The color of money

This filmⁱ ended up on the viewlist roughly through a giggle and a wink at "the 80s fucking sucked" quote. Holy shit does it deliver!

For one thing, the screenplay's so bad it looks like it must have been written by Tom Cruiseⁱⁱ, in between couch jumping sessionsⁱⁱⁱ. If you know how to read between the lines on the face of the writer, the strategy here was to make a movie based on the following problem : in a world based on dissimulation^iv, how is meaning even possible^v ?

By the time the brilliant tacticians involved are done with the salad however, everything's been buried under mounds of the bitter salt of "why do you say that ?"^vi, Mastroianni oops I mean^vii Mastrantonio has shown her miserable bosom three times more than it'd be a good idea (she only does it twice) and everything makes about as much sense as the internal universe of Tom Cruise. Who wrote the script. He must've.

Paul Newman looks good, which is about all this thing's good for : to be run with the sound off as a sort of Empire of Newman's head and shoulders. It wouldn't even be eight hours.

1. The color of money, 1986, by Martin Scorsese, with Paul Newman, Tom Cruise and the pointedly ugly Marybeth Mastrantonio. [↩]
2. It wasn't, it comes from one Richard Price, possibly the worst copywriter cinema has ever known. He's not even crazy-bad, or funny-bad, he's just stolid-bad. [↩]
3. Which by the way - he does here! Apparently indoor-goat had always been part of his lifestyle, you just never knew about it.

   Then again, one could scarcely blame a tendency to bounce off random surfaces on people slightly taller than Nicole Kidman's crotch. [↩]

4. Understand the premise here : the best (only ?) way to "make money" (and piddly money it will be, at any rate) through snooker hustlin' is to run some sort of confidence game on the side. This, according to various idiots from the 80s "adds a whole depth to the game". You'd have to have never went to college to imagine this is actually how depths go - which is fine, they didn't. Back then college didn't take every random Bahamas just yet. [↩]
5. If every single game is "oh, but that's not really the real reality", then what does it mean "to have won" ? [↩]
6. This question is verboten to amateur screenplay writers (such as Richard Pierce) and simultaneously a trope of purple prose, because its only function is to break up large monologues of Mr. Exposition, attempting a faux impression of dialogue while no dialogue whatsoever is taking place and simultaneously taking a monumental pigeon dump on the very concept of character development, let alone any possible implementation thereof. A superlatively humorous form of this is "nice lighter, looks like someone gave it to you". [↩]
7. Hey, at least the Italian made-for-tv crapolade sports ample teenage nudity. [↩]