Director: Elaine May
Starring: Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Adjani, Charles Grodin
Running Time: 107 minutes
Synopsis: In New York, Chuck and Lyle (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty) are a pair of hapless, dimwitted, and talentless songwriters. Their bottom-of-the-barrel agent (Jack Weston) offers them a gig at a hotel in Morocco. The pair land at the adjacent desert kingdom of Ishtar, where they are immediately sucked into Cold War intrigue featuring a history-changing map, left-wing revolutionary Shirra (Isabelle Adjani), and CIA Agent Jim Harrison (Charles Grodin).
What Works Well: The blind camel and the vultures deliver excellent performances.
What Does Not Work As Well: About half the running time is consumed by atrocious song snippets being performed badly; the other half features Hoffman and Beatty lost in the desert with a blind camel, repeating the same dialogue about wasting their lives. Both leading men are miscast and too old for their roles, Beatty in particular floating through the movie with a singular expression of stunned idiocy. Elaine May's writing (witless) and directing (flat) infuse every scene with the awkwardness of bad improvisation. The political context and plot details are sketched-in afterthoughts; none of the characters offer anything resembling depth or evolution; and the comedy moments are either devastatingly unfunny or conspicuously absent.
Key Quote:
Song lyrics co-written by Chuck and Lyle: Telling the truth can be dangerous business / Honest and popular don’t go hand in hand / If you admit that you can play the accordion / No one will hire you for a rock and roll band.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
And, evidently no one told They Might Be Giants or Styx that you can't play the accordion in a rock band.
ReplyDeleteMan, I had heard it was terrible, but I had no idea.
It fully deserves its reputation. This is just an embarrassment.
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