Word: milling
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...movie begins, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), the senior v.p. of production at a major studio, feels his security eroding. An ambitious parvenu named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) has designs on Mill's job. Furthermore, an anonymous and extremely angry screenwriter keeps sending Mill a series of death-threats written on postcards. Unable to tell anyone what is happening, Mill takes matters into his own hands, killing a screenwriter and taking up with his girlfriend. However, the threats don't stop, and the movie is off and running...
Altman manages to draw amazing performances from his cast. Robbins undergoes a striking transformation. From the running-scared and pudgy-faced individual we encounter at the beginning of the film, Mill develops into a confident winner, a killer who is the ultimate Player. It's a great, charismatic performance which the gangly Robbins carries off with the assurance of a Gary Cooper...
...only trouble with Reed's sensational tale is that not a word of it is true. That inconvenient fact has not stopped a busy rumor mill in Arkansas from cranking out ever more preposterous allegations, nor has it prevented some credulous journalists, including Andrew Cockburn, a columnist for the Nation, from using Reed as a source for absurdly speculative accounts. None of those who are taking Reed's wild stories seriously seem to have asked why Clinton, a vocal critic of U.S. aid to the contras who even then was considering running for President, would have done risky favors...
...Griffin Mill, the hero of the delicate and corrosive new movie The Player, knows and cares. Mill (Tim Robbins) is the Vice President in Charge of Abusing Writers at a Hollywood studio. He knows the game, and his bosses know he knows it; he is, in the parlance, a player. And when Mill receives threatening notes from one of his writers, he can play rough. He tracks down a suspect (Vincent D'Onofrio) and puts him in turnaround. He immediately woos the writer's tawny girlfriend (Greta Scacchi) and dumps his own. No screaming, no remorse. Business...
...audience that film production is a spectator sport. Like any other modern sport, it trades in money and celebrity, scandal and sex appeal; it has big winners and losers, all playing for high stakes, which they are happy to drive into their opponents' little black hearts. To them, Griffin Mill is not a parody; he is a patron saint...