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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...
Fingers is not an auspicious directorial debut. At the narrative level hardly an incident in the movie is credible. Dip beneath the plot and you arrive at a psychological sewer. Among several gratuitous shock tactics, Toback treats the audience to an on-screen prostate examination and the spectacle of two women's heads being smashed together. The film's most persistent Freudian motif is a phallus fixation that borders on the pathological. Though Toback tries hard to emulate the expressionistic style of Director Martin Scorsese, Fingers never amounts to more than a flamboyantly neurotic drive-in movie...
...Mike Chapman (Taxi Driver), who has shot New York's mean streets in his usual lucid way. The cast varies from bad to worse. Heroine Tisa Farrow speaks as if she were a spaced-out extra on furlough from Blow-Up. Jim Brown, the subject of a 1971 Toback book, is on hand only to act out the script's juvenile racial-sexual fantasies. As the hero, a schizo prone to gesturing with his mouth while banging at the keyboard, Keitel gives the first terrible performance of his career. He is such a bundle of grating mannerisms that...