Simple Men dvd movie.|
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List Price: $14.99 Our Price: $12.99 You Save: $2 Features • Anamorphic • Color • Dolby • DTS Surround Sound • DVD-Video • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 1992 DVD Release : 27 January, 2004 |
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Simple Men description Simple Men opens with small-time hood Bill (Robert Burke from RoboCop 3) asking a bound and blindfolded security guard if he can have the guard's Virgin Mary medallion. "Be good to her and she'll be good to you," says the guard. Immediately after, Bill is double-crossed by his girlfriend and his partner. From there, the plot goes off in a completely different direction: Bill and his younger brother Dennis (William Sage, High Art), a philosophy student, go off in search of their father, a former star shortstop who may have committed a bombing many years ago. Their only clue is a phone number on Long Island; they end up at a cafe run by Kate (Karen Sillas, Female Perversions), which is also the hangout for Elina Löwensohn (Nadja) and Martin Donovan (Hollow Reed, The Opposite of Sex). But plot is never the point in Hal Hartley movies (Trust, Amateur, Henry Fool); it's just a clothesline on which to hang odd, quirky scenes--moments like Donovan and Sage trying to imitate Löwensohn's dance movements to a Sonic Youth song, or a half-drunken conversation about pop music and self-exploitation. Hartley's deliberately stilted dialogue and stylized performances actually play better on video; the movie feels more intimate, making the humor more relaxed and fluid. Hartley is the kind of idiosyncratic filmmaker who provokes love-him-or-hate-him responses, but there's a deep sincerity to his artifice that goes beyond mere posing. Against all commercial wisdom, he's struggling to find his own cinematic poetry. Such an uncommon aspiration is worth checking out. --Bret Fetzer |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Intelligent and absurdist filmmaking -- you will walk away smiling and thinking |
| Hal Hartley's best films are intellectual candy. They are full of provocations and delights, little moments that are both enigmatic and profoundly simple and true. This one is my favorite, at least so far. Two men on a search for their father, who may or may not be guilty of a profound wrong or disastrous mistake. Two women waiting for something or someone. In outline, the basic plot sounds like any number of Hollywood dramas or romantic comedies, but in this film there is something so fresh about the dialogue with its musical punctuation and simple but unique staging. The style he employs here, of characters speaking like they were in a soap opera -- not quite acting but emoting and standing as mouthpiece for a play of ideas that is tied to the action -- works when it is subtle and simple as it is in this film (and in others like Henry Fool). Taken to an extreme it can become a bit annoying, as in Fay Grim which feels just too big and unwieldy to work. Here it is just right, and at just the right moments is broken by absurdly funny set pieces like a spontaneous musical outburst in response to the Sonic Youth or a cigarette-smoking nun who assaults a police officer. Hartley is the closest we have to an American Godard. Definitely a keeper. | |
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