Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: The Poll

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: The Poll

****
3
16%
*** 1/2
1
5%
***
3
16%
** 1/2
0
No votes
**
6
32%
* 1/2
2
11%
*
3
16%
1/2 *
1
5%
0
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 19

Zahveed
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Post by Zahveed »

Akash wrote:PSH is an obnoxious, smug actor whom I've never really liked, and I find the conventional opinion that he's "an actor's actor" or "a real actor" boring. It's something people say to make themselves sound more intuitive, or because they think it's cool. I also didn't think there was anything award worthy about Capote or his performance.

The only thing I really liked him in was Fifteen Minute Hamlet. :cool:
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Post by Greg »

Sabin wrote:You walk into this movie, you sit down, and there he is. All of him. ALL OF HIM.
I take it that, as this is an R-rated movie, the most you see of PSH is his Mr. Sad and not his Mr. Happy.
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Post by Akash »

PSH is an obnoxious, smug actor whom I've never really liked, and I find the conventional opinion that he's "an actor's actor" or "a real actor" boring. It's something people say to make themselves sound more intuitive, or because they think it's cool. I also didn't think there was anything award worthy about Capote or his performance.

If these nude scenes prove anything about Hoffman as an actor, it's that the emperor has no clothes.

Thanks for the warning Sabin. My poor eyes are grateful.




Edited By Akash on 1194409096
Sabin
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Post by Sabin »

Akash, you don't understand. You walk into this movie, you sit down, and there he is. All of him. ALL OF HIM.

You will see Ethan Hawke's tushy. That will happen. You will see Marisa Tomei naked for about ten minutes. That will happen. You will also see more jiggles than anything since 'Sidewalks' and more freckles than any movie Julianne Moore made before '99. Before she got "respectable" and boring. And clad.

Your call, Akash.
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Post by Akash »

Why is it every review of the film begins or mentions early enough, the sex scene involving Hoffman? My god, does anyone really want that image to stay? I don't even think naked Ethan Hawke is worth sitting through that.



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kaytodd
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Post by kaytodd »

Mister Tee wrote:And have I mentioned the last 15 minutes really go over the top? Not quite to the point of outright giggles, but oh so close.
When I saw this film, there was derisive laughter from the audience several times during the entire "hospital scene."
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living. Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Post by Mister Tee »

George Carlin once said if you took two things that had never been combined before and nailed them together, some schmuck would buy the result from you. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead combines a fractured-time/heist gone wrong flick with a dysfunctional family/self-destrictive loser offspring drama.

At the point -- roughly an hour in -- where the second element takes over (though it's been obvious from early on it was coming), the film does become pretty engaging/diverting, at least in the Carlin, Well-I've-never-seen-this-before way. Having a stable of strong actors helps make you think, for a while, that maybe something unique might be pulled off. But soon enough things sag. The family history portion of the story -- crucial to the film's being taken "seriously" -- is woefully underwritten. No one wants tearful explanatory monologues about what turned Hoffman and Hawke into such pathetic specimens, but we want SOMETHING. As it is, they're characters too puny to care about (and the film gives us the tears anyway -- as in Finney/Hoffman's "scene" -- just tears that don't mean anything). The film almost seems to count on our having seen other films like this before, so we can just fill in our preferred back stories. (In fact the whole dramaturgy seems antiquated -- if I were pitching it honestly, I couldn't say Reservoir Dogs-meets-Six Feet Under; I'd have to say The Killing meets Toys in the Attic)

And have I mentioned the last 15 minutes really go over the top? Not quite to the point of outright giggles, but oh so close.

No blame for the actors, who all do their best. It's good to see Hoffman back in something that suits him. Hawke is solid as well. Tomei is unobjectionable, though, for a character who's around so much of the time, I don't feel I know much about her. Again, the script is mostly at fault.

Have to disagree iwth you about the score, Sabin. I was shocked in the end credits to find it was Burwell, whose work I've so liked in the past. I thought the music soggily underlined every banality on display; I have to assume it's what the director wanted.

