SincereFinest
disgusting, overrated, pointless
Konterr
Brilliant and touching
Fairaher
The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Walter Sloane
Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
Frank Carr
Fool for Love is one of the best films, and plays, I've seen in my 30+ years of adulthood--and I hate *everything* (i.e., I have very high standards). I also hate 90% of what Robert Altman has directed; Nashville goes right in the garbage can as far as I'm concerned.No spoiler here--just go to the play, if you can, or watch the film. It is intense, suspenseful, moving, funny (occasionally)...a must-see for art-film enthusiasts. Sam Shepard is a brilliant playwright and an excellent actor. The casting of Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, and Dennis Quaid for the movie was nothing short of genius.
Red-125
Fool for Love (1985) was directed by Robert Altman. It's based on a Sam Shepard play. Sam Shepard did the screenplay. Sam Shepard also stars as Eddie, a rodeo rider who drives up to an end-of-nowhere motel, and starts causing trouble within the first 60 seconds.I'm amazed that this movie is so bad. Shepard is a good actor, and so are the other leads: Kim Basinger as May, and Harry Dean Stanton as "Old Man." Randy Quaid has the unenviable supporting role as a "normal" guy who arrives at the motel to take May out on a date, and ends up enmeshed in the bizarre triangle. It's hard to believe that a brilliant director, working with such skilled actors, could end up with a movie this bad. Nothing works, except that Eddie is a menacing presence throughout. It's obvious from the first minutes of the movie that bad things are going to happen, and they do throughout the film.It's also obvious that Altman needed to open up the play so that he could turn it into a movie, and he did. He didn't do it all that well, but he did it. It's clear that people didn't like the film. At the time I'm writing this review, the IMDb rating is a horrific 5.9. (I actually helped improve the rating when I gave the film a 6. That must be a first.)The movie will work well enough on DVD, which is how I saw it. It would probably work better on the large screen, because you'd get even more of a sense of the total isolation of the motel location. However, my advice is to pick another movie. Fool for Love just isn't worth the time spent watching it.
gavin6942
May (Kim Basinger) is waiting for her boyfriend (Sam Shepard) in a run-down American motel, when an old flame turns up and threatens to undermine her efforts and drag her back into the life that she was running away from. The situation soon turns complicated.When a film is an expansion on a play, such as this is, you have to be true to the source while also going beyond. Altman succeeds, casting Harry Dean Stanton as a one-man Greek chorus and bringing a fuller vision to the story than could be shown within one room.Roger Ebert said that Altman "has succeeded on two levels that seem opposed to each other. He has made a melodrama, almost a soap opera, in which the characters achieve a kind of nobility." These are kin words and not without merit.
spappas2009
This is a VERY dull, slow movie. With almost no redeeming qualities to it, the film lumbers towards a dramatic and distasteful climax. No way to connect with the loathsome characters, you feel like a creep, a peeping tom watching the lives of the two main actors fall apart. There can't possibly be a worse way to spend nearly two hours of your life than watching this piece of junk movie. Try Zapped! for 80s nostalgia. If you want something more stimulating, intellectually or otherwise, just stick your head in a plastic bag. Don't bother with this dud. This movie was all about the actors and writers loving themselves more than their audience. You'll feel dirty and insulted after-wards...