Movie Review: House Of Gucci (2021)

A family-and-business saga, House Of Gucci is an engaging but notably ovelong romantic drama-comedy. 

In 1978, Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) is the daughter of a truck company owner. At a party she meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), a law student and heir to 50 percent of the luxury brand. She pursues him romantically and they are soon married. Maurizio's father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) does not approve of Patrizia, believing she is just a golddigger, but Rodolfo's brother Aldo (Al Pacino) is more welcoming. Aldo's son Paolo (Jared Leto) is the family fool.

The ambitious Patrizia has a sharp business mind and befriends psychic Pina (Salma Hayek). Patrizia then inserts herself into the family's affairs by manipulating Maurizio and Paolo. After Rodolfo's death she tries to manoeuvre for full control, but Maurizio eventually tires of her antics and their marriage heads into trouble, leaving Patrizia vulnerable and deeply resentful.

Inspired by real events, House Of Gucci has the perfumed gloss of a high-end fashion magazine. The screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna finds plenty of material spanning more than 15 years in the cocooned world of the wealthy, and maintains admirable energy. Romance, business, connivance, and family feuds ensure a steady stream of narrative twists. Director Ridley Scott stages the Gucci clan antics with bravado, embracing the aloof glamour of wealth. 

And it's a lust for wealth and power that drives Patrizia. The Gucci's themselves are relatively boring, and it's left to an outsider to burst into their world and shake it up, igniting a delicious clash between classism, social ladder-climbing, and eurotrash. It's all fun and games until someone dies, although for better or worse, the film steers towards violence with a silly grin.

The cast is simultaneously captivating and caricaturish. Almost unrecognizable under layers of makeup, Jared Leto is simply out there as Paolo, milking the role of pathetic idiot for all it's worth. Pacino is more restrained but still flamboyant. Lady Gaga and Adam Driver hold the centre of the circus together with assured performances, Gaga's take on Patrizia underlining her demands for a place in the sun, while Driver tracks Maurizio's meandering journey from withdrawn young man to ruthless business tycoon.

At 158 minutes, House Of Gucci is inexcusably too long, Scott's lazy editing allowing every scene and sequence to go on. The characters are over-the-top entertaining, but they could have been hustled along with better discipline.



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Movie Review: The Hummingbird Project (2018)

A business drama, The Hummingbird Project tackles a potentially dry subject with some verve, despite never quite engaging at the human level.

In New York City, stock trader Vince Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg) works at the firm run by Eva Torres (Salma Hayek). His socially awkward but technically brilliant cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) is Eva's technology guru, part of the team continuously trying to improve transaction speed to gain millisecond advantages. Vince finds a backer to finance his dream of building the fastest fibre optic line from Kansas to New Jersey. Access to the line can then be sold to traders, generating millions in profits.

Vince and Anton quit their jobs, enraging Eva, and team up with construction expert Mark Vega (Michael Mando). Building in a straight line will require negotiating with numerous property owners, crossing rivers and swamps, and the small matter of drilling through the Appalachian Mountains. Vince will also have to deal with unwelcome health news and Eva's determined efforts to torpedo the project, while Anton struggles to make his software as efficient as possible.

The Michael Lewis non-fiction book Flash Boys (2014) highlighted the dangers and eccentricities of the high speed stock trading world, and how the race to gain milliseconds in transaction speeds drives the madcap construction of dedicated fibre optic lines across the country. It's an arcane subject at best, so credit to Canadian writer and director Kim Nguyen for conceiving a fictional movie (not based on the book) tackling the same subject matter.

The Hummingbird Project tries to create human subjects worth caring about, and Nguyen colours in just enough personality to help move the action along. Vince and Anton Zaleski are sons of Eastern European immigrants living the dream and chasing more, Vince the always persuasive dealmaker while Anton is the prototypical dour coder. Less successful is Eva as the one-dimensional antagonist, sketched in as a cartoonish villain.

The script's real investment is out in the field, where the idea of building a communications conduit in an absolute straight line takes shape. The sheer audacity of such a project is at the heart of the film, and Nguyen provides a taste of the challenges to be overcome, from negotiating with individual landowners to flying in drilling equipment by gigantic helicopter to the base of the Appalachians, where there are no roads.

