SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

billcr12 Harvey Keitel is Jimmy fingers, a man divided by his passion for the piano and his day job as a collector for his mobster father. He is the perfect choice for this dark and schizophrenic role, since it matches his personality. His father is Italian, and he wishes him to carry on in the family business, and his Jewish mother hopes for him to become a concert pianist, and so that is what he must choose from. It is pretty straight forward, as he slips back and forth from sitting at a keyboard, performing classical music, and in the next moment, beating someone for not paying his debts in a timely manner. I love Keitel as an actor, but I found Fingers tedious and I didn't really care what happened to the nut case in the end. A 5/10 for Harvey.

MBunge This late 70s film is nicely filmed and looks very good. Now, if I were going to follow the adage of "if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all", there would nothing else I could say about Fingers. Since I'm something of a bitter prick, there's a whole lot more to this review. This aimless mess is fully of caricaturish performances and scenes that look like outtakes accidentally left in the movie. When watching it, I frequently couldn't believe what writer/director James Toback was offering to me on screen and spent much of the last half of Fingers laughing at the gaudy, overwrought, nonsensical nature of it.Jimmy (Harvey Keitel) is a man in his late 20s who desperately wants to be a concert pianist. He practices relentlessly and childishly mouths along with the notes as he plays. Jimmy is also an obviously disturbed young man with an explosive temper and a needy desire for the opposite sex. He's got a mother in a mental ward and a father who's a loan shark. This story concerns the thoroughly disconnected strands of Jimmy getting a chance to audition for Carnegie Hall, his fixation on a woman he sees out on the street one day and his father asking Jimmy to collect on two outstanding debts. Along the way we see a scuffle over Jimmy's 1970s purse-sized portable radio and cassette player, a rectal exam, a bathroom sexual encounter that resembles a man trying to squeeze under a limbo bar and football great Jim Brown portraying the forerunner of South Park's Chef.This film is just ridiculous. It appears to be an middle class take on a Taxi Driver-ish breakdown with an undercurrent of homosexuality thrown in, but it's so meandering and parts of it are so exaggerated that it's hard to know for sure. There are moments in this movie that come out of nowhere and then vanish back into oblivion. The three separate plot threads are so fragmented and halting it's as if the script were written longhand by someone with Parkinson's disease. It's kind of difficult to accurately describe Fingers because there are so many odd moments that are played completely seriously when they actually belong in the gag reel as the end of one of Burt Reynolds' Cannonball Run movies. I mean, writer/director Toback literally spends the better part of a minute showing a couple of white chicks sucking on Jim Brown's nipples. What do you say about that?Harvey Keitel is…well, Harvey Keitel and yes, he does end up naked at one point looking into the camera with a "What do you want me to do about it?" look on his face. He does a nice job with the symptoms of Jimmy's personality disorders but there's nothing whole or coherent about the role he was given. Tisa Farrow as the woman Jimmy's obsessed with speaks and moves in a monotone. As for the rest of the cast, all you can do is play "Spot the future member of The Sopranos".When talented creators do crappy work, their admirers often feel compelled to pretend otherwise. That's about the only explanation I can come up with for why this thing made it to DVD. It's astonishingly poor storytelling put to no good use.

christopher-underwood Some may love this early Keitel movie but it is one hell of an ugly little bugger, with awkward sex, a fumbled rape and a vigorous rectal exploration. The drab 70s streets of New York are atmospheric but not much else is. Keitel carries around transistor radio on which he plays late 50s early 60s pop wherever he goes. At home however he is practising to be a concert hall pianist and we have to listen to large bouts of Bach while he pretends to be oh so involved. It is a strange fidgety performance, clearly at the behest of Toback, who has his mother in a mental hospital and his mobster father acting even more like a nut. Sorry not for me.

sol ****SPOILERS**** Outlandish motion picture that tries to cover too much ground and in the end gets buried under it. Harvey Keitel, Jimmy "Fingers" Angelelli, comes across as a borderline psycho who's about to explode, which is just what he does at the end of the movie. Jimmy is pressured by wanting to become a Carnegie Hall caliber Bach playing pianist and at the same time doing his job for his dad Ben, Michael V. Gazzo, a Mafia loan shark. Jimmy who's very sexually active with the ladies he even seems to be interested in men as well. We get to see Jimmy early in the film making eye-contact with an obviously gay waiter at a restaurant as if he wanted to pick him up. Jimmy unfortunately has a very severe prostate condition that becomes inflamed and unbearable when ever he has sex. It turns out that having sex for Jimmy is more like rape and his prostate condition drives him almost out of his head. I did like the brutal mobster, debt collector, contrasted by the sensitive artist, pianist, angle of the movie. This contradiction stems from Jimmy's gangster father Ben and pianist mother Ruth, Marian Seldes, who we later see in a hospital ward suffering from a mental breakdown. Writer/Director James Toback seemed to add something in "Fingers" straight out of the movie "Taxi Driver", which Harvey Keitel also stared in, into the story. We have Jimmy falling in love and then wanting to save Carol (Tisa Farrow) who's, when we first see her, a sculpture. Later when we meet Carol's boss or pimp Dreems, Jim Brown, we realize that Carol is hooker which makes her a combination of both Iris & Betsy in "Taxi Driver". You begin to think that Jimmy like Travis Bickel in "Taxi Driver" will in the end dispatch Dreems and his henchmen and save Carol from her life of sin and have her back living with her parents and family. Instead the movie just can't make up it's mind and as it comes to it's brutal conclusion Carol and her pimp Dreems are totally written out or forgotten about! It's as if they were put in the film just to fill in some time to make it a full-length 90 minutes motion picture!I felt that Jimmy's unrestrained brutality in the movie was more due to his failure to become a concert pianist then to his painful sexual experiences due to his prostate condition. Since his prostrate is treatable with medication but his failure as a concert pianist isn't. It's just that Jimmy can't mentally get it all together whenever he's on stage playing th piano and being judged by music critics. We see Jimmy in action early in the film when he cold-cocks the massive and powerful pizza store owner Luchino, Lenny Montana, who owed his lone shark dad Ben money that he lent him. But as the movie goes on it's obvious that Jimmy is getting more and more out of control because his both uncontrolled and painful sexual urges. Jimmy virtually rapes Julie, Tanya Roberts, in order to intimidate mobsters Riccamonza's, Tony Sirico, girlfriend who also owes Jimmy's dad money. Later Jimmy forces himself on Carol who you thought up until then he was trying to rescue from a life on the streets and practically rapes her as well. The worst and most sickening act by Jimmy is when as an act of revenge he savagely beats and murders Riccamonza who had Jimmy's father killed. Jimmy murders Riccamonza by blowing his eyes out of his eye-sockets like he said that he would do earlier in the movie; luckily for Riccamonza he was already dead when that happened! As the movie "Fingers" ends we see Jimmy stark naked playing the piano in his apartment with absolutely no musical skill at all and obviously insane. All alone in the world, everyone that he loved and cared for have either died or left him, Jimmy is just waiting for the men in the white suits to take him away in handcuffs and a straight-jacket.