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DVD In the Soup
This is a low-key gem that is at once about the power of dreams, the power of suggestion, and the tyranny of artistic vision (when there really isn't one to fight for). This disarming comedy by director Alexandre Rockwell was a hit at the Sundance Festival but barely registered commercially. Steve Buscemi stars as a hard-luck case: Adolpho, a wanna-be filmmaker with a phone-book-sized screenplay and no money. He lives in a hellish Lower East Side apartment and has a thing for his standoffish neighbor (Jennifer Beals). When he places a want ad to sell his script, he lands Joe (Seymour Cassell), a would-be investor who, it turns out, is really a con artist. Together, they go looking for money to make the movie. A dizzily funny and understated film in which Cassell gives the performance of his career. --Marshall Fine
The title to this review is one of my favorite movie lines ever, EVER. This movie came out right before Steve Buscemi had a part in literally every movie that came out for 2 straight years. As cool as he is, I must admit I got a little over-Buscemi'd there for a while. This is one of my favorite roles he's done but the main reason I have always remebered this film is Seymour Cassel. His role as the fatherly, mysterious and awesomely spontaneous gansgter is pure freakin' genious. I've yet to see him in a role I didn't like but this has got to be one of his best. Another classic Seymour Cassel line: "20 minutes, what are they gonna do, read it in brail?" You'll just have to see it but trust me, if you even remotely enjoy films by Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch and the like, you will love this film.
"Every great artist had to suffer a little."
Adolfo Rollo (Steve Buscemi) is flat broke and the rent is due. He has only one precious possession to sell--and that is a 500 plus page film script of his epic "Unconditional Surrender." Adolfo places a 'for sale' advertisement in the paper, and someone responds. Adolfo meets the prospective purchaser Joe (Seymour Cassel) in his run-down hotel room. Adolfo wants $200 for the script, but Joe gives him $1,000 and offers to get funding to make the film. Now since Joe makes the offer in his underwear--without even bothering to read the script--it's obvious that something is wrong here.
"In the Soup" is a wildly bizarre comedy--there's not a normal character in the entire film. Jennifer Beals plays Angelica--Adolfo's prickly neighbour, and she has a few problems with immigration. Adolfo has a giant crush on Angelica, and wants to put her in his film. His relationship with Angelica is complicated by her bizarre, jealous, obnoxious French husband, Gregoire (Stanley Tucci). Adolfo's landlords are the singing Bafardi brothers, the owners of Bafardi's liquor. And then there are a couple of nudist game show hosts. Amidst all this madness and mayhem, Joe attempts to get funding for Adolfo's incredibly rotten film. Joe and his psychotic brother, Skip have some illegal methods to get the money.
I read several professional reviews of this film that stated that it was not funny. I must say that "In the Soup" was one of the funniest films I've seen in a long time. For the first half of the film, I laughed practically non-stop. After about the halfway point, the film briefly lost some of its humour and took on a more serious tone, but then the humour quickly swung back into motion. Autobiographical events in director's Alexandre Rockwell's life inspired the story. Rockwell isn't too well known in America, but he also directed "The Wrong Man" story in "Four Rooms." "In the Soup" is inspired, original, wickedly funny, bizarre, and quite fantastic. Adolfo's life is going nowhere, and then he meets the unstoppable Joe. Joe is one of those people you never forget--although you can't quite fathom him either. Steve Buscemi as the loser Adolfo is marvelous. He seems to have a knack for these sorts of roles, but it's Seymour Cassel's film all the way. "In the Soup" could well become a cult classic, and it deserves a much wider audience--displacedhuman
Great wacky comedy
With a stellar cast including indie film fave (sorry for the chintzy language!) Steve Buscemi, Seymour Cassell, Stanley Tucci, Will Patton, Carol Kane, and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup takes the tried and true tale of a guy wanting to make a film and manages to make this story decidedly fresh and original.
Seymour Cassell's Joe is a consummate con man who knows exactly how to squeeze, steal, and/or cajole money out of a whole plethora of situations. Joe the slickster with a sexy Asian girlfriend is a perfect match for Steve Buscemi's close-to-broke Adolfo the intellectual bumbler (who dreams of his neighbor Jennifer Beals' Latina Angela), whose 450 page film script--Unconditional Surrender--sends Joe into a rapture of delight at the prospect of financing a real film. Of course the way Joe raises the dough to make the film is not exactly, shall we say, kosher.