Of course almost everything that can go wrong does, Vince's dream threatened by serious personal challenges and obstacles as mundane as an obstinate Amish community, while on the sidelines Eva tries every trick to halt the line in its tracks.

Although the acting performances are secondary, Alexander Skarsgård is a pleasant surprise, entirely losing his Tarzan features and transforming into a bald, haunched and entirely pessimistic anti-social tech geek.

The Hummingbird Project is a version of the American Dream where millions are sunk in pursuit of an imperceptible advantage for dubious purposes, and making a quick buck is defined literally.

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Movie Review: Beatriz At Dinner (2017)

A social drama, Beatriz At Dinner sets up interesting conversational pieces but leaves them dangling.

In Los Angeles, Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a natural healer and massage therapist, working at a cancer treatment clinic. She is depressed because her pet goat was recently killed by a neighbour. One afternoon Beatriz drive to the swanky home of her client Kathy (Connie Britton) to provide a massage ahead of Kathy's small dinner party. Beatriz's car fails to restart and she is invited to stay for dinner, where the guest of honour is business tycoon Doug Strutt (John Lithgow). 

Beatriz and Doug immediately clash. He looks down on her immigrant roots, and she senses that he is a heartless developer with little regard for the wellbeing of the communities where he builds his hotels and shopping centres. When Beatriz learns that Doug also enjoys big-game hunting she snaps, and the evening takes a turn towards open hostility.

Directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White, Beatriz At Dinner fearlessly takes a seat at the table where societal divisions are laid bare. The front lines where tensions simmer between poor and rich, Hispanics and whites, recent immigrants and less recent colonialists, animal loving vegetarians and animal killing meat eaters, spiritualists and capitalists are all represented by Beatriz's reluctant invasion of Kathy's party. Doug embodies the source of all the ills Beatriz struggles daily to heal, and this is one dinner party where she will call out her demons, pleasantries be damned.

Despite an intense Salma Hayek performance and a suitably smug turn by John Lithgow, the film stalls once it makes its points. Arteta and White struggle to steer the film towards a satisfying ending, and indeed they try a few different iterations on for size. Eventually Beatriz At Dinner settles for abstract visuals and pretty pictures of floating lanterns and water, where meaning is imagined rather than conveyed.

The brief 83 minutes of running time betray an inability to flesh out any of the supporting characters, with Connie Britton, Chloë Sevigny, Jay Duplass, Amy Landecker and David Warshofsky sacrificed to make up the numbers and confined to the shallowest of backgrounds.

Beatriz At Dinner serves up a few deliciously awkward moments of social tension, but the desert is no more than mediocre.

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Movie Review: How To Make Love Like An Englishman (2014)

An insipid romantic triangle, How To Make Love Like An Englishman (also known as Some Kind Of Beautiful and Lessons In Love) is a tonally deaf exercise in wasting talent.

In England, Richard Haig (Pierce Brosnan) has followed in the footsteps of his father Gordon (Malcolm McDowell) and also become a professor of romantic literature. Gordon's ethos is to defy authority, raise hell and live life to the full, and Richard teaches with the same passion while bedding a succession of much younger college girls for kicks. But when his latest nubile student partner Kate (Jessica Alba) announces that she is pregnant, Richard decides to move with her to Los Angeles and settle down, despite being more attracted to her more mature sister Olivia (Salma Hayek).

A few years after their son Jake is born, Kate announces that she is thoroughly bored with Richard and takes up with boyfriend Brian (Ben McKenzie), while Richard relocates to the pool house to stay close to Jake. Olivia's marriage falls apart, creating an opening for romance to blossom again with Richard, but with his immigration date approaching Richard has to maintain the pretense that he is happily married to Kate, while Gordon's continued erratic behaviour and caustic attitude disrupts his son's already chaotic life.

Directed by Tom Vaughan, co-produced by Brosnan and barely released, How To Make Love Like An Englishman is an embarrassment with more alternative titles than ideas. The Matthew Newman script does not come close to generating emotions of any type, and instead of love, laughs, chemistry or conflict, the film just goes into a lazy coma. Basic character motivations are repeatedly violated, Richard's sudden turn from philanderer to loyal husband and father just the first of many incredulous moments.

The low point arrives courtesy of Kate, who takes umbrage at Richard's affair with Olivia two years after she abandoned him and moved her toyboy lover under their roof.

