Movie Review: House Of Games (1987)

Genre: Crime Drama  

Director: David Mamet  

Starring: Joe Mantegna, Lindsay Crouse, J.T. Walsh  

Running Time: 102 minutes  

Synopsis: Psychiatrist and successful author Dr. Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) learns that her troubled client Billy Hahn is being threatened over a gambling debt. Determined to help, she confronts Mike (Joe Mantegna), the man holding Billy's IOU, at the scuzzy House Of Games pool hall. Margaret finds Mike's combination of charm and confidence irresistible compared to her cold and lonely life, and she is drawn into his world of psychological manipulation for profit.

What Works Well: The milieu of scam artists thriving in the dark is conveyed with pleasing aesthetics, and contrasts sharply with Margaret's scrubbed professional environment. Her lack of fulfillment and subsequent attraction to Mike's seedy antics drives the plot, writer and debut director David Mamet questioning the value of risk-free existence. Joe Mantegna never betrays his character's essence as a man who thrives on exploiting weaknesses in others, and is ably supported by a cast featuring J.T. Walsh, William H. Macy, Mike Nussbaum, and Ricky Jay.

What Does Not Work As Well: After the initial con, the other twists along Margaret's journey to danger are quite easy to see through, and the ending abandons cleverness altogether in favour of old-fashioned score-settling. In a clipped and cold performance, Lindsay Crouse (Mrs. David Mamet at the time) struggles mightily to convey relatable emotions, creating instead an unfortunate vacuum at the story's core.

Conclusion: Rich with mood, but not quite as clever as it wants to be.



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Movie Review: Searching For Bobby Fischer (1993)

A sports drama, Searching For Bobby Fischer explores the clash between adult aspirations of dominance and life's simple pleasures through the story of a chess prodigy.

In New York City, seven year old Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) demonstrates a natural talent for chess, to the surprise of his parents Fred and Bonnie (Joe Mantegna and Joan Allen). Josh sharpens his skills playing speed chess with the sketchy Washington Square Park locals, where he establishes a friendship with Vinnie (Laurence Fishburne).

Fred hires chess coach Bruce Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley), and Josh starts to dominate tournaments. Bruce believes Josh could be as good as legendary world champion Bobby Fischer, and along with Fred they both get over-invested in the child's success and pressure him into adopting a winning-is-all mentality. But Josh also enjoys baseball, fishing and just being a kid, and seeks a more rounded approach to life, supported by Bonnie.

Based on a true story and Fred Waitzkin's book, Searching For Bobby Fischer is sweet, tender and only sometimes overblown. Writer and director Steve Zaillian ensures the story of a child thrust into a competitive world appeals to children and their parents, and while the simple life lessons for both kid (be yourself) and dad (back off) are none too subtle, the package is undeniably appealing.

The topic is chess, but it could be any sport. Zaillian skips past trying to explain the rules or intricacies of the game (other than Pandolfini obliquely referring to it as "art"), and focusses instead on the pressures imposed on a youngster displaying natural talent and aptitude. Fred gets emotionally wrapped-up in his son's potential, Pandolfini want to make amends for his past failures (only cryptically alluded to), and suddenly what started as fun for young Josh becomes a pressurized cauldron.

In snippets and historical flashbacks Josh narrates the story of eccentric American champion Bobby Fischer, a child prodigy who gate-crashed the heretofore Soviet-dominated chess world of the early 1970s before promptly disappearing. Josh gets saddled with the "next Bobby Fischer" label, both an honour and an unwanted weight on his young shoulders. According to Pandolfini, Fischer and most world champions are singularly dedicated to chess and display arrogance and disdain towards their opponents. Josh acknowledges the strength of his upbringing by recoiling from the cut-throat nastiness seemingly required to reach the top and stay there.

The mass market concessions appear in the portrayals of chess as a slam-down event, players almost always making their moves aggressively and theatrically whacking the timing clocks. James Horner's music score does not help by regularly soaring to extreme saccharine levels. The late introduction of a tournament nemesis sets-up a good if overly contrived climax. 

Zaillian shows restraint by limiting the running time to 110 minutes, and excellent work from the cast helps maintain spry energy levels. Max Pomeranc expresses mature self-awareness to nudge Josh's environment towards rationality, while Joe Mantegna, Ben Kinglsey and Laurence Fishburne are different versions of adults channeling aspirations through their kids. The wonders of genius are luminescent, but as one child demonstrates, the pathways to fulfilment are numerous.



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Movie Review: Bugsy (1991)

An uneven biography of Ben "Bugsy" Siegel's later years, Bugsy tries to turn a mobster into a visionary and a lover, and succeeds only in patches.

It's the early 1940s, and charismatic criminal Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty) is dispatched by his gang to open new territories in California. Despite advice from his lifelong crime partner Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) to adopt a slow and low-key approach, Siegel wastes no time in flashing his money around Los Angeles and taking control of the local extortion rackets, including recruiting his main rival Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) as his chief lieutenant.

