Movie Review: Ishtar (1987)

Genre: Musical Comedy  

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.

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Movie Review: Rules Don't Apply (2016)

A drama, comedy and romance set in Hollywood, Rules Don't Apply is a wayward and tonally scattered story.

It's the late 1950s, and young starlet Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) arrives in Hollywood with her mother Lucy (Annette Bening) to film a screen test and join reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes' RKO Studios. Marla's driver is Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), and after many weeks of classes and rehearsals, it becomes obvious to Marla and Lucy that very few people have ever met Hughes. Lucy departs back to Virginia, while Marla stays behind and flirts more openly with Frank.

Marla eventually meets the sociophobic Hughes (Warren Beatty), and he seems to like her, although he is preoccupied with corporate battles involving his airline TWA. Hughes also meets Frank, and brings him into his inner circle as a confidant. The relationship between Marla and Frank is hampered by his commitment to his hometown girlfriend, while Hughes suddenly expresses devotion to Marla, but she is drunk and he has devious reasons to find a wife in order to fend off corporate predators.

Directed and written by Beatty, Rules Don't Apply is an unfortunate mess. While the recreation of Los Angeles of the late 1950s and early 1960s makes for attractive locales, the story is a muddled bore, and the one obvious attribute is indecision over what the film is meant to be about, or why.

The first act appears to be Marla's story, with Lily Collins in excellent wide-eyed but mischievous form. Hughes does not feature at all in this chapter. Marla then fades as the perspective shifts more towards Frank, his dream of a grand real estate deal and his admittance into Hughes' bizarre world. Then the final chapter becomes all about Hughes and his eccentricities, Beatty belatedly placing himself at centre stage as the film becomes an examination of a billionaire's erratic behaviour.

The film ends with both Marla and Frank incidental to the story of a befuddled businessman's seemingly harmless eccentricities. Marla's late and triumphal re-entry with a new no nonsense attitude does not to dispel the sense that Beatty had no overarching vision.

At a running length of 126 minutes the pacing is lazy and the editing sloppy, with one mostly static scene between Hughes and Marla dragging on for an astounding amount of time, sucking all momentum out of the film. A barbarians-at-the-gate subplot about rival businessmen seemingly scheming to take over TWA contributes frequent interruptive and noisy distraction from the already fragmented narrative, but is barely explained and never expounded upon.

In addition to Annette Bening disappearing early, the cast features a star in every role, with the likes of Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Dabney Coleman, Amy Madigan, Martin Sheen, Oliver Platt and Paul Sorvino either contributing little or being utterly wasted in single scenes.

Rules Don't Apply breaks all the rules of good film making, and as result fractures into forgettable cutting room floor material.

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Movie Review: McCabe And Mrs. Miller (1971)

A different kind of Western, McCabe And Mrs. Miller features two flawed characters trying to carve out a better life through entrepreneurial instincts. The setting, aesthetics and grim realism create a memorable and unique visual experience.

Professional gambler McCabe (Warren Beatty) rides into a small ramshackle mining town in the dreary Northwest and senses an opportunity to make some money. Noting the near total absence of women to satisfy the frustrated men, he imports three whores and sets up prostitution tents. But McCabe, who may or may not have a background of having killed a man, is not thinking big enough. Professional prostitute and sharp businesswoman Constance Miller (Julie Christie) arrives in town and convinces him to partner with her to build a classy saloon with baths, gambling and high class rooms for a larger number of prostitutes.

Constance, who also has a love for opium, brings in a gaggle of whores from Seattle, McCabe fronts the money, and the saloon is built. The business initially struggles but eventually thrives, while McCabe and Constance become a couple of sorts, although she holds on to her sex-for-money ethos. Their success attracts the attention of a mining corporation represented by businessmen Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland). They offer a large amount of money for McCabe to sell all his holdings, setting off a series of events that will challenge all of McCabe's skills.

Directed and co-written by Robert Altman and filmed in British Columbia, McCabe And Mrs. Miller steers clear of all traditional Western elements. There is no quest, no heroism, no revenge motive, no wrong that needs to be righted, no journey towards redemption, no sheriffs, no outlaws, and for the first two thirds of the film, not even a conflict to speak of. Instead Altman focuses on the struggle of unremarkable individuals to just live and create a business, perhaps one of the more realistic portrayals of common life in frontier territory.

Coupled with the unique subject matter, Altman and his cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond create a a washed-out aesthetic, the negative somewhere between sepia-toned and destroyed beyond repair, with the intention of creating a visual experience evocative of pictures from the era. It works. Combined with Pacific coast rain, mud, snow and general grey bleakness, McCabe And Mrs. Miller is distinctively dreary.