With the love triangle taking on a pear shape, Malcolm McDowell appears at regular intervals with a caricaturish portrayal of a father whose entire set of conversational skills consists of acerbic and profanity-riddled commentary. His late conversion to a human being is equally outlandish.

The sub-plot about Richard trying to secure his permanent residency in the United States is tacked on with astounding carelessness, a well-educated and well-resourced applicant reduced to dealing with a bottom-of-the-barrel lawyer.

The cast is too talented for the material, with Brosnan, Alba, Hayek and McDowell giving it their all but unable to do anything meaningful or memorable with their roles. Hayek gets the one laugh in the film, and it's a straight lift-and-switch of the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally.... The only lesson learned from How To Make Love Like An Englishman is that when your script ideas are nonexistent, steal the moment of climax from a classic American comedy.

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Movie Review: Frida (2002)

A biopic of Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, Frida is filled with passion and deeply-felt human emotions. Salma Hayek shines in the central role, but the script does suffer from some wayward targeting.

As a young girl in Mexico, Frida (Hayek) develops a crush on painter, communist and hopeless womanizer Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). After getting caught up in a severe bus crash, Frida's life hangs in the balance, and she suffers severe injuries to her back and legs. After many months she eventually recovers enough to resume her life, dedicating herself to painting and reconnecting with Diego. They get married, with Frida understanding that Diego can never be faithful, but he promises to at least be loyal to her.

Frida does not hide her bisexual tendencies, and establishes close relationships with Diego's ex-wife Lupe Marín (Valeria Golino) and sultry mutual friend Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd). With Diego's star rising in the art world, the couple enjoy a stint in New York, with Diego winning a commission from Nelson Rockefeller (Edward Norton). But Frida suffers another personal tragedy, and Diego does manage to hurt his wife with his exceptional inability to resist any woman. A bizarre encounter with none other than Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush), now a fugitive from the Russian revolution that he helped to inspire, completes the inspiration for Frida's works of art.

Directed with panache by Julie Taymor, Frida is a singularly engaging film. The Latin lust for life positively jumps off the screen, and even the most secondary of characters display an ardent desire to contribute. The mix of art, politics and sexuality is captured by Taymor in an intoxicating broth, and Frida benefits from an unabashed, proud and outspoken posture. Frida, Diego and their circle have little time for apologies, justifications or requests for permission: they dive into life with purposeful commitment, and the biography buzzes with the energy of people worth knowing.

At just over two hours, the film is packed with incident and never flags as entertainment. Taymor constructs Frida's life around several tragic milestones, starting with the harrowing bus crash, and tracks her evolution from fledgling classical artist to a woman able to capture life's agonies in surreal, grotesque and captivating images. Life throws plenty of challenges Frida's way, and she navigates through them with a headstrong determination to embrace each obstacle and remain in charge, no matter what. With short but plentiful scenes the film builds and maintains momentum consistent with a woman who throws back twice as hard.

The film does steal some focus away from its main character. Although the story is recounted from Frida's perspective and her emotions remain at the core of all events, much of the second half of the film does centre on Diego, and at least as much time is invested in his character development and artistic achievements. His unwillingness to compromise his politics and his inability to refrain from casual sex dominate large segments of screen time, with Frida reduced to victim, observer or both. While her life with Diego clearly influenced Frida's art, the film tilts the balance more towards Diego as the source of inspiration and less on Frida as the artist who drew stimulation from a fascinating man.

Salma Hayek is excellent at every stage of Frida's life, and allows the character's flaws, vulnerabilities, strengths and desires to meld into a complete person. Alfred Molina matches Hayek scene for scene, and although Diego's arc is simpler, Molina is able to demonstrate that an overweight and outspoken frumpy man can exert an inexorable and long-lasting force on women. Antonio Banderas gets a small role as a member of Diego's intellectual circle.

The film's visual aesthetic is frequently inspired by Frida's paintings, and Taymor cleverly weaves the artwork into the narrative scenes without drawing attention to them, allowing the sometimes gruesome beauty to speak for itself. Life inspires art, and Frida is a worthy celebration of a fascinating artist's tumultuous journey.

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Movie Review: Grown Ups (2010)

A low-brow comedy slapped together with nominal effort, Grown Ups is almost condescending in its minimalist attitude and lack of talent application.

