An American romance directed by Nicole Kassell, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Rosemarie DeWitt, Romany Malco, Treat Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Dinklage and Kathy Bates.
A woman finds that she has cancer and falls in love with the doctor.
This was on a list of worst movies ever made, but I have seen far worse, and tons of them. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 4% and Metacritic has 14%. Sure, it was shallow and vapid. The writing and dialogue were terrible. The acting seemed forced and the camerawork and editing looked like the filmmakers thought it was better than it actually was. So great movies like The Breakfast Club (1985) are going along great until the sappy, crappy ending. This was sappy and crappy most of the way through with an amazing ending. I'll just go ahead and spoil it: the woman dies and all of her friends and family have a party "Yay! She's finally dead!" I was thinking it was totally trite until that point. The name of the film comes from one short scene in which a male midget prostitute is hired for the woman with cancer (image). I rate this tolerable because of the ending. You probably should not watch it, though.
An Italian American crime drama directed by Sergio Leone, starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Joe Pesci, Burt Young and Treat Williams.
A group of boys in New York City start an organized crime gang. After a conflict with a rival gang, one of them goes to jail for many years. When he gets out, he finds that he has an aversion to this type of work.
I watched the super-long four hour version and liked it. The plot held my interest and the variety of characters was good. I thought that relatively few of them showed much depth or development. The phone ringing in the beginning was maddening. There must have been some other way to do that scene. I found the rape scene in the car disturbing to watch. The version that I got had some inconsistencies in the video for some reason. It could have been a bad copy, could have been intended that way or those could be the deleted scenes edited in without color correction. The video style and acting are what impressed me the most. Everything was shown so clearly with such convincing characters that it didn't feel like watching a staged movie. Overall, exceptional. For a four hour film to hold my attention attests to it's greatness. I rate this awesome.