Through his connection with childhood friend George (a reference to actor George Raft, portrayed by Joe Mantegna), Bugsy also falls in love with the Hollywood scene. He is immediately infatuated with starlet Virginia Hill (Annette Bening), who has a long history of association with gangsters and assorted semi-celebrities. She initially plays hard to get but eventually they become a couple, despite Siegel being married to Esta (Wendy Phillips).

Bugsy then divides his time between managing a criminal empire, sometimes with extreme brutality, and juggling domestic duties with one wife, two kids and one lover. He eventually turns his attention to the Nevada desert, where he imagines the possibility of opening a resort offering gambling, sex and luxury accommodation. But the Flamingo resort proves to be easy to envision but difficult to build, straining all of Bugsy's relationships.

That the movie is called Bugsy while the main character seethes in anger against any use of that nickname is a hint of the problems that nibble away at the film's intentions. Directed by Barry Levinson and written by James Toback, Bugsy was a long-term Warren Beatty project, who saw an intriguing subject matter in the cold blooded killer who got involved in the early business of building Las Vegas. He is a dreamer seeking love to fill the void in his soul caused by wanton violence; he is also a goofy family man, a fast talker, and a bad businessman with no sense for money. Unfortunately Levinson and Toback get lost in the puzzle of a complex man, and the film never latches onto a worthwhile arc.

Trying too hard to soften the man's edges, the film ignores Bugsy's formative years as a cold-blooded hitman. Beatty's magnetism instead shifts the focus to creating a likeable guy who falls hard for an alluring woman and then pursues an enigmatic vision. The romance elements occupy the centre of the film and take far too long, with occasional jarring interruptions for scenes demonstrating Siegel's propensity for extreme anger. In pursuit of a fiction better than fact, compared to the real story the film overplays Bugsy's role in initiating the Flamingo project.

Beatty and Bening became a real-life couple soon after the film's release, and they do share unquestionable on-screen chemistry. Harvey Keitel and Ben Kingsley are serviceable but offer little beyond typical grim gangster traits. Elliott Gould has a couple of pivotal scenes as a none-too-bright Siegel associate who evolves from dimwit to a real problem.

Ennio Morricone contributes one of his least memorable scores, the emphasis on romance undermining any attempts to build rousing music worthy of a grand criminal enterprise. The film does look magnificent, with rich colours and lavish wardrobes capturing the glamour of Los Angeles at the height of the studio era.

Bugsy is a glossy but episodic effort, often stumbling over itself as it oscillates wildly between the red mist of bloodthirsty outrage and the soft glow of cutesy romance.

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The Movies Of Joe Mantegna

All movies starring Joe Mantegna and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Money Pit (1986)

Three Amigos! (1986)

House Of Games (1987)

Suspect (1987)

The Godfather Part III (1990)

Bugsy (1991)

Body Of Evidence (1993)

Searching For Bobby Fischer (1993)

Eye For An Eye (1996)

Valentine's Day (2010, uncredited)

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Movie Review: Eye For An Eye (1996)

A mother's vigilante justice drama, Eye For An Eye works hard to raise a sweat but remains just one notch above TV movie fare.

Karen and Mack McCann (Sally Field and Ed Harris) have two daughters, teenager Julie (Olivia Burnette) and the much younger Megan (Alexandra Kyle). On the day of Megan's birthday, a home intruder violently rapes and kills Julie. Detective Joe Denillo (Joe Mantegna) arrests lowlife delivery man Robert Doob (Kiefer Sutherland), and with strong DNA evidence linking him to the crime, a conviction appears likely. But Doob escapes justice on a technicality and is released, infuriating Karen.

She joins a victim support group where she befriends the sympathetic Angel Kosinsky (Charlayne Woodard), and secretly starts plotting to take justice into her own hands. She tracks Doob's movements and begins to suspect that he is about to rape and murder again. In desperation, Karen turns to a group of grieving parents who appear to be facilitating vigilante justice, including Sidney Hughes (Philip Baker Hall). But Karen will learn that extracting revenge is much more difficult than she imagined.

Directed by John Schlesinger and adapted from the Erika Holzer novel, Eye For An Eye has above-average talent working with below average material. The urbanite victim frustrated by the justice system and deciding to turn to vigilantism is at least as old as Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974). That movie and all its sequels and imitators, including women revenge fantasies in such fare as Ms. 45 (1981), squeezed the concept dry a good 15 years before Eye For An Eye.

The film does try, and Schlesinger raises the violence quotient by ensuring that the two rape and murder scenes are harrowing and painful to watch. Forcing Karen McCann to listen-in over a cell phone as her daughter is assaulted adds to the sense of a parent's helplessness and increases the justification for her fury. Sally Field dominates the film and delivers a committed performance, while Kiefer Sutherland does his part by creating in Robert Doob a truly hate-worthy piece of white trash, a psychopath driven by the basest animal instincts to copulate and kill. Doob taunting Karen and Mack in the courtroom after the case against him is thrown out is a classic piece of despicable behaviour.

But the weaknesses of the material are quickly apparent. This is a film in which nothing will be known about Doob's backstory, and most of the strong supporting cast is wasted. Ed Harris, Joe Mategna and Beverly D'Angelo (as Karen's business partner) are derivative characters reduced to the shallowest of line readings, and several potentially interesting sub-stories featuring Angel and Sidney are abandoned when convenient.

