Actors: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Banecroft
Director: Mike Nichols
As I said during my The Princess Bride review, it's real tough to think about a film such as this that has been endlessly parodied and referenced. The good news is that I didn't actually know the full plot of the film, which ventures into some rather dark and Freudian places for a supposedly 'classic' film. It also manages to be about the Sixties without jamming all sorts of Sixties symbols down my throat, compared to e.g. Forrest Gump. Ultimately, the characters are intentionally caricatures and the plot rather unbelievable, but there are some fabulous scenes that result regardless.
Note: Spoilers ahead
The film also happens to be one of those insane fantasies that can only exist on the page or celluloid - young, timorous lad gets seduced by his parents' friends mother, then her daughter wants to sex him. Thankfully the movie washes that away at the end by declaring their lust to be only symbolic - they're attracted to each other because they're not like their parents. I would've knocked off an entire star had Dustin Hoffman and his beloved embraced at the very end.
Also of note that the famous 'You're trying to seduce me, aren't you?' is far, far better in the film - I'd never heard it with the squeaky up note that Dustin Hoffman puts on the 'aren't you?'; I'd always figured it was a rhetorical question.
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Those are two of my favorite points about the movie: just how inarticulately nervous dustin hoffman is with the seduction stuff, and that, 'what do we do now?' look the two of them have at the end in the back of that bus.
ReplyDeleteAs somebody who completed college and then ended up being a poker player (non-standard life path) and had many many adults (especially my parents friends) come over to me and basically try to talk my into a standard career, the scene where the guy tells him about "One word, Plastics," at his parents party was so incredibly relavent, the first time I saw it I almost fell off the couch laughing.
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