Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

(1977)

I never turn off a movie out of disgust. If I don’t have the patience for something at its current run-time, I usually just watch it at twice the speed.

I turned on this film because De Niro can be interesting. It’s interesting to watch Liza Minnelli and pick out which of her features she got from Judy Garland and which came from Vincent Minnelli. Martin Scorsese, he’s made a film or two, right? This movie has everything!

This was supposed to be a break away for Scorsese. He had been doing depressing gangster stuff and wanted to do something fun and romantic. Remind me to never invite Martin Scorsese over for fun and romance. This was just as depressing as a Scorsese gangster film, sans gangsters. So what’s left?

DeNiro’s character is defined as one giant red flag. If there was some kind of machine gun that could fire red flags at women, DeNiro would be firing it rapid-fire at Liza and laughing his ass off the whole time. He is utterly unlikable and not once does he demonstrate an ounce of redeeming quality.

Meanwhile, doe-eyed Minnelli, who started out with some well-established boundaries, gradually develops some kind of stockholm syndrome for him. Over the course of an hour and a half De Niro pressures her into one terrible decision after another. At this point I checked the runtime and realized there was still almost another hour and a half left!

I hop on to Wikipedia to spoil this for myself so I won’t waste my time waiting for this tripe to spoil itself. Now I’m going to spoil it for you. You’re welcome. The plot goes nowhere and it just gets drearier and drearier. De Nero basically forces Minelli to marry him, she gets pergnit and he slaps a son out of her, litterally. He suddenly realizes he doesn’t want to be a father or a husband and flys the coop. Gee, didn’t see that coming. After going their separate ways they each become successful and eventually end up writing a song together. He wants to get back together and she blows him off. The end. Whoopie! Ah, l’amore!

The cinematography was artistic and reminiscent of film noir but this whole thing was a fever dream, a vehicle for De Niro to chew on the extravagant scenery and Minelli’s stationary lower lip. It looked pretty. Hang it on a wall in a museum for snobs to look at and discuss what Scorsese was trying to say with this piece. The rest of us are going to watch movies about superheroes.

As for me, I turned this off half way through. Twice the speed would not be fast enough to make this film any less intolerable.