Not everything about the film is as successful. The lack of drama and tension takes a toll, the interesting but limited characters of McCabe and Constance only able to carry the film so far. The audio soundtrack pursues realism by featuring plenty of mumbling, simultaneous talking and a general abundance of background noise. And the secondary characters barely make an impact. Many of the men and whores populating the emerging town of Presbyterian Church are interchangeable beneath their bedraggled clothes and layers of grime. The cast includes the likes of René Auberjonois, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine and William Devane.

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie bring to life two enduring characters. McCabe is one of the best fits with Beatty's persona, and he keeps his sex appeal in check by underscoring the shades of dimwittedness within the character. Christie creates in Constance a no-nonsense prostitute with a nose for business, and that is all she wants to reveal. McCabe tries hard to create a meaningful relationship between them, but Constance knows enough to set hard boundaries.

McCabe And Mrs. Miller ends with the shadow of capitalism creeping across the West. Corporations move in, the big look to swallow the small, and men of modest means will have to understand their role. Finally there are good guys stripped of legends, bad guys cashing a pay cheque, and shootouts in the snow. It all takes place away from the public eye, as one difficult era draws to a close and the more surreptitious age of company dominance through questionable tactics slithers towards the ocean.

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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 Warren Beatty

All movies starring Warren Beatty and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Splendor In The Grass (1961)

Bonnie And Clyde (1967)

McCabe And Mrs. Miller (1971)

The Parallax View (1974)

Shampoo (1975)

Ishtar (1987)

Bugsy (1991)

Rules Don't Apply (2016, also Director)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Shampoo (1975)

A sex and politics farce of sorts, Shampoo is weighed down by petulant characters engaged in uniformly selfish behaviour. The lack of anyone remotely sympathetic, or halfway intelligent, sucks most of the enjoyment out of the movie.

It's the eve of the 1968 presidential election. In Los Angeles, George (Warren Beatty) works as a hairdresser. He dreams of opening his own salon, but does not have the credit or business savvy to secure a loan. Extremely popular with his lady clients who find him sexually irresistible, George is sleeping with Jill (Goldie Hawn), who is naive enough to think that she is the only woman in his life. In fact, George jumps into bed with any willing woman, including Jackie (Julie Christie), the mistress of the pompous, rich and politically-connected Lester (Jack Warden).

Jackie suggests that George approach Lester to secure a private loan. While Jackie is torn between the promise of what Lester can offer her (should he ever leave his wife) and George's raw passion, Lester is intrigued by George, but also suspicious of him. As well he should be: George is also sleeping with Lester's wife Felicia (Lee Grant). Meanwhile, Lester's daughter, Lorna (Carrie Fisher) wants in on the action with George. As Nixon is confirmed as the winner of the election, a night of stuffy political banquets and wild sex parties provides a backdrop for George, Lester and Jackie to sort out their futures.

Shampoo bids a fond adieu to the free-wheeling, sex-drenched days of the 1960s social revolution, and ushers in the era of cynicism and corruption, as marked by Nixon's election. It's an interesting seam in cultural history, but Shampoo is unable to do much with it. Bogged down by uninteresting and unlikable characters, the film is a tiresome merry-go-round of sexual obsession among a group of desperate dullards. It's rarely funny, nor does it carry any meaningful weight of drama.

Director Hal Ashby struggles to create something watchable out of the Robert Towne script, finding only so much story in the ongoing sexapades and half-hearted attempts at irony. Precious few laughs and fewer sober thoughts are generated, and none are sustained. Shampoo settles down to a series of set-piece parties and hair appointments interrupted by brief couplings that admittedly were risqué in 1975.

Warren Beatty rides around on his motorcycle from house to house and bed to bed (or just the floor will do, on some occasions) having sex with every desirous female, and he sports a serious contender for the most ridiculous hairdo in the history of motion pictures. As is typical for the Beatty persona, he mostly just is, a catalyst around which women flutter and dissolve, for no apparent reason related to ability, smarts or prospects. George is a great summary of things that women regret wasting their time on in their later years.

Jack Warden, usually confined to limited screen time, gets one of his more expansive roles. Representing a 1950s man beginning to get really lost at the end of the 1960s, Warden makes Lester the most interesting character in the movie as the man with everything but inching towards a variety of self-destruct buttons to counter the growing boredom and detachment.

