Rpgcatech Disapointment

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

kijii Based on one of Nathanael West's five short novels, this movie portrays and attacks Hollywood of the late 30s, just as the Nashville, released the same year, satirized Nashville. Although there have been many satires about the movie industry, none is quite as acerbic as this one.Set in a Southwestern adobe apartment complex, the San Bernardino Arms, we see an assortment of Hollywood hopefuls, has beens, and want-to-bes as well as some hucksters and con men. The story is viewed through the eyes of Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a talented Yale sketch artist and set designer who actually does get a Hollywood job in his chosen field. Faye Greener (Karen Black) is there as an extra and dreams of making it big someday. She lives with her father, Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), a washed up vaudevillian clown who goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, selling bottles of elixir, using his old vaudeville routine as a sales pitch.Adore (Jackie Earle Haley) is the brat child actor with the stereotypical stage mother. Another REALLY obnoxious character is Abe Kusich (Billy Barty), a dwarf bookie who takes advantage of his difference, knowing that no one can really fight back—I've personally known people like this who use their apparent disadvantages to their own obnoxious advantage. (Both Adore and Abe fit into this category. I mean, who can lash out against a child or a dwarf?) Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland) also belongs to this strange group of Hollywood misfits. He is really the ultimate outsider. He is a strange repressed accountant from the Midwest, who really wants to be loved for who he is. After Harry Greener's death, Faye, uses Homer---for his money and slavish love —as long as his unrequited worship of her remains intact.Most of the men love Faye and want her as their girlfriend or lover. She almost drives Tod crazy, since he tries to get her to love him, but she says something like 'I don't love you that way.' When he asks her why she would have sex for money, she screams 'That's different!! They are STRANGERS!!!' The asexual Homer is different too: He just loves to be around her and cook for her. "Big Sister (Geraldine Page)—who could have been based on Aimee Semple McPherson—is the woman evangelist begging for money in exchange for promises of everlasting live, health, and happiness is Hollywood's religion, 'the false, utopian theology California is famous for." I'm not sure what the symbolism is behind the movie's constant motif of cockfighting. It could represent male sexual competition (cock fighting) or it could be the need for voyeuristic nihilism so prevalent in Hollywood. The final scene of the movie is very long. (And I think it is way overdone.) It starts with a Hollywood premier of Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer (1938)and ends in chaos, death, and destruction. The movie is mostly filmed through a yellow lens, suggesting 'sunny' Southern California.

mark.waltz As if they were mocking the love of everything 20's, 30's and 40's on TV, Broadway and the movie screens, the writers of this screenplay tear apart the legend of movie's so-called "Golden Age". Karen Black, fresh from flying the plane in "Airport '75" (and free from that knife-wielding monster in "Trilogy of Terror"), is a blonde bombshell in 1933 Hollywood who appears in a 1937 Eddie Cantor movie called "Ali Baba Goes to Town" and is upset when most of her one scene is deleted. She selfishly leads lovers along until she meets Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), a not-so-cartoonish loner who saves her father (Burgess Meredith) during an attack of exhaustion. Black gives a really mesmerizing performance, especially in scenes where she deals with her father's death and her own insecurities, but ultimately her character is too unlikable.Billy Barty, who in 1933 was making cameos in Busby Berkley musicals, plays a troubled neighbor, and Geraldine Page has a dramatic one-scene cameo as an Aimee Semple McPherson type evangelist. Vintage 30's music, like the previous year's "The Great Gatsby", provides the only real nostalgia since the theme is actually dark and depressing. Burgess Meredith's funeral sequence is interrupted at the Hollywood Cemetery when it is announced that a movie star named Mr. Gable has just arrived. The attitude is satirical but inappropriately so, since the comedy is actually pretty mean spirited. A genuine 30's atmosphere is felt, but this is is not a pretty look at Tinsel Town. Audiences who expected "The Sting" or even "Gatsby" got stung here, and I'm sure many walked out. There is a violent scene involving an attempted rape over jealousy between two men organizing a cock fight. Backstage scenes at Paramount where a film about Napoleon is being shot while everything goes wrong seem genuine, although "College Swing", advertised in the background, wasn't made until several years after this took place. But get a load of "Gilligan's Island"'s Natalie Schafer as a Hollywood madam who shows porno at her parties, a drag queen who performs Dietrich's "Hot Voodoo", and a Shirley Temple like performer so hatefully obnoxious that she (?) makes Temple's rival Jane Withers seem like an angel.If director John Schleshinger's goal was to create a film audiences wouldn't soon forget, he reached his goal. Technically (especially visually), it is outstanding. However, for me, it was not in the way he intended to. This moves past the darkness of his previous nostalgic film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", taking tastelessness to a new level that only seemed appropriate in 1975 in John Waters' underground movies.

