With well over a thousand other reviews in line ahead of this one, I'm quite sure almost no one will ever see it. (Or care if they do.) I just need to get it off my mind.
The film is artless and has no redeeming virtues save as a very amateurish attempt to display what Ollie Stone saw as a bitter young man's descent into compensatory narcissistic and sociopathic hell. (One could say precisely the same thing about the 1932 Warner Brothers version, as well, save for its revelation of "Ma's" awful enabling.)
De Palma's direction wouldn't have gotten him a renewal after a first season, free TV crime drama. Lighting serves mood. But the lighting here serves nothing. Music serves mood (as Scorcese and Coppola =well= understood). But the music here serves nothing.
The characters are cardboard cutouts of what Ollie imagined Miami thugs to be, with no more depth to them than Cash's & Epps's in Warren Beatty's later cinematic comic book, "Dick Tracy." Which is surprising, considering what Stone had to go on after several seasons of Michael Mann's =far= superior (but still insufficient) "Miami Vice" TV show.
If Luis Valdez or Edward James Olmos had written and directed SF on the heels of their terrific "Zoot Suit" (not to mention "American Me"), chances seem far better that SF would have been a lot closer to "real."
I grew up in a transitional neighborhood around kids who turned into The Real Deal in LA's White Fence, Avenues, Temple Street and MS 13 gangs. Every single one of them was a tightly controlled, lizard-brained, pragmatically violent criminal by the time he was ten... and very little like the stupidly impulsive Tony M., who wouldn't have survived for long in any of =those= deals.
After decades of encountering them professionally in places like Corcoran, Chuckawalla and Pelican Bay, I know why. Because I've met many of their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers.
NONE of that is evident in this trite, witless, cinematic nonsense.
The film is artless and has no redeeming virtues save as a very amateurish attempt to display what Ollie Stone saw as a bitter young man's descent into compensatory narcissistic and sociopathic hell. (One could say precisely the same thing about the 1932 Warner Brothers version, as well, save for its revelation of "Ma's" awful enabling.)
De Palma's direction wouldn't have gotten him a renewal after a first season, free TV crime drama. Lighting serves mood. But the lighting here serves nothing. Music serves mood (as Scorcese and Coppola =well= understood). But the music here serves nothing.
The characters are cardboard cutouts of what Ollie imagined Miami thugs to be, with no more depth to them than Cash's & Epps's in Warren Beatty's later cinematic comic book, "Dick Tracy." Which is surprising, considering what Stone had to go on after several seasons of Michael Mann's =far= superior (but still insufficient) "Miami Vice" TV show.
If Luis Valdez or Edward James Olmos had written and directed SF on the heels of their terrific "Zoot Suit" (not to mention "American Me"), chances seem far better that SF would have been a lot closer to "real."
I grew up in a transitional neighborhood around kids who turned into The Real Deal in LA's White Fence, Avenues, Temple Street and MS 13 gangs. Every single one of them was a tightly controlled, lizard-brained, pragmatically violent criminal by the time he was ten... and very little like the stupidly impulsive Tony M., who wouldn't have survived for long in any of =those= deals.
After decades of encountering them professionally in places like Corcoran, Chuckawalla and Pelican Bay, I know why. Because I've met many of their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers.
NONE of that is evident in this trite, witless, cinematic nonsense.
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