dear Ishtar,

I love you. I hope one day everyone else does too.

Sincerely,
willow

Shoutout to Elaine for losing a studio 60 million dollars

A predestined failure that has emerged, 25 years later, as an orphan worth adopting-- awkward at times, with leads that work hard to redeem their miscasting, but winning and sweet and full of inspired silliness. The film handles the far outskirts of show business with a knowing wit that the Moroccan mayhem cannot quite equal (though the blind camel is never not funny), but its overall affability wins the day for me.

May the goat

"Why didn't you try to recruit me as a communist? Wasn't I good enough?"

smuck

3-2-3-4-4-2-3-AND!!!
*clack clack clack clack clack*

"He will find you a blind camel. He also knows of a camel which has a crippled leg and no teeth. He will sell you both for a special price."

i loled at the camel

Twenty minutes of sheer unadulterated genius then it just becomes totally bland and boring. There are much better movies than this that don't come close to reaching the highs present here.

Beatty and Hoffman are both wonderful, so well tuned together and shamelessly exposed in their schmucky characters, so goofy that even their interpretation seems a bit delightfully off at times. Adjani is obviously great too. May's conduction when leaving the realm of cringe-inducing bro-comedy may not be among the most effective, but some of the most suspenseful touches add to the film's eccentricity more than they actually hurt its cohesiveness. It also helps that the gags, even if quite simple, are definitely hilarious.

This is fantastic? Elaine May understands better than any other director the peculiarly American kind of idiocy that allows one to fail so spectacularly, so colossally that you become an accidental arms dealer, CIA dupe, communist insurrectionary, and prophet of a new religion of incompetence all at once.

"Look at the upside: we're not leading lives of quiet desperation."

"Why didn't you try to recruit me as a communist? Wasn't I good enough?"

Watched this action-adventure-comedy film purely out of morbid curiosity as this is not only a notorious box office flop but also apparently considered one of the worst films ever made which I didn't find to be quite the case but it is far from a good film. Now there is plenty of talent on camera and behind it but ultimately the film fails due to a script that just isn't funny enough while having massive tonal inconsistencies, lacklustre characterisation, the first part of the film set in New York is utterly boring and any action that is present falls flat. It does, however, have a few laughs, the two leads are likeable enough, the use of music is effective, it looks good and it is mostly well paced.