A group of five snotty 12 year old friends overachieve and win a school basketball championship. Thirty years later, their beloved coach dies, and they gather for his funeral along with their wives and kids. Lenny (Adam Sandler) is now a successful talent agent and is married to uppity fashion designer Roxanne (Salma Hayek). Eric (Kevin James) has been less successful in his career and is married to Sally (Maria Bello), who is still breastfeeding their four-year-old son. Kurt (Chris Rock) is a stay-at-home-dad, married to the pregnant Deanne (Maya Rudolph) and having to tolerate her loudmouth mother (Ebony Jo-Ann).

The group is rounded out by Higgy (David Spade), who never settled down and is still chasing women, and Rob (Rob Schneider), who always had a thing for older women and is now married to the much older Gloria (Joyce Van Patten). After spreading the coach's ashes, the group settles down for a countryside weekend of fun and adventure, and they learn a few truths and air out some issues related to the past and their relationships.

Purportedly directed by Dennis Dugan and co-written by Sandler, Grown Ups is as vacuous as it sounds. The project smells of a group of comedians gathering for a week of fun, ad-libbing most of the dialogue, cracking a few jokes, and wrapping the whole thing in the flimsiest of premises to pretend that this is a film worth releasing. Somehow the movie reportedly cost $80 million, while what's on the screen resembles a glorified family vacation video. More remarkably, Grown Ups grossed $270 million, testament to the dumb power of the lowest common denominator.

There is undoubted talent involved, and there are some laughs to be had, all of the really silly variety. But the lame pranks outnumber the good moments by a good two to one margin, and all the scenes involving Rock, Spade and Schneider are more awkward than funny. Sandler and James do better, and they are halfway believable as fathers doing their best to deal with middle-age issues. Steve Buscemi shows up late as a member of the local dimwits who challenge Lenny and his friends to a rematch of that famous grade school basketball final.

The ladies have way too much talent to be involved in this project. Hayek, Bello and Rudolph hide their embarrassment, deliver their punchlines with no conviction, and scurry off to cash their cheques.

Despite offering some laughs, Grown Ups is nothing if not juvenile.

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The Movies Of Salma Hayek

All movies starring Salma Hayek and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Desperado (1995)

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Traffic (2000, uncredited)

Frida (2002)

Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)

Across The Universe (2007)

Grown Ups (2010)

Savages (2012)

How To Make Love Like An Englishman (2014)

Beatriz At Dinner (2017)

The Hummingbird Project (2018)

House Of Gucci (2021)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Savages (2012)

Oliver Stone opens the taps of violence and gore and wades knee deep into the world of drug turf wars. Savages is stark, vivid, and occasionally beautiful in its brutality, but ultimately falls in the gap between where insufficient wit meets extreme violence.

War veteran Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and sensitive botanist Ben (Aaron Johnson) are best friends, and run a successful boutique marijuana operation in California. They grow and supply high grade weed to a large network of distributors, and openly share a girlfriend, Ophelia (Blake Lively), better known as simply O. A ruthless Mexican drug cartel run by Elena (Salma Hayek) wants to muscle in on their business, with the negotiations engineered by lead henchmen Lado (Benicio del Toro), who never stops at simply killing when torturing and decapitating are available options.


When the negotiations fail, Elena's cartel kidnaps O to force Chon and Ben to cooperate. As O endures torture and confinement by Lado and his fellow brutes, Chon and Ben turn to their protector for help, a corrupt Drugs Enforcement Administration agent named Dennis (John Travolta). He provides them with enough information to expose weaknesses in Elena's empire, including revealing the locations of safe houses used as money collection and transfer points. With all sides getting desperate, Elena's daughter Magda (Sandra Echeverria) is also placed at risk as a showdown looms.

Stone places three relatively fresh faces at the front of Savages, and the lack of star power among Chon, Ben and O works well. Stone is free to fill the canvass typically occupied by star personas with some unique colours. Taylor Kitsch (who also starred in 2012's Battleships and John Carter) is the least interesting, but at least here is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars openly enjoying his residual aggressiveness and not succumbing to torture by internal demons. Aaron Johnson gets the more sensitive role, Ben a brilliant botanist and also a caring soul who uses the proceeds of his drugs business to help disadvantaged African villages.

