Word: cusack
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Movies: City HallAl Pacino plays fictitious New York Mayor John Pappas as the tornado at the center of "City Hall", a cluttered drama that imagines a Faustian battle between Pappas and his deputy mayor, Kent Calhoun (John Cusack). Because the story was written by Ken Lipper, a deputy mayor in the Koch administration, and snazzed up by a trio of old-pro screenwriters -- Nicholas Pileggi, Paul Schrader, Bo Goldman -- and because it was shot in Gotham?s City Hall with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani?s blessing, the movie has a burly verisimilitude. "After a few reels, though, things get goofy," says TIME...
Arnold and Cusack balance each other well, although Arnold tends to overdo man of his scenes. While they successfully show suburban parenting in all its zany glory, Cusack's more understated style is often overpowered by Arnold's persistent over action and insistence on finding as many ways as possible to bludgeon Grant's character is every scene they share...
...movies Mr. Allen writes and directs but in which he does not appear. His sense of life and his worries about it have been so well chronicled that they are by now unmistakable. So much so that in his new release, "Bullets Over Broadway," there are times when John Cusack looks as if he is doing a bad impression of his director...
...Bullets Over Broadway," is, however, generally a success, and Cusack is generally quite good. He plays David Shayne, an aspiring playwright in 1920's New York, whose second play will be staged on Broadway, thanks to a deal made by a respected producer (Jack Warden) with the gangster Nick Valente (Joe Viterelli). The deal is this: Nick will bankroll the play in return for a role for his girlfriend, Olive (Jennifer Tilly...
Lightly comic and pleasantly distracting as it is, however, "Bullets Over Broadway" cannot escape the mark of Allen's touch. If his philosophical bent is subdued, his style is not: Cusack bumbles about for much of the picture looking as if he is the slightly stilted son of Fielding Mellish. And, like "Manhattan Murder Mystery," "Bullets Over Broadway" ultimately can't help submitting to Allen's hopeful vision that love can work, that love should work. This vision, of course, must be Woody Allen's; it must be Woody Allen's plea...