The ladies of Shampoo are hampered by having no brains to overcome the sexual gravity generated in proximity to George. The characters played by Julie Christie, Lee Grant and Goldie Hawn never answer any questions related to what is attracting them to a big-haired loser stuck in a dead-end job. Hawn's Jill seems able to grab any man she wants (and indeed she tries to arouse George's jealousy); Christie as Jackie is already wrecking one home by carrying on with Lester; with George, she risks destroying her destruction, which may be quite appropriate. And Grant's Felicia is pretending to be jealous of Jackie while cheating on Lester with George. Sympathetic, these women are not.

Only Carrie Fisher as Lorna seems to get it right: she uses George to scratch an itch, and has no other agenda or expectations. Welcome to the 1970s.

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Movie Review: The Parallax View (1974)

With the high-profile assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the previous dozen years, the attempt on the life of Governor George Wallace in 1972, corruption oozing out of the Nixon White House and deep mistrust of the government over the Vietnam War, conspiracy theories were mainstream in the early 1970s. The Parallax View is a botched attempt to confirm that, indeed, government-sponsored assassin teams are crawling all over the landscape killing people to serve some unstated but clearly evil purpose.

Newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) is covering Independence Day celebrations at the Seattle Space Needle when Senator Charles Carroll is assassinated. A judicial commission concludes that the gunman acted alone. Three years later fellow reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) visits Frady and insists that her life is in danger: six other people who were also present at the Space Needle have since mysteriously died. Soon enough, Carter herself is dead.

Frady, a former alcoholic, starts to investigate despite the misgivings of his editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn), and travels to the small town of Salmontail, where a judge who witnessed the Carroll assassination supposedly drowned while fishing. After tangling with the local sheriff's department Frady uncovers evidence of something called The Parallax Corporation, seemingly a recruitment organization for assassins. As Frady delves further into the events surrounding the Carroll murders and Parallax, he becomes a target until he fakes his death and applies to Parallax himself under an assumed identity.

The Parallax View stumbles badly and early as any semblance of an intellectual approach is quickly ditched in favour of abject and random mayhem completely at odds with the film's premise. Supposedly surgically precise killing teams get sloppy in a hurry. Explosions become common: both a boat and an airplane are destroyed by messy bombs that don't seem to raise any interest from police authorities. A plot to murder Frady is hatched and clumsily bungled at a remote dam site. And The Parallax View suffers from reporter-becomes-superhero syndrome: Frady can out-punch a sheriff's deputy, drown the sheriff, tail a professional assassin all around town without being noticed, and survive three separate attempts on his life, almost comically reappearing unscathed at the office of his newspaper editor after every brush with death.

The film does not even begin to offer theories on what is motivating all the killing. A lot of screen time is invested working up the six other murders related to Senator Carroll's assassination, but no explanation is ever provided for any of the actual or attempted killings. This is a likely intentional underlining of the all-powerful-dark-forces-getting-away-with-anything premise, but it also smacks of lazy film-making: allow the bad guys to kill at their leisure without the burden of explaining themselves.

Amidst the dropping bodies and gaping plot holes, Warren Beatty meanders through the film attempting to act cool but appearing mostly disinterested. His lack of emotional reaction to all the violence comes across as a robotic detachment from the evil supposedly surrounding him, and combined with his remarkable survival skills make Joe Frady a character that can only exist on paper.

Director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis almost succeed in keeping the film interesting with some excellent framing, dynamic angles and some terrific camera placements, the scenes at the Seattle Space Needle, on-board the threatened airliner and at the auditorium where the film climaxes being particular highlights.

Conspiracies only work when less is known about them. The Parallax View attempts to keep the shrouds dark, dusty and menacing. Instead, it stumbles on cheap carpet and falls flat into the harsh light.

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Movie Review: Splendor In The Grass (1961)

A strikingly frank exploration of sexual repression, Splendor In The Grass launched the career of Warren Beatty, revitalized the fortunes of Natalie Wood, and ushered in a new decade of dramatically increased sexual openness in both the movies and society.

The setting is Kansas in the late 1920s, just ahead of the stock market crash and the Great Depression. High school sweethearts Deanie Loomis (Wood) and Bud Stamper (Beatty) are planning their futures and barely able to restrain themselves from having sex. Bud is more than willing, but Deanie wants to wait: she comes from a relatively modest family, and although her parents are thrilled she is dating the high profile Bud, Deanie's frigid mother (Audrey Christie) is adamant good girls do not enjoy sex.

