Amateur

Rating:
Summary: One of Hartley's best, why still not priced for retail?
Review: To his typically perceptive mix of quirky character-based comedy and drama, writer/director Hal Hartley adds a wry, clever, and offbeat noir style crime drama plot, though ultimately the film is still an exploration of identity issues, with Martin Donovan's amnesiac character serving as the focal point. The cast is superb, particulary Donovan in the lead, and Isabelle Huppert in the co-starring role of a pornography-writing ex-nun who decides to help him on his quest to find out who he is. Elina Lowensohn is, as always, wonderfully strange, haughty, beautiful and offbeat as someone who was an important part of the Donovan character's pre-amnesia life. To give away more would be to spoil somewhat the experience of seeing this delightful small-scale film for the first time.

It's astounding, though, that of all of Hartley's films, this is the ONLY one that has not been priced for retail sale. 96 bucks is simply an absurd price to have to pay for this, especially considering it's been 5 years since this film was released! Considering Hartley's loyal cult following, and the difficulty in finding a film like this for rent in a typical video store, this is definitley exactly the sort of film that would tend to lend itself to purchase rather than rental. Columbia/Tri-Star is stupidly missing out on sales opportunites for this film by refusing to price it for retail. It's no wonder that, in spite of Hartley's following and how good this little film is, that it ranks very low on Amazon's sales rank. Thank goodness Hartley's other films have ended up in the hands of smarter and more savvy distributors.

Rating:
Summary: One of Hartley's best, why still not priced for retail?
Review: To his typically perceptive mix of quirky character-based comedy and drama, writer/director Hal Hartley adds a wry, clever, and offbeat noir style crime drama plot, though ultimately the film is still an exploration of identity issues, with Martin Donovan's amnesiac character serving as the focal point. The cast is superb, particulary Donovan in the lead, and Isabelle Huppert in the co-starring role of a pornography-writing ex-nun who decides to help him on his quest to find out who he is. Elina Lowensohn is, as always, wonderfully strange, haughty, beautiful and offbeat as someone who was an important part of the Donovan character's pre-amnesia life. To give away more would be to spoil somewhat the experience of seeing this delightful small-scale film for the first time.

It's astounding, though, that of all of Hartley's films, this is the ONLY one that has not been priced for retail sale. 96 bucks is simply an absurd price to have to pay for this, especially considering it's been 5 years since this film was released! Considering Hartley's loyal cult following, and the difficulty in finding a film like this for rent in a typical video store, this is definitley exactly the sort of film that would tend to lend itself to purchase rather than rental. Columbia/Tri-Star is stupidly missing out on sales opportunites for this film by refusing to price it for retail. It's no wonder that, in spite of Hartley's following and how good this little film is, that it ranks very low on Amazon's sales rank. Thank goodness Hartley's other films have ended up in the hands of smarter and more savvy distributors.