Flutterby™! : The Color of Money

After my report on seeing The Hustler, we rented The Color of Money last night. Wow, was that a dog. There are times when Martin Scorsese's overdone style of direction, with those dramatic camera moves and synchronized cuts, is appropriate. I enjoyed that feeling in The Age of Innocence. But in The Color of Money it felt like someone had gone nuts with the effects shots and the only thing missing was the checkerboard dissolve and the diagonal wipe. It didn't help any that the story sucked, the screenplay lacked subtlety, and the scoring was melodramatic.

There was one scene where this movie worked, the one where where Paul Newman takes on Forest Whitaker. Straight cuts, two great actors playing off each other. Other than that it's Tom Cruise chewing up the scenery with a completely unlikeable character, and everyone else trying to fit into a screenplay and sense of direction that just totally destroys whatever sense of humanity may have lain in the source novel.

I still want to read the book, mostly because I've heard that the movie is very different from the book. Skip the movie.