Word: gering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...obvious and unoriginal as that, An Officer and a Gentleman still works. The tension and yearnings pent up inside of aspiring Navy pilot Zack Mayo (Richard Gere) are vivid and believable. You may think you're too sophisticated for an underdog-gets-crewcut-and-makes-good saga, but wait until Mayo is face down in the mud, "doin' 50" for that bastard Sergeant Foley. You'll suddenly find you own tightly clenched fist pounding the arm rest with every rep. "Yes SIR! I'd LIKE to do some more push...
...come to mind: John Wooden, Dean Smith, Bobby Knight. NBA coaches are getting better. Very few are left who wear those medallions on big metal chains around their necks. The new trend setters have been the three Lakers' coaches since Bill Sharman--the ones who lost out to Richard Gere for the lead in "American Gigolo...
Julian (Richard Gere) makes his living in the nicer precincts of Los Angeles by providing sexual services to well-off middle-aged ladies. He is pretty, smartly dressed and inarticulate when any serious subject comes up; yet one can understand what a neglected wife might see in him. His power with women derives not from being aggressively male but from being ingratiatingly sweet. He is good at his work and is sufficiently self-aware to understand that his exceptional talent is ultimately self-defeating: he can give pleasure but never receive it. Indeed, the film's major psychological twist...
...very far beneath the ugly surface of the demimonde. It is clear he is horrified (or at least titillated) by his movie's milieu, but he doesn't make it palpable. In any event, Schrader's development of the frame-up story is mechanically melodramatic, and Gere, essentially a boring actor, doesn't help much either. He just cannot carry a picture, even when his passivity and gentleness well serve some aspects of his character, as they do here...
...hours getting Julian into a tight corner, Schrader cannot bear to leave him there. The picture ends with a cockamamie implication that love will conquer all -even the false, but seemingly airtight, murder rap. Such a conclusion betrays everything the film has so carefully built up -the easily victimized Gere character, the hypocrisy of the chic world he has risen to, the viciousness of the underworld which spawned him and retains its vicious claim...