The Player (1992)
Bekkah:
We have hit the stage of Jeff Goldblum Movie Club where we are just looking for movies available to stream online, so today this is what we watched. (We’re saving The World According to… for more stressful days!) The longer this movie went on, the less I liked it. At the one-hour mark, I was like, “Danya, there is a whole nother hour left in this movie” and Danya was like “WTF?!” As soon as this movie started and the Criterion Collection logo showed up, Danya was like, “Oh no, is this art?” because we know we do not like Art Movies. It was definitely a Hollywood Art Movie, in that there were lots of scenes shot through windows, dialogue was often hard to hear, and the entire movie kept referencing itself throughout. Jeff made a one minute cameo as himself in a movie full of cameos. I suspect nothing in his scene was scripted and we didn’t really hear him say anything. He had on a delightful sweater, though! My other favorite cameos were John Cusack and Lily Tomlin. Peter Gallagher’s non-cameo in 90s glasses was very nice. I generally don’t like Hollywood movies about Hollywood, and this, sadly, was no exception!
Danya:
So this movie actually won some awards! Like the palm d’or at Cannes! SO FANCY. It showed it’s intense fanciness by having cameos by literally anyone who was recognizable in 1992, and thank god one of those people was Jeff in an unflattering sweater. This movie is the “breaking bad” of hollywood, where a nice studio exec guy just gets worse and worse until he is wearing all black! That’s how you know he’s bad now! I did appreciate that The Player passed the Bechdel test within the first five minutes, and that at least two speaking named characters where bad ass black ladies! Watch this just for the outfits, not for the meta film commentary on commentary.
4/10 Goldglums
A Hollywood studio executive is being sent death threats by a writer whose script he rejected, but which one?
Top credits
Director Robert Altman
Writer Michael Tolkin(screenplay)
Stars Tim Robbins Greta Scacchi Fred Ward