YEAR: 1995
DIRECTOR: Barry Sonnenfeld
SCREENPLAY: Scott Frank
PRINCIPAL CAST: John Travolta, Renee Russo, Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito, Dennis Farina, James Gandolfini
YEAR: 1995
DIRECTOR: Barry Sonnenfeld
SCREENPLAY: Scott Frank
PRINCIPAL CAST: John Travolta, Renee Russo, Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito, Dennis Farina, James Gandolfini
John Travolta is Chili Palmer, a loan shark who goes to Hollywood to collect a few debts and winds up Going Hollywood. He's in love with movies so much, he later decides to become a producer in Hollywood.
Gene Hackman, wearing sublime dentures and a seedy goatee, is the producer Chili shakes down his first night in town--only to end up having drinks with him and pitching him a story. Rene Russo is the producer's companion, a B-movie actress who tunes in to Chili's less obvious statements, interprets for him (like any good practitioner of the method, she understands "subtext"), and falls for him. Danny DeVito is her superstar ex-husband, a sawed-off Oscar winner whose support is essential to turning Chili's pitch into a picture deal. The little tyrant is madly in love with himself, but greedily fascinated by Chili's lightning-crisp air of authority. Delroy Lindo, Dennis Farina, and James Gandolfini are the buffoonish lowlifes who envy Chili's piece of the action, not because they need money (ironically, they have plenty of that), but because they are helplessly, hopelessly besotted with movies, or at least what "movies" represent to the human imagination at large: prestige, glamour, creativity.
Artists may not dream of becoming businessmen, but they often fantasize about being criminals. Film noir owes its existence to this fact, but real gangsters are very hard to get right: movies either romanticize them, intellectualize them (the same thing), or turn them into berserk clowns. Despite the mature wine of Elmore Leonard's dialogue--chilled and preserved with great skill by Frank--Travolta's is the only mobster who rings true; the rest are caricatures. (You get the sense that Frank and Sonnenfeld have met few, if any, flesh-and- blood mobsters--and it's a pity. A pinch of involuntary reality might have enriched the comedy.) Still, they've gotten Hollywood dead right. Restaurant manners, fashions and fads, shameless hypocrisies, fawning greed and, in a rare man like Chili, a genuine, romantic flair--these are etched in acid with a pitiless accuracy. --F.X. Feeney, revised by Mike McKiernan.
[ Artwork | Resume | Video Picks | Softball | Vote | Meet Mike ]
[
Home | Hot Links |
Credits ]
Get your own Free Home Page