Word: toback
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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City Hall Plaza: Ben Folds Five, Dido, Duran Duran, Ellis Paul, Fleming & John, Jeremy Toback, Jude, NRBQ, Thisway, Train, Vonda Shepard...
...tough question is, Will he stay out of trouble this time? Friends and colleagues are hopeful but uncertain. "Robert is very ambitious," says director James Toback, who cast Downey in his first starring role in The Pick-Up Artist and wrote Two Girls and a Guy for the actor after seeing him handcuffed on TV at the time of an earlier arrest. "He has a ravenous appetite for money, fame and to do great work. Paradoxically, he's oblivious to making a constructive path to reach that goal. People with one-tenth his talent are more practical in achieving...
...Toback is a rather serious and self-conscious fellow. So, after a perky start, his work turns into a meandering wrangle. He flirts with a semidaring resolution--a cozy little menage a trois--but doesn't quite have the gumption to go there. Instead, he lurches into a darkness that contains the promise of redemption (or at least responsible adulthood) for his wayward protagonist. We don't believe it for a second. We do, however, believe in the talent of his actors. The vengeful women--a coolly elegant Heather Graham and a flat-voiced, sharp-minded Natasha Gregson Wagner...
Except that "movie" doesn't seem quite the right term for it. At best, it's a rather murkily photographed one-act play, confined to a single setting and to real time by writer-director James Toback. Indeed, if he had developed his situation--two girls discover that their guy has been blithely having his way with both of them simultaneously--he might have given us a chic, updated version of one of those old-fashioned farces that once upon a time regaled Broadway...
Screenwriter James Toback, who has sometimes tended to the prolix and the pretentious, is all business here -- much of it very funny business. The man writes dialogue as if it had not gone out of style. Transforming the hearsay history of a gangster's life into something shrewder than a mere morality tale, yet more disciplined than a romantic celebration of outlaw heroism, he keeps reminding us that back in Bugsy's day, the mark of a good screenplay was great wordplay...