pekinman John Schlesinger's film of Nathanial West's iconic novel Day of the Locust has been hanging in there with film buffs for so long I think it is about time it was acknowledged as the minor masterpiece that it is. Maybe not so minor in fact. When I watch it, which I've been doing since the day it was released, I find myself wishing Hitchcock or Welles had directed an adaptation of it, something that would have insured its arrival into the pantheon of masterpieces. This isn't to degrade Schlesinger's work at all but I think the Hitchock or Wellesian touch might have made it into a film as much talked about as Sunset Boulevard. Day of the Locust is not simply another Hollywood exposé along the lines of Sunset Boulevard, A Star is Born and The Bad and the Beautiful, but it is every bit as fascinating and gut wrenching, perhaps more so, than those classics. Nathanial West's tale is a full blown horror story. Hollywood itself is the inanimate monster that evokes the beast in the bedazzled humans that inhabit the landscape. ALL are victims of the mind numbing, soul evaporating environment. The ironic and disheartening thing about this story is that West has used Love as the vehicle that speeds its passengers towards their melancholy doom. The most sympathetic character is Homer Simpson, yes, Homer Simpson, played with a quiet and tortured passion by Donald Sutherland. Homer is a meek, virginal certified public account who fate has thrown in the path of Faye Greener (Karen Black) and her down-at-heel father Harry (Burgess Meredith in a terrifying performance of pathos and madness), an ex- vaudevillian who has ended up in Hollywood after arriving their years before for a small part in a B movie. Tod (William Atherton) is a bright young man newly arrived from Yale. He is a gifted artist and spends his time recording in drawings the people and events he witnesses. He is rapidly sucked into the vortex of despair and barely escapes with his life in the end. Homer, on the other hand, is not so lucky. The final scenes are harrowing. The most shocking effect it had on me is that I found myself rooting for the crazed Homer who does something I can't bring myself to reveal because the shock of it is worth discovering for oneself. It involves the comeuppance of a horrid child actor named Adore (its sex is ambiguous) played with infuriating moxie by the young Jackie Haley.The cast is splendid. Geraldine Page makes an atomic blast of an appearance as the charlatan evangelist Aimee Sempel McPherson in a single scene of insane religious hysteria.Day of the Locust is about our atavistic need for gods and the subsequent need to destroy them for not living up to our delusions of ourselves. It is a truly disturbing and fascinating film and should be seen by all lovers of great film adaptations of great booksThe 1970s and early 1980s were a Golden Age in Hollywood that is just now being acknowledged as such. The Day of the Locust is one film from that era that rests comfortably near the top of the pyramid. Don't miss it.Very highly recommended.

rokcomx Perhaps the most anti-Hollywood movie ever made by Hollywood! Scarcely seen since its 1975 release, and all-but-forgotten except among devout movie fans, it's worth seeing if only for the meticulous recreation of the period when Hollywood went from golden pond to fetid cesspool. Most all the principals prove to be immoral and hideous, as foreshadowed by the apartment wall paintings of the lead, a movie art director who arrives in town full of hope and optimism, but soon ends up wallowing in the same gutter as the cockroach characters he once emulated and admired.The movie unfolds much like if one actually moved to Hollywood - lots of glitz and glam at first, until the seediness and evilness takes center stage. Donald Sutherland is particularly powerful, as a somewhat dimwitted innocent whose turn for the worse at the end of the movie provides one of the most shocking and memorable climaxes in movie history. If you haven't seen or heard about it, I won't spoil it here - if you're lucky enough to come across Day of the Locust, DON'T read any of the IMDb or online reviews until AFTER viewing. I guarantee you'll be whacked over the head with some powerful surprises ---