The juxtaposition of naivete, dream, imagination, and petty crime, along with Will Patton's menacing hemophiliac brother and Stanley Tucci's French ex-husband should be seen to be believed. This is one film that truly deserves to be on DVD. As of this writing (August 2003), it ain't. A shame.
A great picker-uppper, a lot of fun, and an all around hoot. Put In the Soup on your shelf. You won't be sorry.
Consistently cited by critics worldwide as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's bittersweet drama of life, love, class, and the social code of manners and behavior ("the rules of the game") is a savage critique undertaken with sensitivity and compassion. Renoir's catch-phrase through the film, "Everyone has their reasons," develops a multilayered meaning by the conclusion. A young aviator (Roland Toutain) commits a serious social faux pas by alluding to an affair on national radio. To avert a scandal, the cultured Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), husband to the aviator's mistress, Christine (Nora Gregor), and a philanderer in his own right, invites all to a weekend hunting party in his country mansion. The complicated maze of marriages and mistresses (social register... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Nora Gregor - Marcel Dalio Director(s): Jean Renoir DVD Release Date: Released the 20 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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One of the most acclaimed films of 2003, American Splendor is also one of the most audaciously creative biographical movies ever made. Blending fact, fiction, and personal perspective from the comic books that inspired it, this marvelous portrait of Harvey Pekar--scowling curmudgeon, brow-beaten everyman, insightful chronicler of his own life, and frustrated file clerk at a Cleveland V.A. hospital--is an inspired amalgam of the media (comic books, TV, and film) that lifted Pekar from obscurity to the status of a pop-cultural icon. As played by Paul Giamatti in a master-stroke of casting, we see Pekar and his understanding wife (played by Hope Davis) as underdogs in a world full of obstacles, yet also infused with subtle hope and (gasp!) heartwarming perseverance. We also see the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Shari Springer Berman - Paul Giamatti - Harvey Pekar Director(s): Robert Pulcini - Shari Springer Berman DVD Release Date: Released the 03 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"The cinema," Orson Welles famously noted, "is a ribbon of dream." 3 Women is one of few feature films on record as having taken form in a dream. The dreamer was Robert Altman, and although all his best work has an oneiric quality--the floaty zooms, the eerie pastels bleeding into one another, the slip and slide of characters' trajectories overlapping in the fluid accumulation of what passes for narrative--this last masterpiece in his amazing seven-year run of 1970s masterpieces is only more so. Shelly Duvall, that most unorthodox of Altman creatures, locks in the tone with her eerie portrayal of Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan hoyden whose nonstop prattle turns life into a stream-of-consciousness reverie even as most of the people in her vicinity studiously ignore her. Her... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Shelley Duvall - Sissy Spacek Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 20 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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With this magnificent Criterion DVD release, Luchino Visconti's 1963 historical drama The Leopard will finally earn widespread recognition as one of the most beautiful epics ever produced. In adapting the popular novel by Giuseppe Tomassi di Lampedusa (an Italian equivalent to Gone with the Wind, set during the tumultuous Garibaldi revolution of 1860-62), Visconti was initially reluctant to cast Burt Lancaster as the melancholy Prince of Salina--the aging aristocrat "leopard" of the title--who accepts change as inevitable during the struggle for a unified Italy. But Lancaster (even with his voice dubbed in the fully restored Italian release) delivered one of his finest performances, modeled after Visconti himself, and reacting to political and familial upheavals with the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Burt Lancaster DVD Release Date: Released the 08 June 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust is by consensus the great Hollywood novel, a poison-pen letter aimed squarely at the tinsel heart of the movie biz. Only in the 1970s could Hollywood actually hazard a film of this story, and the result is suitably corrosive. William Atherton is the observer Tod, Karen Black the blond starlet Faye, and Donald Sutherland the hulking Homer--but they are easily out-acted by the colorful supporting cast. In particular, Burgess Meredith's exhausted showbizzy salesman and Billy Barty's strutting dwarf are superbly crafted gargoyles in this Hollywood wax museum. Director John Schlesinger piles on the rancid atmosphere and rampant hypocrisy until the movie fairly drowns in its own grotesque vision. Long before the climactic apocalyptic riot, the film... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Donald Sutherland - Karen Black Director(s): John Schlesinger DVD Release Date: Released the 08 June 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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