The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)

How sad is this?

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I saw this a long time ago and remembered liking it OK, but I'm definitely liking it better now than when I originally saw it. This is probably because it actually has a plot, unlike the majority of modern American movies which are simply built around special effects and cartoonish action. It is frequently downright hilarious and brings back memories of the 1980s, which seems like a painfully innocent time compared to today. It is also quite politically incorrect at points, something that' harder to get away with nowadays, even if it rings totally true. It would be a straight up 10-star flick if it weren't for the awful casting. Every major star (although they weren't major stars when this was filmed), while not completely terrible, just feels wrong for their roles; however, the strength of the script rescues the film, and, like fine wine, it only gets better with age. So ignore the mediocre acting performances, and just enjoy a really fun (and for many of us, nostalgic) motion picture experience.

I have never seen this movie. I will never seen this movie. If I were on a flight and this movie were showing I would parachute out of the plane. If no parachute were available I would jump and try to land on something soft. Even landing on a pile of porcupines from 30,000 feet would be preferable to watching this huge mess.Why i have never watched this in the first place is the result of the deplorable casting in De Palma's film. He got everything so absolutely and totally wrong. He took one of the great novels of my era and turned it into complete crap.

Thanks to this film, I have now resolved to avoid film adaptations whenever possible. I saw the film on release and walked out of the theatre. Tom Hanks is passable. Melanie Griffith's awful Southern accent is distracting. Bruce Willis is horribly miscast as a wry British journalist. We should be thankful that he doesn't attempt a British accent, but without the outsider status and the subtlety that such a role demands, Willis falls flat. DePalma takes the novel's wry winks and turns them into desperate leers. It's like Steve Martin in character as The Jerk is sitting next to me in the theatre with a laser pointer saying say "LOOK! HOW FUNNY!!!".If I could bring myself to watch the film again, I could go on and on pointing out particular moments that irked me into walking out on this film (something I very rarely do). Fat chance.I realize that many folks out there will have never read Wolfe's excellent book, and if you haven't, this film might work as passable farce. If you HAVE read the book, you will very likely hate this film.

Tom Wolfe's sprawling novel about the aftershocks of a hit-and-run in 1980's New York set out to capture the corruption and self- promotion that seemed to dominate the decade, with every power player in the city, and every hanger-on trying to achieve personal triumph, latching on to the media and cultural frenzy to benefit their own personal agenda. It's a remarkable novel; bleakly hilarious but meticulously detailed. A movie adaptation was always going to be dangerous territory, and Brian De Palma's resulting film, that flopped both critically and commercially, is a confused mess. The complete failure of the film may be somewhat cruel and not wholly deserved, but De Palma goes for all-out comedy, failing to grasp Wolfe's subtle satire completely.Tom Hanks plays self-styled 'master of the universe' Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street broker who enjoys every material comfort that life can offer, living in his huge apartment with his ditsy wife Judy (Kim Cattrall). During an eventful night with his mistress Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith), they take a wrong turn while heading back to her apartment and end up in South Bronx. Sherman gets out of the car to clear the road when he is approach by two black youths, and a misunderstanding leads to Ruskin accidentally running one of them over. They flee the scene, but once the story of a rich white man almost killing a poor black kid breaks, the likes of Reverend Bacon (John Hancock), a Harlem religious and political leader, Jewish district attorney Abe Weiss (F. Murray Abraham) and hard-drinking journalist Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) rear their heads to twist the ongoing s**t-storm to their own benefit.Despite some nice tracking shots and sets that really do capture the tacky glamour of the 80's, the movie's biggest downfall is the casting. The two leads, Hanks and Willis, are woefully miscast. McCoy is a loathsome character, a WASP-ish high-roller in an increasingly capitalist country, but Hanks is one of the most likable actors around. He looks visibly uncomfortable in a thinly- written role, and only takes control of his character in a scene in which he clears his apartment by unloading a shotgun played mainly for laughs, which at this stage of his career was Hanks's shtick. Fallow in the novel is a manipulative con-man, twisting the unravelling story through his newspaper in order to keep his job and make a nice paycheck along the way. But De Palma only seems to have picked up on his heavy drinking, meaning that Willis swings a bottle around and narrates the story, playing the role of spoon-feeder without playing an active role in story or convincing as someone who could get to his position.But then again, De Palma's movie doesn't exist in the real world. Arguably, the ensemble of characters in Wolfe's novel were caricatures, but they were well-rounded characters, and being inside their heads meant that we could understand their motives, something the movie entirely ignores. So we get the likes of Bacon, Weiss, lawyer Tom Killian (Kevin Dunn) and Assistant District Attorney Kramer (Saul Rubinek), all key players in the novel, reduced to scowling or bumbling onlookers, while McCoy squirms for our amusement and Fallow tells us what we're supposed to be thinking. Occasionally its an all-out pantomime, which would be forgivable it was funny or insightful. Yet when Wolfe calls for pantomime at the climax, the movie delivers a ridiculous speech spoken by Judge White (Morgan Freeman), informing us that decency is what your grandmother taught you.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com