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    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1990s
    Movies - 1990s Movies - P 3 Mins Read

    Player, The (1992)

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    This is the most irreverent, polished, cynical, tongue-in-jaw dossier on the insanity of the motion picture industry since Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).

    They are all here: the producers, agents, writers, executives and movie stars who turn ideas into finished products on the screen, no matter who they have to maim, trample, or kill along the way.

    player2

    The result is a Hollywood landscape so rich with self-parody you can’t always separate the real from the surreal.

    Tim Robbins, as a ruthless executive named Griffin Mill, turns doubly paranoid when he becomes the target of anonymous death threats from a writer whose scripts have been ignored by the studio.

    Tracking him down to an art house in Pasadena where the writer he suspects as the author of the poison-pen missiles is watching a revival of The Bicycle Thief, Mill murders his tormentor, becomes the chief suspect in the case, and thinks he’s got away with homicide when, in a surprise finale, he realises he’s killed the wrong man.

    playerAltman layers every frame with tracking shots, editing and juxtaposing several conversations simultaneously like TV sound bites, while moguls sipping imported designer water yap on cellular phones and listen to dumb story ideas for everything from Graduate 2 to Goldie Hawn captured by pygmies.

    Meanwhile, you get the bonus of feeling like you’re on a guided tour: Jack Lemmon is playing piano at a cocktail party where Marlee Maitlin is making a deal in sign language; Lily Tomlin is blowing a line in the dailies; Whoopi Goldberg is a tough Pasadena cop more concerned with finding her misplaced tampons than the killer; and the “extras” include Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte, Julia Roberts, Malcolm McDowell, Burt Reynolds, Rod Steiger, Cher, Harry Belafonte, James Coburn, John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Susan Sarandon, and dozens of others.

    Griffin Mill
    Tim Robbins
    June Gudmundsdottir
    Greta Scacchi
    Walter Stuckel
    Fred Ward
    Detective Susan Avery
    Whoopi Goldberg
    Larry Levy
    Peter Gallagher
    Joel Levison
    Brion James
    Bonnie Sherow
    Cynthia Stevenson
    David Kahane
    Vincent D’Onofrio
    Andy Civella
    Dean Stockwell
    Tom Oakley
    Richard E. Grant
    Celia
    Dina Merrill
    Jan
    Angela Hall
    Detective Paul DeLongpre
    Lyle Lovett
    Dick Mellen
    Sydney Pollack
    Sandy
    Leah Ayres
    Reg Goldman
    Randall Batinkoff
    Steve Reeves
    Jeremy Piven
    Whitney Gersh
    Gina Gershon
    Frank Murphy
    Frank Barhydt
    Marty Grossman
    Mike Kaplan
    Gar Girard
    Kevin Scannell
    Detective Broom
    Susan J. Emshwiller
    Phil
    Brian Brophy
    Eric Schecter
    Michael Tolkin
    Carl Schecter
    Stephen Tolkin
    Natalie 
    Natalie Strong
    Walter
    Pete Koch
    Trixie
    Pamela Bowen
    Rocco
    Jeff Weston

    Director
    Robert Altman

    Video


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