Fool for Love

Rating:
Summary: Artsy Fartsy
Review: "Fool For Love" is based on a Sam Shepard`s play, and the movie`s leads are Shepard himself and Kim Basinger as a married couple who face an identity crisis and must overcome their differences in order to be unite again or disjointed forever. While the idea is promising and the first minutes intriguing, it soon turns into a pretensious, lifeless, slow and unfinishable picture. What could have been an interesting piece about love, guilt, dysfunction and desire becomes a sucession of empty dialogs, wooden monologues and tepid flashbacks that fail to engage. Director Robert Altman sure wasted a good opportunity with this snoozer. Avoid.

Rating:
Summary: Artsy Fartsy
Review: "Fool For Love" is based on a Sam Shepard`s play, and the movie`s leads are Shepard himself and Kim Basinger as a married couple who face an identity crisis and must overcome their differences in order to be unite again or disjointed forever. While the idea is promising and the first minutes intriguing, it soon turns into a pretensious, lifeless, slow and unfinishable picture. What could have been an interesting piece about love, guilt, dysfunction and desire becomes a sucession of empty dialogs, wooden monologues and tepid flashbacks that fail to engage. Director Robert Altman sure wasted a good opportunity with this snoozer. Avoid.

Rating:
Summary: A Poor Rendition of A Very Good Piece
Review: A disappointing treatment of a wonderful play. As is so often the case with Altman, there is just too much Hollywood here. Shepard and Basinger are both very capable actors but neither gets the chance to really put their stamp on this material. Altman's decision to make visual flashbacks out of the terrific monologues in the script compromises the real strength of Shepard's writing, i.e. the ability to let words evoke rather than indicate. This play premiered off-Broadway in the early eighties with Ed Harris and Kathy Baker in the principal roles and Shepard himself directing. It was a taut, rambunctiously physical performance with a great deal of humor mixed in to balance the anger and angst, a powerful and inspiring work. Too bad there wasn't a video made of this production because it realized the essence of Shepard's script in ways that are conspicuously absent from Altman's film, particularly the humor. I was surprised that Sam gave his stamp of approval to this film, given its overblown cinematography and cliched Hollywood-isms. If you are looking for a good video of a Shepard play, try to find the Great Performances video of "True West" starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise (don't know if it's available in retail but it appears every once in a while on public television). This is how Shepard should be done.

Rating:
Summary: perfect shepard.
Review: beautifully haunting film about identity and loss. thought provoking only as a sam shepard play could be. big bonus--altman's offbeat, straight-forward direction. must see.

Rating:
Summary: perfect shepard.
Review: beautifully haunting film about identity and loss. thought provoking only as a sam shepard play could be. big bonus--altman's offbeat, straight-forward direction. must see.

Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking--troubling, humorous, and haunting
Review: No one can write about human relationship dysfunction and obsession like Sam Shepard. In a very artistic way Shepard drives home how gentleness,love,loyalty,rage, dispair and loneliness can conflict in us. This movie is about the psychology of family traditions of pain and how we recreate our "family curses" from one generation to the next. I have to believe that Shepard is showing us these problems so graphically in an attempt to teach us to break with the sickness of our pasts. This is not a nice,light, playful movie--it is disturbing but insightful and touching.

Rating:
Summary: Same old Shepard galvanized by master artisan
Review: Shepard loves incest, family abuse, cowboys and rambling loose dialogue. And that seems to be all he knows. For all of his artistic integrity his plays have always felt a little on the nose and a little juvenile (his films even worse!). Altman's multiplicity of points of view, suppressed narration and mass-media-esque techniques give wonderful life to a play that is hardly worth the attention.

Rating:
Summary: A great Robert Altman ? Sam Shepard collaboration
Review: The first perceptions one has of a work of art likely set one's standard by which that work is subsequently judged in comparison with its presentation in another medium. For example if the work is first encountered as a stage-play, then that form becomes the defacto standard for later comparisons, and a subsequent film of that work will likely never achieve one's preconceived expectations. This reviewer first encountered "Fool for Love" in a local theatre in 1985, never having seen the original play.

Readers who are fans of Tennessee Williams' PBS/Showtime 1984 TV version of "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof" with Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones (forget the worthless and sickeningly bowdlerized 1958 Taylor-Newman version, a perfect example of how rampant, uncontrolled religious censorship runs amok and destroys a work of art); or fans of Eugene O'Neill's 1960 "The Iceman Cometh (the Broadway Archive version with Jason Robards); will find this film fits neatly within that pantheon. With this work, Sam Shepard's genius rightly assumes co-equal rank with that of both Williams and O'Neill.

But there is a difference between this film and that of the two outstanding films cited above. This work is NOT just the filming of a great stage-play inside some cheesy New Mexico motel room. Director Altman actually had the complete, rundown "El Royale" motel-cabin, restaurant-bar and junkyard complex built to his specifications outside Sante Fe, where a 360 degree camera sweep would reveal nothing else beyond the complex but the isolated, lonely mountainous and grassy scrubland just off the interstate. The set is complete with flickering burned-out neon; abandoned vehicles; curtain-covered "kitchenette", tiny bath lavatory, medicine cabinet and stool in every cabin; and urine-God-only-knows-what-else stained mattresses (with bed vibrators); a way-station for desperate travelers going elsewhere. Director Altman reports in the documentary that the film set construction was so realistic, travelers passing on the interstate would actually stop and try to book accommodations or eat in the "restaurant."

