For the Love of Money

Of course this movie is more than inspired by Marty Scorcese's GOOD FELLAS, a gangster biopic, with even the famous scene, during a poker game, with a Joe Pesci like dude asking to his pal; "Do You Think I am Funny?" But it shows at least the underworld in Israel and USA too, Israeli hoodlums in L. A.; not so usual. And this little crime film maybe suffers from a lame directing but it remains agreeable. And as in GOOD FELLAS or A BRONX TALE, you have the off voice from the narrator and main character. I guess it was not widely known and I am not surprised that much. Poor Jimmy Caan - who worked with Howard Hawks in the sixties - who is here to pay his bills, taxes or alimony fees.

For the love of god, this film was not good. This film sucked. I know it was based on a true story and all, but the entire thing felt so melodramatic and fake. The acting was decent across the board and I wasn't pleasantly surprised at anything in the entire film. I guess it's about a man and his family coming to America in search of the American dream, which it doesn't feel like. The movie doesn't flow, it doesn't move forward, it feels like it's stuck in park. There is no logical progression of events, everything is disjointed and hard to follow. Like, really hard.

It is a shameful dollar store knockoff of Goodfellas, which is amazing. This? No. Poor direction, poor writing, way melodramatic, not enough depth in characters, the lead has no personality, the ending is cliché and not concluded well, there are so many issues. I only watched it because of Edward Furlong, and he's only in the movie for like 5 minutes. Overall, bad movie. Why watch this when you can watch Goodfellas?

Flashback to 1973, and how one brother was good, but the other was always getting into trouble. So much family backstory. About the first hour of the film. It takes a long time for izek and levi to move to los angeles, but they finally get there, and get mixed up with drug dealers. Izek stays on the straight and narrow (mostly), but again, levi gets in deep with rough crowd from miami. Shootouts. Revenge. This seems to want to be a lesser version of the "godfather", but it just goes all over the place. It kind of lost its focus. Does the wife really have to scream so long about her husband going on a trip to straighten something out? Some familiar faces....james caan, ed furlong, jeff tambor. It does have some fun music from the 70s and 80s that we haven't heard in a long time. Lots of violence, blood. Swearing. A goofy ending. Was that just bad editing? This script needed more work. Photos of what appear to be the actual family members on which this was based. Wikipedia states this film was based on the life of one of the producers. Directed by ellie kanner. Written by jenna mattison.

This film seems to have everything going for it. Good production value, nice nostalgia, great and accurate time warping, good play by good actors, lovely cars and great music memories. So obviously what's not working here is the drive of the story. A pity because this could have been really good. However, it you looking for a drama more than a action movie, there's a good chance you'll be quite satisfied.

A story based on real life events. We meet a couple of Israeli boys growing up in Tel Aviv, later on moving to L.A. To experience the American dream. Being successful with starting burger bars, going further on to dealing with cars, we follow the rise of gangsters. Being stupid enough to not showing the right amount of respect for Levine, they get into deep trouble.

The story is told like many well known gangster movies. I love James Caan's role as the mob boss Mickey Levine here. He is excellent!

The main film makers behind this female, and you might feel that. If you see this as a drama, and don't compare it to the gangster movies it pretends to follow I the line of, this is quite good film making.

Slow movie not much actions but cars & soundtrack are great.