Most engaging is Blake Lively, television's Gossip Girl building her big screen reputation, narrating the movie and proving to be not only the common point in a sizzling sexual threesome, but also the fulcrum of the larger battle between Elena, Ben and Chon. A disruptive prisoner, O is enough of a nuisance to earn an audience with Elena, a savory encounter in which each woman expresses condescending pity towards the other.

The secondary characters are brought to life by movie stalwarts. John Travolta is all smiles and evasiveness as Dennis, a federal agent one misstep away from life in prison, while Benicio Del Toro just ploughs through Savages as the closest thing to the embodiment of the title, but a man who is also as clever as he is violent. Salma Hayek gives Elena some depth, a woman who inherited the business and who clearly enjoys the required ruthlessness, but who is also unable to fortify all her weak spots.

Stone tackles the violence of drug crime head-on, and throws it all on the screen. Mass decapitations, torture, setting victims ablaze, explosions and routine shootings litter Savages, creating a world where lives are cheaper than drugs. It may be slightly over the top in a California context, but Stone is certainly true to the stream of headlines chronicling the endless atrocities in Mexico.

Between the sex, the blood, the corruption and the rival criminals calling each other savages for vastly different reasons, Savages always maintains interest. Despite the chopping of heads, the movie just lacks a cutting edge to push it towards the hyper stylized world it seeks to occupy.

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Movie Review: Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)

Robert Rodriguez concludes his El Mariachi trilogy, but bloat creeps in and the fun factor suffers at the hands of too many characters vying for space in a convoluted plot. Rodriguez is unable to follow in the footsteps of Sergio Leone's "dollars trilogy" and make the jump from enjoyable camp to delicious epic. Once Upon A Time In Mexico aims for grand elements, but never comes close to scaling the necessary heights.

El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) is recruited by CIA Agent Sands (Johnny Depp) to assassinate the vicious General Marquez, who is conspiring with drug lord Barillo (Willem Dafoe) to overthrow the Mexican President. El Mariachi is eager to gain revenge on Marquez, who brutally killed his wife Carolina (Salma Hayek, seen only in flashback) and young daughter. Rattling around the thick edges of the plot are Billy Chambers (Mickey Rourke), who hangs around Barillo's compound; anti-narcotics agent Ajedrez (Eva Lopez); former FBI Agent Ramirez (Ruben Blades), and local thug leader Cucuy (Danny Trejo). Several of these characters will switch allegiances as the plot against the president progresses. And that is not all: Cheech Marin in the local informant helping Sands; the President has a double-crossing advisor; Barillo is planning face-changing plastic surgery; and El Mariachi once again calls on two heavily armed friends, Lorenzo and Fideo, who show up to join the action.

It is a rare for a movie to suffer from being too short, but Once Upon A Time In Mexico, at just over 100 minutes, simply isn't hefty enough to carry everything that is trying to happen within it. Characters are introduced in a hurry or hardly at all, events seem rushed, motivations are barely sketched in, and with so many characters vying to tell their tale, the action sequences now actually get in the way.

Johnny Depp manages to stand out as the conniving Agent Sands, but only by going so far over the top, and having his character meet such a gruesome destiny, that he forcefully etches himself into the memory. Banderas seems disengaged, and most of the other actors have too little screen time to make a lasting impression.

Once Upon A Time In Mexico offers a few moments of enjoyment, but the underground feel and wild abandonment of the earlier El Mariachi movies is gone, replaced by plot congestion caused by character cramming.

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Movie Review: Desperado (1995)

All style and limited substance, but when the style is this flashy, a lot can be forgiven. Desperado is the first major Robert Rodriguez production, and it helped to propel the careers of both Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek. And it doesn't hurt that Quentin Tarantino contributes an unforgettable 10 minutes to add a further injection of irreverence.

The story, a sequel to Rodriguez's El Mariachi, is the most standard revenge fare. Buscemi (Steve Buscemi, as unsettling as ever) enters a filthy bar in a small Mexican town and spins a tall tale about a heavily armed stranger on a mass-killing spree, looking for a certain gang lord called Bucho. The bar is indeed a front for Bucho's business, and the bartender (Cheech Marin) and all the supposed customers are Bucho's men.