There's no reason for Damien to revise his long-standing opinion of Lumet: not a thing is visually distinguished about the film. I'm a bit baffled why the critics have so rallied around him here. Perhaps it's Frenzy syndrome -- so superior to the complete gunk he's been turning out of late that it feels great by comparison.

Still waiting for the movie that knocks me out.
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Post by Sabin »

(outwardly stealing from Sonic's 'The Departed' post last year)

Dude, I don't care what anybody says. This is the best film that Wayne Kramer ever did. Wayne Kramer made such a substantial leap forward in sensibilities and restraint, and even though ultimately the film makes far too many stretches in credibility, the star of the show is Wayne Kramer, who finally learns how to cover a scene (and he does, incredibly) and lets his actors just feel free to enjoy themselves. Wayne Kramer has never been so relaxed in his approach. I can't imagine a respectable director being interested in such a retrograde script, which is admittedly pretty elementary in concept but still full of some gem moments. No doubt the casting aided immeasurably, but while I can't fully embrace the thing, I'm not annoyed that it exists. Because honestly, it's a Wayne Kramer movie! Who's gonna take it too seriously! None of the characters have real motivation for anything and there are leaps in logic that most humans don't usually demonstrate until they've been doing coke for two solid weeks. Just enjoy it!

...well, I can't now, because everybody thinks that it's some great piece of work, and it's not. It's just not. I don't like the script but I enjoy the moments it enables quite a bit. I think I like them because the performances seem to override the inherent falsities of the screenplay but I like them nonetheless. Ethan Hawke plays such a fantastic fuck-up in this film, a beautiful performance that would otherwise be unbearable. Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent as well. I don't buy them as brothers though for a fucking second. Marisa Tomei is quite good; I'll never understand the hate directed against her, but then again I don't think that 'My Cousin Vinny' comes close to being her best work. She's pretty good here. Carter Burwell's score is pretty masterful, and Sidney Lumet knows how to bring out the best in his actors and cover a scene very, very well. It's some of his best you-make-your-days-and-you-make-them-well directing in a while, but the script isn't worthy. I'm not sure if I liked it as a whole on any level but it's a pretty gripping piece of trash. Unfortunately, I'm emphasizing 'trash' and not 'gripping', and not 'trash' in a positive fashion. In the wake of the box office disaster that is 'In the Valley of Elah', I call 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead' the most overrated film of the year.
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Post by dws1982 »

Armond White trashes it:

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Kelly Masterson mistake pornographic fascination for human truth

By Armond White


Before The Devil Knows Your Dead
Directed by Sidney Lumet


Is the naked, doggy-style sex scene between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei that opens Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead blunt and repellant because it reflects the personalities of the characters? Or is it just that director Sidney Lumet is incapable of sensuality and tenderness? We see Hoffman and Tomei bumping uglies, but they’re locked in self-gratification: He checks himself out in a nearby mirror, an image meant to shock but is just gruesome.

And Before the Devil goes down the toilet from there. At age 83, Lumet tries getting back to the outrageous satirical mode of Network and Just Tell Me What You Want, but this family dysfunction story—brothers Andy (Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) rob their Mom and Pop’s Westchester jewelry store resulting in calamity—fails the classic requirements of social critique. Kelly Masterson’s first-time screenplay ignores the social elite, falling into the muddled gray area of the middle-class and lower. That’s where money is desperately sought-after, keyed to each person’s misguided notion of happiness. Andy’s a paunchy, sneaky real estate broker, his wife Gina (Tomei) screws with the younger Hank who works in an office wearing a cheap, ill-fitting suit and is up to his weak smile in debt.

Masterson wallows in every character’s monstrous banality. His revelation that all this distrust, betrayal and incompetence stems from unfair parenting is laughable, a degradation of satire. Instead of scrutinizing petit bourgeois greed, he offers us petty Borgias (“Sopranos” clones) in the glum style of HBO realism.