The Stampers are wealthy oil tycoons, and patriarch Ace Stamper (Pat Hingle) encourages Bud to seek sexual relations with other girls until he marries Deanie. Ace also has Bud's future all laid out for him, including sending him to Yale for an education Bud does not care for. The desires and intentions of the lovers and their parents will face severe tests.

Directed by Elia Kazan and written by William Inge, Splendor In The Grass features two memorable characters buffeted by the currents of destiny. Bud and Deanie start as two hopeful teens and transform over two hours to jaded adults, a journey filled with mounting desperation that life may indeed conspire to comprehensively sabotage true love's destiny.

Bud Stamper walks a tightrope between loving Deanie and lusting after her while alternating between respect and contempt for his father. Bud at least maintains most of his composure; his forlorn soul mate is less fortunate. Deanie's plight is an astonishing reminder that until early in the 20th century, female hysteria was a common diagnosis for women suffering through sexual dissatisfaction. She tries to repress raging sexual desire, conflicted between raw attraction for Bud and all the stop signs planted in her path by an icy cold mother. She emerges from her ordeal a tightly wired cage of suppression, a tense smile working overtime to beat down rage.

Inge pokes at the generational divide and hacks away at the wisdom of parents and adults. Deanie and Bud's downward spiral towards emotional misery is a direct result of respecting their parents wishes. Deanie's mother and Bud's father do all the overt damage, but by their lack of active intervention to provide a counterbalance, Deanie's father and Bud's mother contribute to the ruin by simple neglect. When Bud turns to a doctor for advice, he receives none. 

Wood is a revelation in a physically adventurous and mentally tortuous role, while the enigmatic Beatty's performance is remarkably assured for a young actor stepping into his first big screen role. Pat Hingle towers over every scene he is in, Ace Stamper the manifestation of caring annihilated by domination.

Splendor In The Grass is a powerful drama, tackling taboo subject matter with daring, sensitivity, and bravado.

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Movie Review: Bonnie And Clyde (1967)

The story of outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Bonnie And Clyde explores fame and notoriety through a blood-splattered romantic crime drama.

It's the early 1930s in the depression-hit southern US. The suave Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) has recently been released from a stint in prison for armed robbery, and he's back seeking a life of crime. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), an attractive but bored waitress, catches Clyde about to steal her mother's car. Both in their early 20's, he seduces her with the promise of a better life; she sees in him the opportunity to escape the drudgery of her boring destiny. Soon they are robbing stores and banks in a trail of crime with ever increasing violence across several states.

They are joined by car mechanic C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard), Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons). After several shoot-outs with police officers and many narrow escapes, the gang gains unprecedented notoriety thanks to breathless press coverage, and the duo take on the aura of heroic fugitives sticking it to the system. As the stakes get higher, so do the risks, as the authorities ratchet up the intensity of the chase to bring Bonnie and Clyde to some form of justice.

Riding the counter-culture wave, Bonnie And Clyde adopts a sympathetic stance towards its subjects. Young and attractive, Clyde is portrayed as smart and instinctive, while Bonnie is ambitious, sensual and headstrong, as well as a budding poet who cares for her mother. Both are playful and get a rush from taking risks. In contrast, their victims are mostly faceless and nameless police officers, guards, storekeepers and bank officials, shot and killed doing their jobs.

Within the context of villains as heroes, director Arthur Penn crafts a beautiful period piece bursting with nothing-to-lose energy. The film recreates an era of economic malaise in need of distraction, and fuelled by sensational media coverage, charismatic criminals willing to stick it to the authorities tap into a national mood of defiance. With societal survival itself an everyday concern, extremes can be tested, and here crime is coupled with graphic and gory violence. Blood flows freely as the Barrow gang carve a trail of crime through the countryside, with the cameras not turning away when victims are shot in the head at close range. 

Beatty and Dunaway were only a few years older than the real Bonnie and Clyde at the time of filming, and they are both engaging in their portrayal of the young criminals. Dunaway colours Bonnie Parker as a complex, easily irritable woman who needs adventure, loves to have fun, and craves attention. Beatty establishes Clyde Barrow as an intelligent man, seduced by a life of crime, enjoying the thrill of the chase but quick to turn to violence. Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons in an Academy Award winning role bring a lot of vivid, memorable energy to their supporting roles.

From the cars to the costumes and from the sets to the landscape, Bonnie And Clyde looks gorgeous. Penn frames the action within breathtaking vistas of the middle-America rural countryside. The cinematography of Burnett Guffey and the Charles Strouse music score are a perfect complement to Penn's vision. In these vast open spaces, violence wrapped in the flag of anti-authoritarian rebellion breeds legends.

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