Word: ishtars
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...Dictionary, we're Morocco bound." That lyric, warbled by Hope and Crosby as they jounced along one of their more amiable roads back in 1942, is outrageous enough to have been penned by Rogers and Clarke, the comically dreadful songwriting team played by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar. The two pictures share similarities besides their North African setting: agreeably low-keyed playing by their stars, a plot that involves them dangerously in local politics, and about the same quota of gags. There is one important difference: Ishtar cost roughly 40 times as much as Road to Morocco. Laughter...
...auteur of Ishtar the movie is film's shyest comic talent, Elaine May. The auteur of Ishtar the event (or would-be event) is the medium's shyest -- but also slyest -- actor-producer, Warren Beatty. It is important to keep those functions separate in mind. Otherwise it is hard to enjoy either the film or the media outcry that any overbudget, long-delayed (six months) production is bound to engender...
...compassion for articulate, depressed dreamers grounded in reality only by two left feet. With visions of Simon and Garfunkel galumphing through their minds, the Rogers and Clarke duo have been sent by their agent to try out their new lounge act -- as far out of town as possible. In Ishtar, they get muddled up with Isabelle Adjani, whom they both mistake for a boy at first; a CIA operative (Charles Grodin) who is not nearly so smooth a counterrevolutionary as he thinks he is; and a blind camel that provides the film with its best running -- actually stumbling...
...last part of Ishtar returns to the funny, fast pace of the early scenes in New York. There's a great gag having to do with a blind camel and a scene in which Hoffman pretends to speak a Berber dialect is hysterical...
...Ishtar is an enjoyable farce. Without the enormous price tag, it would be a great little unpretentious comedy. Had May chosen to concentrate on the Beatty-Hoffman chemistry and eliminated some of the contrived plot, the movie would have been less frantic. And cheaper. It shouldn't cost so much to make us laugh...