Gullible critics who hail this freak show as a portrait of how we live today should only speak for themselves, but of course, they don’t. Lumet and Masterson make it so easy to be judgmental about sub-mental characters. This moral failure goes past condescension into obnoxious, cynical bemusement. Each character—including the remote, unloving father (Albert Finney) and Hank’s shrewish ex-wife (Amy Ryan, repeating her Gone Baby Gone nag)—is a loser and a user. Masterson’s concept is like Andy watching himself rut—a peek at animalistic behavior that mistakes pornographic fascination for human truth.

Lumet doesn’t get that Masterson has written beneath the delirious moralizing of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network script and lacks the class consciousness of Jay Presson Allen’s script for Just Tell Me What You Want. That hard-edged New York comedy-of-manners had an old-fashioned sentimental core. Released soon after Manhattan, it couldn’t compete with Woody Allen’s fashionable narcissism, but it remains Lumet’s most underrated film—perhaps the truest to the kind of aggressive, hubristic New Yorker he’s knows best.

The hype that Lumet is a New York director par excellence, based on Dog Day Afternoon and his cop-movies Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A and Night Falls on Manhattan has passed into legend, thus into critical cant. But Before the Devil doesn’t have that brusque presentation of the city’s ethnic tensions. It moves from suburban drudgery to urban dehumanization—typified by Andy’s secret visits to a gay heroin dealer he uses as substitute mommy and shrink. These contrasts, via irritatingly awkward time-shifts from the jewelry store robbery to before, after and back to the scene of the crime, shuffle each male characters’ point-of-view. But there’s no narrative advantage except to show that Lumet envies the current Jean-Pierre Melville fad (only this movie is visually cruddy). Masterson misses his chance to make this existential trickery profound; he leaves out the women’s experiences/memories. Tomei’s Gina doesn’t redefine stupid golddigger and Rosemary Harris’ role as the mother feels curtailed—as if Masterson deliberately avoided challenging the benighted men’s mundane habits. Shifting beyond-the-grave might have been audacious, achieving something like Thornton Wilder’s cosmic omniscience.

But audacity isn’t in Lumet’s billfold. Besides, Before the Devil isn’t about transcendence. Lumet’s always-crude style matches the characters’ meanness and greed. When the plot devolves into blood and violence, extending the story to homicide, matricide, fratricide and spiritual patricide, it’s merely the cynical overkill Neil LaBute hasn’t yet dared. Before the Devil lacks tragic power. Its self-pitying characters lack sorrow. This reflects how actors live today. Hoffman and Hawke fall for Masterson’s canard that everyone is bad (“The world is an evil place!” Andy declares). But then, no one’s responsible for themselves or to others. These brothers are on the Westchester Limited, they can only be defined simplistically: as a mess and a dirtbag. The result is self-indulgent overacting—Hoffman’s specialty. His highpoint is Andy’s egregious complaint:

“It’s not fair!”

Before the Devil is too proudly depraved. It lacks the seriousness that scholar Robert Fitzgerald noted when calling Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex “the work of a mind in the highest degree orderly, penetrating and sensitive, an enlightened mind aware of the moral issues in human action and a reverent mind aware of the powers that operate through time and fortune on human affairs.” Lumet and Masterson continue the corruption of tragedy in the post-Sopranos age. They fail to attain the lucid, credible emotion of modern tragedy (on view in The Brave One and Reservation Road). Before the Devil is pathetic, a Hollywood tragedy.
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Post by Mister Tee »

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
By LISA NESSELSON
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke star in Sidney Lumet-directed 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.'

A ThinkFilm release of a Capitol Films/Funky Buddha Group presentation of a Unity Prods./Linsefilm production. Produced by Michael Cerenzie, Brian Linse, Paul Parmar, William S. Gilmore. Executive producers, David Bergstein, Jane Barclay, Hannah Leader, Belle Avery, Jeffry Melnick, J.J. Hoffman, Eli Klein, Sam Zaharis. Co-executive producers, Guy Pham, Joel Corman. Co-producers, Jeff G. Waxman, Austin Chick. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Screenplay, Kelly Masterson.