Eye For An Eye is predictable revenge fare, arriving late to the party and leaving next to no impression.

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Movie Review: The Money Pit (1986)

The house is the star, but The Money Pit is still funny.

New Yorkers Walter (Tom Hanks) and Anna (Shelley Long) are in a long term relationship, but financially strapped. He is a music agent, she is a violinist in an orchestra, and after getting kicked out of their apartment, they purchase a grand house in the suburbs for a low price that seems way too good to be true.  It is.

The house is barely held together by the paint, and soon after they move in, it starts collapsing all around them. From the front door to the staircase, from the plumbing to the electrical system, from the bathtub to the flooring, everything about the house is either dangerously faulty or ready to cave in on itself. To afford the repairs, Anna has to borrow money from former lover Max (Alexander Godunov), causing a strain on the relationship with Walter. Eventually, an army of contractors moves in for a long repair and rebuilding job, forcing Walter and Anna to live through one large headache of a renovation.

Tom Hanks and Shelley Long do their best, but they, like the rest of the film, are swallowed by the tricked-out house at the centre of The Money Pit. The movie becomes an exercise in anticipating what the house will do next, and any character-driven plot elements are forced to the margins.

Director Richard Benjamin, well-backed by a team of high-powered producers including Steven Spielberg, makes the most of what he has to work with, and delivers a house-full of spectacular laughs. The collapsing grand staircase and the electrical fire in the kitchen are classic comedy moments, overdone to perfection with Hanks the victim in both cases.

With the stars playing second fiddle to a house, the supporting cast are pushed all the way out to the edge of irrelevance. At least Alexander Godunov makes an impact with plenty of wavy hair and oodles of European smarm as Anna's still smitten former lover. Others, like Joe Mantegna and Maureen Stapleton, make the briefest of appearances before disappearing.

The Money Pit not just consumes huge financial resources, it also sucks in all the acting talent into the vacuum of special effects. The superficial laughs are good, but the depth of emotion that can only be delivered by humans is missing.

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Movie Review: Body Of Evidence (1993)

Body Of Evidence may or may not be the worst film of the 1990s: it certainly presents a compelling example of a project gone pear shaped to the point of being interesting for all the wrong reasons.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis, king of the derivatives, must have thought that he was onto a no-lose proposition: mash together lawyer-falls-for-suspect from Jagged Edge (1985) with sex-as-act-of-murder from Basic Instinct (1992), add an all-star cast, drop in the sizzle of Madonna as an often naked seductress, and stir vigorously. That despite all these ingredients he ended up with a squashed turkey says a lot about the awfulness of this film.

Body Of Evidence would have had a better chance of success with a half-decent script and a half-decent director. Instead Brad Mirman wrote a screenplay that gets lamer the harder it tries for eroticism, and once promising director Uli Edel used Body Of Evidence to prove his inability to deliver quality movies, spending most of the rest of his tattered career in TV land.

And the hole at the centre of this donut is Madonna, flapping her eyelids in a desperate attempt to prove that she belongs on the big screen, and utterly failing to convince. Madonna's lightweight presence at the heart of Body Of Evidence tilts the whole enterprise towards farce. Next to her on the screen, Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Frank Langella and Jurgen Prochnow hang on for dear life as they realize that their careers may be drowning in a sea of ineptitude.

As for the plot, old man Andrew Marsh is found dead in his bed. Rebecca Carlson (Madonna) is his much younger lover, and she is soon arrested for having induced Marsh's death by intentionally straining his heart with ever more kinky sex. Rebecca's lawyer is Frank Dulaney (Dafoe), and although he is happily married to Sharon (Julianne Moore), Rebecca is soon tying him up, straddling him naked, and dripping hot wax on his chest in what is meant to be an erotic lovemaking session. Better is yet to come when they have sex in a dank parkade as shards of glass tear through his skin.

Nevertheless, Prosecutor Robert Garrett (Mategna) wants to deprive the world of Rebecca's unique skill set by throwing her in jail for murder, and he thinks he has a strong case, particularly as Rebecca stands to inherit Marsh's fortune. Marsh's secretary Joanne (Archer) is ready to testify that Rebecca shoved cocaine up March's nose; a former lover is uncovered and he testifies that Rebecca also tried to push his heart over the edge with too much sex, and Marsh's doctor Alan (Prochnow) confesses that Rebecca found out from him that Marsh had a weak heart.

All these witnesses eventually implode into a spectacular mess in the farcical courtroom, as Rebecca and Frank are able to discredit them with ever more ludicrous revelations, all without any research, support staff, or actual work to interrupt the hot sex sessions in Rebecca's floating house with flowing curtains. Rebecca walks, and Frank has to confront her when he is shocked -- shocked! -- that she was, actually and after all, behind the murder of Andrew Marsh.

Body Of Evidence is not bad enough to be funny, just bad enough to make for compelling viewing as several careers suffer nasty damage in a most unfortunate screen wreck.



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