Gloria dvd movie.|
Gloria buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $24.95 Our Price: $21.99 You Save: $2.96 Features • Closed-captioned • Color • DVD-Video • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 1980 DVD Release : 25 February, 2003 |
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Gloria description Even a genre film looks different in the hands of writer-director John Cassavetes. In this one, he casts a wonderfully hard-boiled Gena Rowlands as the title character: a former Mob moll who picked up a few tricks along the way. She becomes the unexpected guardian of a young boy (John Adames) who has just seen his parents wiped out. Worse, the Mob is after him as well, seeking a book he has--and the overdue fine is a killer. Though Cassavetes lets his actors have a little too much rein, it pays off in the complex--and surprisingly funny--performance by Rowlands as an unlikely nanny who discovers that, though she is an unwilling bodyguard, she actually learns to care for the tough little guy she's trying to keep out of harm's way. --Marshall Fine |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Gena Rowlands shines, but the plot stumbles |
| This movie is worth watching for the pure joy of watching Gena Rowlands kicking butt and taking names. The movie starts out strong. The mafia closes in around a family who live down the hall from Gloria. The father works for the mafia but has been disclosing information to the FBI. As men with guns appear outside their apartment building and the family desperately realizes they are doomed, the mother convinces Gloria to take her son into her apartment so that he can be saved. The family is killed, and Gloria is left with a belligerent 6 year old she doesn't know what to do with. To complicate matters, she was working for the same people who killed the family, so by keeping the son alive, she jeopardizes her own life.
As she tries to decide what to do, the child rants and raves like an adult, proudly declaring "I am a man! I am a man! You can't tell me what to do" and angrily demanding to be returned to his father. Gloria considers leaving him to the mob, but then changes her mind when a car of hoodlums shows up to take him. She starts dragging him all over the city trying to find a plan of escape, and eventually she decides she loves the child. Here's where the plot grows thin. Gloria's lines are natural, strong, effortless, but the child's voice oscillates between that of an actual child (but not one who cries or feels sad for his parents), that of an adult (but with a bizarre Street Car Named Desire machismo), and sometimes, that of some sort of narrator. His character didn't ring true, and so the maternal love story between him and Gloria doesn't end up feeling real. Despite this, Gena Rowlands is able to carry the movie. At the end of the movie is a strikingly cheesy slow motion running-to-safety scene. A slow motion running scene from Cassavettes, founding father of American independent cinema? I can only hope to blame the cultural void that was the 1980s for that error of judgement. |
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