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msnielsen
Reviews
Men at Work (1990)
What a Waste!
One of the dumbest movies in the history of cinema. Wait, I take that back-- this movie can't be included in any category related to "cinema"; it belongs in categories like "waste", turds, or similar categories. Ironically, it's even _about_ two garbagemen. The movie is "Men At Work", a lightweight crime comedy starring the Estevez (Sheen) brothers from 1990. Setting aside the asinine and implausible plot line, bad acting, bad dialogue, poorly executed stunts and slapstick, continuity errors, and high rate of no-name actors never to be seen again, all in all it was a pretty bad movie anyway (at its core, I mean). It was the kind of movie that might be good for one thing: you can watch it about 200 times, learn every line, and in a campy kind of way repeat them back and forth in public with your *wasted* friends, thus securing your status as the biggest dorks in your tenth grade class.
To make matters worse, I actually submitted an IMDb trivia entry (along with this bad review) to the movie's IMDb web page, if only because I spotted a silly little punk music joke that apparently nobody else spotted yet(about the Butthole Surfer statue). I'm so conflicted about why I should even *waste* my time submitting what looks like a supportive trivia note, when what I really want to do is blow up Emilio's acting career (no, wait, he's already done that himself. Thanks, dude!) I'm so glad I *wasted* only time on this, not real money. For that matter, can I maybe have at least one tenth of their budget? Anyone other than this director (Emilio) could have made two or three much better movies with just what they spent blowing up cars, carefully placing bikini-clad bimbos in the background, and beating up useless extras (henchmen) in haz-mat suits. I'd mention Emilio's writing credit, but it would be a stretch to call this screenplay "writing" -- it's more like crayon-scrawled cartoon ideas. And Charlie Sheen, if you're reading this, I assume M.A.W. must have been made during the part of your career in which you were a coked-up, hooker-loving Hollywood brat who had not grown up yet. (Oops! Sorry, I guess that part of your life isn't over yet. Get well soon, you "half a man". Such a promising talent, so *wasted*
oh look, there's that word again.)
Hi, Mom! (1970)
Like buried treasure on late-night cable
Thank God for 3am infant feedings, or I would never have known about this strange and formative period in either DePalma's or DeNiro's careers. My first instinct was to think of this as experimental, maybe as experimental as Hollywood features ever got. But comments here remind me that other features at the time were doing similar things (episodic or loose plot structures, movie-within-a-movie framing, documentary-style grittiness, and/or improvisational acting a'la Cassavetes). From Antonioni's "Blow Up" to the oft-mentioned Hitchcock-DePalma parallels to certain aspects of Woody Allen's early films, this funny, disturbing movie and its influences have to be understood in a historical context. Moreso even than most of his later work, this movie and its predecessor "Greetings" put DePalma firmly (for me) among the influential first generation of film-school filmmakers like Scorsese and Coppola. The obvious rough edges in "Hi Mom!" may be due to budgetary or creative constraints in a few cases, but I think they are more often intentional. It's as if in trying to catch lightning in a bottle with an almost "guerrilla" style of filming and acting, they had to concede that a strange edit here or a too-shaky camera there were unavoidable. I'd love to know what the original script for this movie actually looked like (if they even had one).
Altogether, a good movie to remind us that, for DePalma and DeNiro (as well as character actors Gerritt Graham and Paul Bartel, with smaller but equally important early roles here), movies can be an exploration of dark, weird human impulses and the underbelly of our society --instead of just 90-120 minutes of conventional storytelling. See for yourself, if you can find it.