Character interactions are complex and intense, at times funny yet simultaneously deadly serious, loaded with crackling, sizzling dialog and byplay which run tempestuously hot and cold. While these behaviors seem initially inexplicable, they are driven by past events, which growing intimations and clarifications gradually unveil. The present day portrayals are freely intermixed with metaphors and ghostly influences from that past. The shocking realities of that past are shown in flashback with all the contradictions and lies of convenience that creep into such re-telling. The way these elements are brought seamlessly together make this a film of such depth that it screams out for multiple viewings to appreciate its full merits.

Because of the vitality and completeness down to every last detail; a large background cast of other people including bit-parts and stand-ins for principal actors when they were younger; horses and cattle galore; functioning beat-up cars, trucks with dirty windshields and horse-trailers; and characters' past flashbacks filmed in a variety of supporting locales; this production never once assumes the aura of its stage-play origins. No matter how much one touts the supremacy of the original play, one would have to concede that there are elements of this joint Altman-Shepard recreation of Shepard's original that would simply be impossible to realize on the stage.

Sam Shepard's screenplay is perfectly realized. Robert Altman's direction of the story, the actors, and the background settings is nothing short of masterful. The cast is uniformly superb. Pierre Mignot's beautifully clear and largely night-time color cinematography and George Burt's musical assemblage blend it all together into an unforgettable masterpiece of cinematic art.

A fascinating 20 minute making-of documentary by Robert Altman (refreshingly low-key in comparison to the usual rampant narcissism displayed in too many such documentaries) is included, along with the original theatrical trailer. The DVD's 1.85:1 original theatrical aspect ratio picture quality is excellent. Sound is fine, though stereo surround effects are muted or non-existent, not a problem as such effects could make no contribution. Like Williams and O'Neill, Shepard has created a highly cerebral film. Those who are teen-age action-adventure addicts need not waste their time on this pre-eminently adult fare

Rating:
Summary: A great Robert Altman ¿ Sam Shepard collaboration
Review: The first perceptions one has of a work of art likely set one's standard by which that work is subsequently judged in comparison with its presentation in another medium. For example if the work is first encountered as a stage-play, then that form becomes the defacto standard for later comparisons, and a subsequent film of that work will likely never achieve one's preconceived expectations. This reviewer first encountered "Fool for Love" in a local theatre in 1985, never having seen the original play.

Readers who are fans of Tennessee Williams' PBS/Showtime 1984 TV version of "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof" with Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones (forget the worthless and sickeningly bowdlerized 1958 Taylor-Newman version, a perfect example of how rampant, uncontrolled religious censorship runs amok and destroys a work of art); or fans of Eugene O'Neill's 1960 "The Iceman Cometh (the Broadway Archive version with Jason Robards); will find this film fits neatly within that pantheon. With this work, Sam Shepard's genius rightly assumes co-equal rank with that of both Williams and O'Neill.

But there is a difference between this film and that of the two outstanding films cited above. This work is NOT just the filming of a great stage-play inside some cheesy New Mexico motel room. Director Altman actually had the complete, rundown "El Royale" motel-cabin, restaurant-bar and junkyard complex built to his specifications outside Sante Fe, where a 360 degree camera sweep would reveal nothing else beyond the complex but the isolated, lonely mountainous and grassy scrubland just off the interstate. The set is complete with flickering burned-out neon; abandoned vehicles; curtain-covered "kitchenette", tiny bath lavatory, medicine cabinet and stool in every cabin; and urine-God-only-knows-what-else stained mattresses (with bed vibrators); a way-station for desperate travelers going elsewhere. Director Altman reports in the documentary that the film set construction was so realistic, travelers passing on the interstate would actually stop and try to book accommodations or eat in the "restaurant."

Character interactions are complex and intense, at times funny yet simultaneously deadly serious, loaded with crackling, sizzling dialog and byplay which run tempestuously hot and cold. While these behaviors seem initially inexplicable, they are driven by past events, which growing intimations and clarifications gradually unveil. The present day portrayals are freely intermixed with metaphors and ghostly influences from that past. The shocking realities of that past are shown in flashback with all the contradictions and lies of convenience that creep into such re-telling. The way these elements are brought seamlessly together make this a film of such depth that it screams out for multiple viewings to appreciate its full merits.

Because of the vitality and completeness down to every last detail; a large background cast of other people including bit-parts and stand-ins for principal actors when they were younger; horses and cattle galore; functioning beat-up cars, trucks with dirty windshields and horse-trailers; and characters' past flashbacks filmed in a variety of supporting locales; this production never once assumes the aura of its stage-play origins. No matter how much one touts the supremacy of the original play, one would have to concede that there are elements of this joint Altman-Shepard recreation of Shepard's original that would simply be impossible to realize on the stage.

Sam Shepard's screenplay is perfectly realized. Robert Altman's direction of the story, the actors, and the background settings is nothing short of masterful. The cast is uniformly superb. Pierre Mignot's beautifully clear and largely night-time color cinematography and George Burt's musical assemblage blend it all together into an unforgettable masterpiece of cinematic art.

A fascinating 20 minute making-of documentary by Robert Altman (refreshingly low-key in comparison to the usual rampant narcissism displayed in too many such documentaries) is included, along with the original theatrical trailer. The DVD's 1.85:1 original theatrical aspect ratio picture quality is excellent. Sound is fine, though stereo surround effects are muted or non-existent, not a problem as such effects could make no contribution. Like Williams and O'Neill, Shepard has created a highly cerebral film. Those who are teen-age action-adventure addicts need not waste their time on this pre-eminently adult fare