Oh you’ve got to see it. Infinitely rewatchable. I read the book too and enjoyed reading about the cons the movie didn’t include (until I found out the author greatly exaggerated his exploits).
When the Academy finally got around to giving Pacino an Oscar, it was the same damn year as Glengarry Glen Ross. If they really wanted to give Pacino an Oscar as an acknowledgment for all of the amazing performances he’d given without being awarded, this one was right there, and was the much better acting job than Scent of a Woman. He was nominated for Best Supporting for Glengarry Glen Ross, but still. They gave Best Supporting to Hackman for Unforgiven, which is a very deserving performance but not so undeniable that it would have been a travesty to not give him an award for it.
I much prefer how that year lays out if they give Best Actor to Denzel for Malcolm X and Best Supporting to Pacino for Glengarry Glen Ross. I mean, honestly I’d have given Best Supporting to Nicholson for A Few Good Men, but I understand the urge to want to seize the opportunity to give Pacino a win.
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Academy wouldn’t have given it to Denzel in that era despite being deserving of it.
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Hopefully one day I will
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re: GGR, for obvious reasons this movie has pretty legendary quotability status among sales people, but notably I probably see 20 mentions of steak knives for every brass balls reference. Both of those, however, are absolutely dwarfed by the number of references to this prop:
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This made me wonder if the “steak knives” thing inspired the line and then later call-back in A Few Good Men.
Weinberg: “Kaffee is considered to be the best litigator in our office. He successfully plea bargained 44 cases in 9 months.”
Kaffee: “One more and I get a set of steak knives.”
Later followed by Galloway bitterly telling him, “Sorry I lost your set of steak knives.”
But nah, they were released the same year. Just a coincidence I guess.
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The Glengarry role is such a wonderfully restrained performance from Pacino.
Denzel absolutely deserved an Oscar for Malcolm X. I think he was vindicated with his win for Training Day, but I learned from reading How to Make Friends with Black People that some people saw it as a shitty consolation prize.
I think an underrated performance in the Pacino catalog is his turn in Donnie Brasco. He, as the former Michael Corleone, taking on a role in a crime organization where he’s kind of a vulnerable and pathetic underling was a great thing to watch, and he really nailed it.
Denzel had won (again, quite deservedly) an Oscar for Glory for Best Supporting Actor, so he did have one of the little gold men at that point, but yeah, as great as Training Day was, it’s just not what the Malcolm X role was. It really wasn’t even the lead role in that movie even though it was the dominant one.
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But Denzel deserved the Oscar for Training Day. It was a pitch perfect performance and I remember when I was doing the commentary for the movie telling the commentary recording engineer that Denzel probably wouldn’t even get nominated but that he deserved to win the Oscar for that role. I was very pleasantly surprised at Oscar time and it was probably the happiest I’d been about anything related to the Academy in a while.
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Well, he goes off on Harris and Spacey in the last scene, but other than that, yeah, he’s pretty restrained.
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It’s a fine result. But I’m a big fan of the Russell Crowe performance in A Beautiful Mind also, so I tend to lean that way from that year.
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Never saw it, so can’t comment. I just know in a vacuum that Denzel’s performance in Training Day deserved the statue.
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Is that Jamie from the Progressive commercials in Twister?
No, but I can see the similarity for sure. The Twister guy didn’t age almost 30 years THAT well:
When watching it recently, I primarily recognized him as the Wonders’ first big fan in That Thing You Do.
Identity with John Cusack is a bad movie
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That is one of the two people I know who still do appearances multiple times per year!
His most famous role:
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Yes. Not accurate about DID or enjoyable as a thriller.
Watching Twister, the WSOP, and furiously scrolling Twitter at the same time.
WSOP: “Well he’s got blockers.” (player tanks 4 minutes over river minbet)
Twister: “GET OUT OF THERE!!!” (repeat 79 times)
There’s plenty of slack in the system is what I’m saying.
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I don’t understand why people goof on Twister. It’s a fun, well-directed, suspenseful, star-packed movie with pretty good special effects.
The scene at the drive-in is one of my favorite disaster scenes in cinema.
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Nevermind me, I’m just posting screenshots of twitter posts that don’t make sense and I failed to realize it until after I posted them.