spawned a great sit-com, and it's still fun to go back and see all those great favorite scenes, especially with Sally Kellerman who steals the movie from just about everyone.

Only if you're a David Arquette or Lukas Haas fan will you really enjoy this movie. In fact, Lukas is very well cast as the black sheep of the family turned male prostitute. It drags in places but I think director Scott Silver set out to capture the sordidness and lonliness of your average L.A. hustler, so in that case it's very believable. But the film does call for a long attention span. One of the best scenes, and oddly touching was with Elliot Gould, terrific as always, as the client drawn away from his tête à tête with John to handle his family man duties. But other than that, the film seems rather pointless and to call it "Midnight Cowboy for the 90's" is really hyping it.