Saturday, August 23, 2014

Film Review - The Player (1992)

The Player is directed by Robert Altman and stars Tim Robbins and Griffin Mill, a Hollywood studio executive who hears a lot of story pitches but one day he is sent a Postcard that says "In the Name of All Writers, I'm Going to Kill You" which sends Griffin mad as Hell and determined to find who is responsible.

The Player is simply terrific stuff and I just loved sitting there watching it unfold, Robbins is superb as Mill and along with his work on the Shawshank Redemption and Jacobs Ladder he proves that he can be one of the best actors going around, I also really loved the performances by Peter Gallagher and Brion James as two of the other studio execs as well as by Vincent D'Onofrio as a frustrated writer and Whoopi Goldberg as a Pasadena detective.

But I have to also talk about the script by Michael Tolkin and on who's novel this is based as it is incredibly clever in its mixture of satire and insight and I wonder if Altman's long experience as a director up to that point helped him as well as while I was watching this film I started wondering "I wonder if that is how it really goes down as it would feel right if it did" plus there are some fantastic cameos that really made me laugh.

So yeah I had a big smile on my face watching the Player and any film fan owes it to themselves to check it out, 5 out of 5.

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