The Great White Hype & Scarface

The Great White Hype is pretty darn bad. Maybe Ron Shelton did only have one good screenplay in him. And the cast (Samuel L. Jackson, Jeff Goldblum, Corbin Bernsen, Jon Lovitz, Cheech Marin, John Rhys-Davies, Jamie Foxx, Damon Wayans, and Method Man) is much better than the material deserves, but can't make up for the craptacularness of the material. And it is craptacular.

Scarface is a movie I hadn't seen in so long I couldn't remember much of it (but I still had on my list as having watched it, and with the same rating as I gave it this time...). Then I watched it and remembered why I had blocked it out. Overlong and boring. Oh, yeah, just like many other Brian De Palma films. At least the worst ones. And why are so many of the Cubans played by Italians? Ugh. About the only time I thought anything good about it was when Harris "Quentin Travers" Yulin showed up. I always enjoy recognizing actors from the Whedon-verse. The movie just doesn't end, is full of either cardboard cutouts or completely despicable characters, and is just another example of De Palma and his desire to remake everything. I know, Stone did the screenplay and De Palma joined the film late, but ugh. And the soundtrack is the worst of 80s excess in overuse of synthesizers. Moroder, ummm, really didn't do much good in soundtracks. Cat People has a good song, cowritten with David Bowie, but man, most 80s soundtracks sucked, and Moroder is at least partly responsible for that. Why the hell can this movie be so popular? I mean, I know why it's so popular, but why do people like it so much? It's not a good movie, there are much better gangster films. And why the hell would anyone want to be Tony Montana, unless you're seriously messed up in the head? A drug-addicted asswipe in love with his sister? Man, I want to be him!