Word: toback
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Here's what James Toback brings to the table: an obsession with gambling as a metaphor for life's scariest risks, a connoisseur's eye for beyond-gorgeous women, and a choice collection of vintage 45s. As writer-director of Fingers, Love and Money and Exposed, Toback got high on violence of word, motive and deed, where every roll of the dice can reveal the snake eyes of death. Now, with Molly Ringwald as his star and the lure of a PG-13 rating, Toback comes up with the Judy Blume version. Robert Downey (desperately charming) is a young...
...face of advice from her lawyer, her agent and her friends not to make Exposed, Kinski went ahead. Why? In part because in pitching the film to her, Toback played Tristan to her Isolde: "This movie is why we're alive. It is why you were born and I was born. If we die when this movie is finished it won't matter, because this is it." Nastassia seems unbothered that the resulting film looks like a Bloomingdale's window of Terrorist Chic, and that the story line functions as a metaphor for her dangerous need to be used...
There are two character types that American movies have never believably portrayed: the international financier and the Third World revolutionary. By putting both in the same picture, Love and Money hardly doubles anyone's fun. Writer-Director James Toback labors under the delusion that he is a man of ideas, a Conrad or Dostoyevsky of the silver screen, and will go to any convoluted lengths to get a strained or totally phony argument going. In this case, the great mogul (played with a flashy show of menacing teeth by Klaus Kinski) wishes to bump off the revolutionary (Armand Assante...