The Color of Money
2004-11-12 01:03:44.359786+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
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.