Word: hoffmans
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This just in! The media distorts the truth for its own nefarious purposes! Mad City focuses on Max Brackett (Dustin Hoffman), a reporter who "crosses the line" between reporting the news and fabricating it when he turns a hostage crisis involving a fired janitor (John Travolta) into a media circus. Unfortunately, this preachy film also crosses a line--the one that separates commentary from polemic. Despite fine performances from Hoffman and Travolta, it suffers from a fatal heavy-handedness...
This just in! The media distorts the truth for its own nefarious purposes! This movie focuses on Max Brackett (Dustin Hoffman), a reporter who "cross the line" between reporting the news and fabricating it when he turns a hostage crisis involving a fired janitor (John Travolta) into a media circus. Unfortunately, this preachy film also croosses a line--the one that separates commentary from polemic. Despite fine performances, it suffers from a fatal heavy-handedness...
...Hoffman is superb, underplaying even the punchiest lines for maximum effect. A spotlight line such as, "You're the best show in town, Sam," might have amounted to little more than a melodramatic leer in the hands of a less talented actor; Hoffman delivers it quietly, almost swallowing the words, and the effect is chilling. To its own detriment, the script fails to learn from his example. Writers Tom Matthews and Eric Williams, journalists themselves, cannot resist hammering home their message. "I don't want to cross the line," Brackett tells his boss; Lou, at the beginning of the movie...
...Hoffman's Brackett is by far the most complex and believable character of the bunch. Still, the writers need him to become more sympathetic as the climax approaches, and they try very hard to make us like him again, a feat which requires some serious mid-movie plot engineering (up to this point, we've only seen him capitalizing on tragedy and weighing the pros and cons of seducing Lori). Halfway into the film, two wolfish network producers inexplicably show us a clip of Brackett and anchor Hollander on the site of a gruesome airplane crash. Shaken by the carnage...
...events into perspective." Gavras makes an excellent point. Mad City could also have profited from a little perspective. Its creators failed to notice that they themselves had crossed a line--the one that separates shrewd commentary from polemic."Photos courtesy of Warner Bros,TWO RING CIRCUS: DUSTIN HOFFMAN (left), shines as a hard-boiled reporter who exploits the story of a simple-minded janitor's (JOHN TRAVOLTA, below) revolt against society...