The Player (1992)

Very well executed

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

That was soooo meta! It was funny, sardonic, and extremely clever! Best ending possible for the story.Pretty well written, omg I'm kinda feeling guilty in not including my bf in the screening of this one, perhaps I'll see The Player all over again with him. I enjoyed the cameos so much, Jack Lemon, Peter Falk, Malcom McDowell, and the posters, I loved the inclusion of those posters!

Tim Robbins stars as a studio VP facing rumors that he is going to lose his job to young hotshot Peter Gallagher. He is also receiving threatening anonymous postcards from some writer he has seen and never called back. He decides it must be Vincent D'Onofrio, who he confronts and accidentally murders. A black and vicious satire of modern Hollywood that ends up leaving the audience slightly rooting for Robbins's reprehensible exec if only because everyone else is more reprehensible.

This is a biting satire on Hollywood, but there are plenty of those around--from the The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) to The Day of the Locust (1975). However, this is an ingenious Hollywood journey as only Altman could make it. It may be fair to say that this is the only movie that this is: "a movie ABOUT a movie CONTAINING a movie-within-a-movie, loaded with REAL movie stars playing themselves. Altman must have really enjoyed making this one!!The story starts with an INTENTIONAL long tracking shot around a Hollywood studio--similar to the famous one in Orson Wells' Touch of Evil.The story is ABOUT a Hollywood producer, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), who listens to people 'pitching' movie plots to him. As he goes about his daily routine of meeting, and dining with famous stars, he starts to receive death threats written on post cards. The threats could be coming from ONE of the millions of his disgruntled 'pitchers' over the years. But, the question is WHICH of his former disgruntled 'pitchers' IS it. As he tries to figure out who is threatening him, he traces down, and kills, the 'death threatener' after talking to the killer's Icelandic girlfriend, June (Greta Sacchi), on the phone. A problem arises when—after killing the man—the death threats continue as before. One circuitous path follows another until the movie's surprise ending. While this is not another M*A*S*H, Nashville, Short Cuts or McCabe and Mrs. Miller, it is well worth watching and is an interesting opus in Robert Altman's filmography.

The Player is a 1992 satire on the indifference and uncaring attitude of Hollywood Bigwigs, and a blackmail mystery, or something--nobody knows for sure. This movie's plot is like Bigfoot. Vague, sketchy information of possible plot sightings have been reported by fringe groups and kooks.The story goes something like this: Anyway, all I can say about this movie is that I want my two hours and four minutes back. I think I'd rather be sitting in an ancient art history class looking at slides of overweight stone cave goddess sculptures with giant mammaries.The producers' mission statement on this movie was an obvious formula for an enduring, ingenious, classic film: Under no circumstances will the cinematographer point their camera at a person who is acting! Eye contact? Overrated! Why build sets when we can just make the movie hanging around the office! Tension? Story? Why bother! My Hollywood friends are here! There was, what, about eight or nine minutes, tops, of movie here. The remaining hour and fifty four minutes were just camera people running around Hollywood flailing about madly screaming in high-pitched voices, "look at me! Look at me! I've got a camera and I'm shooting celebs!" And yes, they were definitely flailing about madly and screaming in high-pitched voices. It's the only logical explanation.This movie wasn't a "who's who" so much as a "so what." Among the diarrhea of cameos: Whoopi Goldberg plays a tampon-flinging cop on the loose, with Lyle Lovett as her canny but streetwise poster child for hairstyles gone bad. Cher showed up--I figure they must have paid her in drugs and plastic surgery. And what parade of Hollywood garbage is complete without Burt Reynolds slamming his fat ugly face onto the screen? Even the nudity managed to suck. Every nude woman on the screen was no bigger than a couple half-aspirins on a cutting board. Worst of all, this movie casts Tim Robbins, an actor I used to like, in a whole new light for me.And here's what I'm told is so delightful about this movie: it's chock-full of Hollywood insider references and jokes. I caught the ones that I caught, and then this movie's advocates tried plaintively to convince me that I was being let in on some really privileged information when I was told the rest. It almost goes without saying, but it just comes off as grossly pretentious.And, as a sure sign that the apocalypse draws nigh, as this movie points out, there were about 4,166 other story ideas that got thrown out so that this movie could be made.I personally would rather have watched Habeus Corpus.