Andy Hanson - Philip Seymour Hoffman
Hank - Ethan Hawke
Gina - Marisa Tomei
Charles - Albert Finney
Nanette - Rosemary Harris
Bobby - Bryan F. O'Byrne
Martha - Amy Ryan

An intricate tragedy that plumbs messy emotional depths with cinematic precision, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" explores urban malaise via ingredients so timeless, an ancient Greek stumbling into the theater would recognize the building blocks of mortal folly. Filial impiety, sibling rivalry, marital distress and crippling debt bedevil protags who shop for all their decisions at Bad Choices 'R Us. Satisfyingly draining narrative will probably skew toward older viewers, but the wrenching tale has something for anyone who likes their melodrama spiked with palpable tension and genuine suspense.
Recounted via out-of-sequence episodes with chapter headings, the action deconstructs the four days before -- as well as the week after -- the botched robbery of a mom-and-pop jewelry store. From this comparatively small fulcrum, pic enters a vortex that sucks protags in with irreversible force.

Mining the twin veins of family ties and the American pursuit of the almighty dollar, director Sidney Lumet gives his wisely chosen cast plentiful opportunities to act up a dark, brooding storm. Narrative's escalating tally of sordid maneuvers and desperate acts may seem unlikely to some, but Lumet's "Find Me Guilty" (2006) was in many ways more of a stretch than anything here (and that was based on a true story).

In the 1957 debut by Lumet, now 83, only 12 men were "angry" -- here, it's hard to find a character who would recognize serenity if it rang their Westchester or Manhattan doorbell.

Pic starts with chubby but robust Andy Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the payroll manager for a large New York real estate firm, coupling with gusto with his shapely wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). Their postcoital chat reveals they're in Rio, and they're both stunned at the quality of sensation they've just shared, since life back in Gotham is apparently unsatisfying in and out of the bedroom.

Onscreen title then switches to "The Day of the Robbery." Two men drive up to a small jewelry store for what should be a cinch of a heist. But several things go lethally awry: Shots are fired and the driver screeches off in panic and dismay.

Connections between the characters are doled out with teasing artistry as the ramifications of their actions reverberate. The driver, we learn, is Hank (Ethan Hawke), a likable loser with a shrewish ex-wife (Amy Ryan) and cute daughter. Hank owes three months' child support and holds an undistinguished job compared to his older brother, Andy.

Hank and Gina are having an affair, unbeknownst to Andy, whose own secret life actually outdoes his little brother's. The dynamic between the siblings is rife with unresolved resentment; their parents (Rosemary Harris and Albert Finney) have a loving partnership, but don't seem to have imparted much spontaneity or warmth to Andy, the eldest of their three children.

From wives to ex-wives to girlfriends to secretaries, femmes try to aid or shield the men around them, only to find their efforts pretty much ignored or rebuffed. On the basis of this pic, it's not easy -- or much fun -- to be an American man. Playwright and first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson incorporates several original twists and sardonic lines (upon being told her late hubby enlisted a pal with a credit card to rent a car for him, his street-smart widow immediately detects a lie, retorting that if he'd wanted a car, he would have stolen one).

The camera probes perfectly designed locations with assertive, communicative lensing. Lumet is unafraid to employ flashy film grammar as events cross-pollinate in sometimes shocking ways. Vet helmer makes human distress as compelling as the most lurid horror pic or special-effects extravaganza, and the film exudes a claustrophobic quality as characters struggle to buy time with dwindling currency.

Lead thesps are outstanding across the board, with excellent support in smaller roles.

Lumet atones for 1992's rocky "A Stranger Among Us" in a few terse scenes with an elderly diamond dealer, to whom key characters come for practical and/or shattering information.

Title comes from the Irish toast: "May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead."
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