jimddddd
As a fan of John Fante's 1939 novel I've tried to watch this film several times, but I'm never able to get through it. I don't like the characters as presented here, and not for a second did I believe I was in 1930s Los Angeles. On the DVD commentary track, Robert Towne says he built the set in Cape Town, South Africa, because he couldn't find any parts of Los Angeles suitable as locations for the film. That's funny, because when Roman Polanski made Towne's "Chinatown" twenty years earlier, he had no trouble finding local places that effectively evoked the period. To make matters worse, the "Ask the Dust" movie set didn't even depict the Bunker Hill neighborhood--a real character in the book--but rather showed it only in the background as a distorted Third Street tunnel and the adjacent funicular, Angels Flight. Frankly, the Los Angeles of "Ask the Dust" couldn't have been less authentic if Towne had saved himself all the trouble and simply shot it on the Paramount back lot.
tieman64
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway1939. John Fante writes "Ask the Dust", the tale of a young man embarking on a literary career. Years later a young Robert Towne stumbles upon and voraciously devours Fante's novels, most of which attempt to paint a portrait of early 20th century Los Angeles. Decades pass. Towne embarks on his own literary career. He scores big with his screenplay for Roman Polanski's "Chinatown", a LA set noir influenced and flavoured by Fante. Towne and Fante personally meet in the 1970s. Fante dies in 1983. Two decades later Towne adapts "Ask the Dust" for the screen.Those looking for a faithful adaptation of Fante's novel will be disappointed. Towne has been sculpted "Ask the Dusk" into a deliberate, five-way romance: a distillation of Towne's long-time love for Fante, Towne's adoration of noir (and its assorted signs, trinkets and decor), Towne and Fante's love for early Los Angeles (its history, its characters, locales and heartbeat), Towne's idealisation of the Romantic image of the struggling artist, and the in-film love affair between an artist (played by Colin Farrell) and a Mexican waitress (Salma Hayek).The film can't touch Nicholas Ray's "In A Lonely Place", but to those attuned to Towne's very specific yearnings it's a very good film. Towne's no visualist, but he's a good enough writer to capture the essence of a noirish LA, with its flapping curtains, decrepit apartments, barflies, lonely hearts, drunks, scroungers, con-men, palm trees and sun-baked pavements. It's a nostalgia rush, all of which is married to an idealised, heavily romanticised portrait of a struggling artist – super good looking of course – who spends his time bedding lush Mexican women (a bosomy Salma Hayek) or sitting valiantly at a typewriter, pounding prose on page while chiaroscuro lighting bathes his body. The most interesting thing about the film, though, is its narrative arc. Farrell, who plays our budding artist (a surrogate for both Towne and Fante), has a massive insecurity complex and hates himself because he's Italian. Of course many burgeoning artists develop their artistic talents as a means of assuaging personal issues (alienation, rootlessness, self esteem problems etc). Art them becomes a means of reconnection; the product of the outsider looking inwards. The marginality of the artist then often results in the artist developing, as a sort of self-defence mechanism, a sense of superiority or inflated ego ("I hate them for making me an outsider", "I want to be with them", "I am too good to be with them", "I'm a great artist", "superior", "going places", "don't need them", "so confused!" etc). As the artist must put him or herself far out on the line, and often stand alone, such an inflation – or an almost bipolar flip-flop from feelings of unworthiness to massive self-exaltation – then becomes all that keeps her or him persevering. Now the Farrell character, because he is supremely self-loathing, begins to lash out at anyone and anything that reminds him of his own lowliness. One of his targets is Salma Hayek's character (too beautiful for such a role), a poor Mexican waitress. She reminds him of that which he wishes to escape. By the film's end, however, Farrell drops his hate, his aloofness, and begins to identify with others, empathise and speak up for them. Being a writer then becomes not a mark of status, but a duty. This tension itself increasingly obsessed Fante, his books ostensibly revolving around arrogant characters seeking independence, fame and success, while actually serving as a vehicle to introduce readers to a city, its inhabitants and their plights. In the film, Farrell's re-connection with the marginalised - the very subjects of his future art - is symbolised as a series of romantic or sexual encounters with physically deformed women and society's dregs. The film is not about "immigration", "racism" and "poverty", as some claim, but something more generalised: artists or spectators forging empathic connections with their objects. As empathy by definition cannot function without imagination, you might say empathy is itself a kind of art. This is why it is important that Towne prolong the sex scene between Farrell and Hayek, and why it is important that it is at her most desirable moment that she cough and be sickly. Incidentally, evolutionary speaking, empathy or "sharing someone else's emotion" need not yield pro-social behaviour. If perceiving another person in a painful circumstance elicits personal, physical or emotional distress, then the observer may tend not to attend fully to the other's experience and as a result seem to lack sympathetic behaviours. As empathic concern can lead to personal distress, such "commections" are also often blocked out. This may explain why, statistically, excessively empathetic humans are less likely to be pro-social and perhaps why artists prefer to disconnect and engage with the world safely by proxy.8/10 – Interesting, but somewhat poorly directed and should have been better written. Will appeal only to noir-heads, artists and romantics. Seek out Fante's much copied novel. Worth one viewing.
dominus17
I don't know why most IMDb reviews tend to say every movie is garbage. Ask the Dust was not one of them. It is excellent! It is very funny at some parts and it has great performances from Salma, Colin and Idina above all. It is full of passion, spirit and logical things. The script is a very good one. Everything they said made sense and was very intelligent. I personally enjoyed very much the discussion scenes between Colin and Salma. They were awesome! This picture deserved much more support and more objective comments! The book might be better than the film, but still, this film is very romantic and passionate. It has those moments where human nature and romance comes into play, I love them. Salma and Colin fit for those roles perfectly. Anyone else suggesting other actors are ignorant fans of their own actors. Movie worth seeing. But if you are another IMDb critic, who doesn't know how to appreciate a good movie, then ...
joel-280
Gorgeous bodies, gorgeous colors and camera work, pretentious dialog, banal plot. The name of the prima donna, Camilla, and the eponymous flowers that appear frequently, are enough to remind us of the plot similarities from Dumas' novel La Dame aux Camelias, the movie Camille starring Garbo and (I think) Robert Taylor, and last but not least Verdi's opera La Traviata. Beautiful, not-too-virtuous young ladies, social outcasts for one reason or another, loved, split up, reunited just in time to die of tuberculosis in the last scene... One forgives banal plots and stupid unrealistic dialog in opera, but why waste Hayak, Don Sutherland, a beautiful rendition of LA in the 30s, a deus ex machina earthquake that conveniently kills the other woman, and all that beauty on this mediocre turkey where there isn't even any beautiful singing?