The stranger is El Mariachi (Banderas), Buscemi's friend, and he is on a single-minded mission to kill Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), as revenge for Bucho having killed his girlfriend. El Mariachi arrives at the bar, and using the arsenal of heavy weaponry he keeps hidden in a guitar case, kills everyone in it after an ultra intense firefight. He then survives an assassination attempt by the mysterious knife-throwing Navajas (Danny Trejo) -- Buscemi is not so fortunate. El Mariachi hooks up with Carolina (Hayek), who runs a library in a town where no one reads: the library is another front for Bucho's business. After several more encounters with Bucho's men, one featuring two El Mariachi friends who also use ridiculous guitar-disguised firepower, Bucho's loyalists are annihilated and a final confrontation unfolds.

Faithful to the philosophy of never using one bullet when 20 are available, Rodriguez fills the screen with dead bodies, literally piled up at the end of every battle scene. Cleaners are brought in to mop up the rivers of blood soaking into the Mexican soil after El Mariachi is done perforating his opponents with an army's worth of ammunition. Entire wars have been fought with less firepower than is on display in Desperado.

Banderas plays his role seriously, and gets away with it, his intensity matching the action even if the revenge motivation is too flimsy to carry the amount of bloodshed. Hayek brings a sultry victimized presence to her role as Carolina, not straying too far from the eye-candy specifications but fitting perfectly into the exaggerated mayhem. Cheech Marin is quietly hilarious as the bartender, conveying emotion with a combination of eyebrow movements, burps, and undisguised glances of contemptible disgust.

Desperado is all very much tongue in cheek, never more so than when Tarantino shows up at the bar and unspools a long-winded and totally irrelevant story about a man making a bet related to long-distance pissing into a beer glass. The story is as meaningless as the film, and as ridiculously enjoyable.



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Movie Review: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

An exercise in stylishly meaningless blood-letting, From Dusk Till Dawn just wants to have fun.  Director Robert Rodriguez delivers an enjoyably gory package, while stars George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino are captivating as they play their over-the-top roles appropriately straight.

Brutal criminal Seth Gecko (Clooney) and his psychotic sex-offender brother Richie (Tarantino) have just violently robbed a Texas bank and are holding hostages as they make a run to Mexico. At a grocery store near the border, Richie kills a local lawman, and in the ensuing shootout, the brothers also shoot and kill the store clerk, but not before Richie is wounded with a bullet through his palm. In the chaos, all their hostages flee except for an elderly bank clerk; Richie kills her anyway when the brothers take refuge in a seedy motel.

Seth kidnaps a vacationing family consisting of pastor Jacob (Harvey Keitel) and his two teenage children, Scott and Kate (Juliette Lewis). The group crosses into Mexico, where Seth has arranged a dawn rendezvous with local crimelord Carlos (Cheech Marin). Seth and Richie force their hostages to settle in for a night of drinking at the Titty Twister strip joint, a rough, isolated biker and trucker hangout. But when the sun goes down, most of the staff, dancers and regulars at the Titty Twister transform into ugly, vicious vampires, intent on devouring the human customers. Seth and Richie need the help of their hostages as well as other colourful customers, including Sex Machine (Tom Savini) and Vietnam War veteran Frost (Fred Williamson), to fight back and survive the night.

Once the vampires take over From Dusk Till Dawn, the movie does not pretend to be anything more than a hyperkinetic blood-soaked comedy of catroon-level violence. Tarantino's screenplay delivers the laughs as Clooney and company fend-off endless hordes of blood-suckers, finding a never ending stream of tools to try and prevent the vampires from having their dinner.

Despite the orgy of violence, Tarantino finds time in the script to give Seth some humanity: Seth blames himself for Richie turning into a sick psychopath. And if there is a message among the bloodied and mangled bodyparts, it is that even individuals as messed up as Seth and Richie will encounter more horrible creatures at some point in their life.

Supporting Clooney and Tarantino is an entertaining cast that adds to the merriment. It's a treat to find Williamson, a veteran of 1970s cheapo exploitation movies, as an unexpected ally in the long battle at the cantina. Cheech Marin plays three manic roles, as a border guard, a greeter at the Titty Twister, and as Carlos. Salma Hayek shows up briefly but memorably as the awesome Satanico Pandemonium, the club's star performer. And Harvey Keitel brings a comically false solemness to the proceedings as a pastor questioning his calling after the death of his wife.

Thanks to the talent on both sides of the camera, From Dusk Till Dawn is much more entertaining than an ultimately pointless movie has any right to be.

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