Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Crwthod A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

Martin Bradley One of John Cassavetes' greatest films is also one of his least known. He made it in 1971 and over the years it has been largely forgotten. I've seen it described as a romantic comedy and even as a screwball comedy but I found it very disturbing. It's not a comedy and I'm not even sure it's a love story. It's characters are all dysfunctional, unhappy people and Minnie and Moskowitz are the most dysfunctional of all.She works in a museum and he works as a car-parking attendant and the film charts their hit and miss relationships, with each other and with other people. It is also largely improvised which gives it the feeling of life being lived in front of our eyes rather than simply being played out but these are people you definitely wouldn't want to know or maybe they aren't people at all but just extentions of Cassavetes' off-the-wall imagination.It is magnificently acted by Cassavetes' repertory company of friends and family though at times it feels more like a series of classes at the Actor's Studio. Gena Rowlands is Minnie and Seymour Cassell is Moskowitz and they are superb as you would expect as indeed are everyone else, particularly Val Avery and Timothy Carey as men having meltdowns in restaurants and an uncredited Cassavetes as an unfaithful husband, while the cinematography of the three credited cinematographers, (Alric Edens, Michael Margulies and Arthur J. Ornitz), gives the film the documentary-like look the director obviously intended. This is independent cinema at its purest and most unrefined; scary, moving, rarely romantic. Just don't call it a comedy.

chaos-rampant Step the third in my journey through Cassavetes..Here, he takes one of the most popular movie formats, the romance. Boy- meets-girl in LA, under the lights. But she is no cool femme fatale, she is fragile, unsure of herself. He is no Bogie himself; as the film starts he is watching The Maltese Falcon in a theater, a scene where Mary Astor throws herself crying on Bogie's feet. Trying to pick up women afterwards, he's chased out of bars, looked at as a weirdo and beaten up in an alley.The idea is that we are not going to see movie people, but real people on the street. That was the ambition anyway, a situation aggravated by Cassavetes' actorly Studio background—as in Husbands, we have constant shouting matches, awkward intrusions, obnoxious pulling and nervousness. He seems to think the room inhabited by these characters won't feel real and lived, unless we have damage on the walls, a Greek sensibility, after all the main story recasts Zorba. So unlike a Bogart film, the actors here don't coolly glide off each other, they cut themselves on each other's edges.The same situation develops here as I described in my comment on Husbands. The edges, the damage are unusually pronounced, by this I mean a situation like when Moskowitz almost runs her over with his truck to get her to go with him takes me out of it. A softer next moment will pull me in again, until the next hysteric one and so on. Which brings me to my main discussion about presence.Moskowitz is the kind of character who can be likable once you get to know him, the sort of bond you form with coworkers that greatly depends on shared time. Minnie is warm when we first see her, but there's a haughty, nervous ghost in her. It is, let's say, a truer to life perception than the immediately charming Bogarts and Stanwycks of old. It requires work to take them in, giving space.That narrative room, that space where characters wreck themselves and things works the same way once you excise the shouty moments, simply wonderful. None of the individual visual moments are cool or typically beautiful. The locales are drab and mundane. The light and textures all natural, the whole is imperfect but breathes. In this, he equals Pasolini, another master of the living eye.So on a moment-by- moment basis, the space is like the characters, intensely present flow to undefined horizon. In a movie like the Maltese Falcon, the narrative horizon is immediately defined (get the bird), and again defined in every scene (get out of there, rough someone up, etc.) so we are at all times comfortably tethered, enjoying the play. What Cassavetes does matters in the long run in the sculpting of the overall effect, it doesn't leap to attention.Like Husbands, this slowly starts to work for me once I have a narrative shift that faintly, very faintly defines a certain horizon in the story—here marriage. Cassavetes is work, because this happens so late in the movie, the bulk of it is like staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration, or waiting for musicians to tune their instruments. Here, that shift happens about 9/10ths in the film, and then we're through that and a new horizon opens, the closing shots of family life and then it's over.So it starts to work late but extends for me to long after it's over, it's one of the most haunting effects I know, transcendentally marvelous; more on that in the next comment on Woman.

tomgillespie2002 Not known for his ability for comedy, pioneer of American Independent Cinema, John Cassavetes, is on romantic comedy grounds here, taking the traditional movie love-story and turning it very much on its head. Eccentric parking-lot attendant Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) re- locates to California, working the same job and living in a small rented room. Museum curator Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) is an emotionally damaged yet extremely attractive 40-something woman who is in an abusive relationship with her secretive partner Jim (Cassavetes himself). A chance encounter puts Minnie and Moskowitz together, and two fume at each other for the duration. Only Seymour falls in love with Minnie, who he feels looks down on people, and Minnie becomes reluctantly curious about this strange man.While following the long tradition of the romantic comedy, anyone expecting a squeaky-clean Rock Hudson/Doris Day Technicolor screwball comedy will be sorely disappointed. Cassavetes sticks to his game using extreme close-ups, a hand-held camera, and semi-improvised performances to tell a story that feels real, but maintains the warmness and the satisfaction that the best of the genre have provided in the past. The film is very much about how movies mid-lead you, and as Minnie states 'they set you up for disappointment'. Minnie and her friend watch Casablanca (1942), and discuss how there are no Humphrey Bogart's or Clark Cable's out there, because they don't exist. Who does exist, however, is Seymour Moskowitz.Cassel is absolutely exceptional in the role, playing his long- moustached, pony-tailed character as quirky and warm, as well as aggressive and often plain insane. He seems to win Minnie over by yelling at her, explaining how it isn't fair how a less-attractive and relatively poor man can't be with Minnie simply because she's richer and physically desirable, but Minnie finds his frankness fresh. With show- stealing cameos by Val Avery and Timothy Carey, as two strange men who the two leads meet over the course of the film, Minnie and Moskowitz is a strange and interesting look at love through the eyes of two sometimes unlikeable, yet utterly compelling people.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

caspian1978 At times, you forget that you are watching a movie and not the lives of two average (but unique) people and the incomplete lives that they live. Searching for love, if not just acceptance, both live in a world where relationships are as confusing as the people in the relationship. By the end of the movie you can't help but smile at the images Cassavetes captures in the last 30 seconds. Without any narrative, Cassavetes gives the conclusion to the two character's lives together. True happiness...