The Insider
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Movie Reviews of The Insider
Movie Review: Another Michael Mann gem!
Summary: 5 Stars
The Insider is not a movie that will get most people's blood pumping. However, for me, this movie did just that. Al Pacino's performance is, as usual, amazing. He never seems to disappoint when he is in front of the camera. Russel Crowe turns in one of the best performances of his career. I thought that his acting job in this movie far exceeded his performance in Gladiator. The movie was a little slow in some places, but the overall tempo was very good. Mann's direction was excellent in adding different elements just at the right time to keep the story going. Although not the typical action movie that most fans like, this drama is an excellent movie for those who are looking for an interesting movie or for great acting.Movie Review: Could have been better.
Summary: 2 Stars
'The Insider' could have been a much better movie than it actually turned out to be. One of the main problems with the film is we don't know anything about the Russel Crow's character or his family. They were poorly developed and that really hurts the movie. We don't know why Jeff has the emotional problems he has or why his wife seems like she is going to vomit in every other scene.
What is also really annoying is how the 'The Insider' was filmed.
Do we really need to see extreme close-ups of the characters' faces from five different angles? What purpose does this type of directing serve? Al Pacino did a fine job as always, but even he couldn't save this mess.
Movie Review: TOBACCO AVENUE
Summary: 3 Stars
One of those films that I always meant to watch and only now, years after the fact, I get around to doing so, and I am a little disappointed. Docudrama about top tobacco corporate vice president who aligns with TV's "60 Minutes" to expose tobacco company standards is too narrow-minded in scope to encompass all the havoc the tobacco empire exposes on the world, relying on the sympathetic plight and near ruin of the family man executive whose behavior borders on paranoia and insecurity. Al Pacino as a "60 Minutes" producer and Russell Crowe as the reluctant crusader executive both seem overdrawn as characters, Pacino in his familiar nervous edgy urban guy persona and Crowe as the weakling confused executive both grow tiresome after a while. Still, the movie moves along briskly and a surreal sequence where a hotel wall becomes an imagined memory invokes the sometimes hopelessness of tobacco addiction. But why does the film feel the need to mercilessly pick on "60 Minutes"'s Mike Wallace? I seem to be missing the inside word here.Movie Review: WAY OVERRATED HYPOCRISY
Summary: 3 Stars
"Issues" liberals may be people of conscience with good intentions who give of their time, energy and money for a variety of causes to better society, usually by helping disadvantaged kids or the afflicted. Hooray for them. They cannot get too much applause for that. But they jumped on the anti-tobacco bandwagon, which is in my view real hypocrisy. First, Hollywood always displays macho men and femme fatale women smoking cigarettes and looking cool. Tobacco has been around for centuries. It is a legal product that people want. The fact that it is bad for you is simply common knowledge, yet trial lawyers, the biggest Democrat special interest group, file nefarious multi-million dollar class action lawsuits and tort claims against tobacco companies, as if some plaintiff who smoked for 50 years before getting lung cancer was forced by the company to do so.During the Clinton years, the Democrats jumped on this issue like there was no tomorrow, actually making government ads against legal American tobacco corporations and the tobacco industry in a move that cannot be legal, civilly and maybe Constitutionally. These ads typically show a couple of (always) white tobacco execs plotting to poison kids, then laughing about it. Turn this ad around and direct it at anybody else and the hue and cry would be endless. These companies contribute enormous taxes and employ thousands. I myself was addicted to chewing tobacco (Copenhagen) for 16 years. I knew I had to quit, tried several times, but went back to it. I knew the dangers of snuff and that it was a disgusting habit. Nobody dragged my arm. I chose to do it, chose to quit, girded my will power and accomplished this task. Period. Just like George W. Bush when he quit drinking.
Speaking of alcohol, this is worse than tobacco. It causes drunk driving deaths and has to be as unhealthy as smoking cigarettes, but it is not a target. On top of that, the real kicker is that if you go to Hollywood parties, or hang out at certain industry hot spots in Studio City, Universal City, Beverly Hills, or Santa Monica, you will find movie executives puffing on huge cigars like the one Bill Clinton asked Monica to use as a phallic. Such hypocrisy.
Russell Crowe played a tobacco exec a few years ago opposite Al Pacino in "The Insider", a film that never got anywhere. The crux of the film was that Brown & Williamson, a tobacco road company with a long, venerable tradition in old Carolina, had...shock...hid the fact that cigarettes are bad for people. For decades.
Really? Bad for people?
Basically they went out and advertised their product like any other capitalist organization, in an effort to get people to buy it. People buy tobacco for the same reason I used to buy it. They know it is bad for them. They joke and call them "cancer sticks." Oh, but kids are being duped, they say. There is no group of individuals on Earth more acutely aware of the danger of smoking than kids, to my knowledge. When my daughter was six or seven she was all over this issue. These same anti-tobacco crusaders are the same ones who will argue six ways from Sunday that marijuana should be legal, too. Let them stop abortion before stopping smoking.
STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
STWRITES@AOL.COM
Movie Review: "I'm an Insider Too"
Summary: 4 Stars
We all know that it's sometimes worth it to take a second look at a film you may have been dismissive of before. To say, I didn't "get" THE INSIDER the first time I saw it would be something of an understatement. I didn't see it as all that revelatory--"'Big tobacco' corrupt?" "Big media craven?" "Mike Wallace has an ego and a temper on the scale of Mt. St. Helens?" Quelle surprise! There was nothing particularly new about all that. In fact, the only big news was that Russell Crowe was going the DeNiro route and altering his physical appearance for the sake of his art. (OK, OK, not as extreme but he did put on a few pounds and donned a less than flattering grey toupe.) Maybe it was something I ate that first time, though, 'cause the second time around, I have to admit, it was pretty riveting. This time out, I found the moral dilemmas facing Crowe's whistleblower and Pacino's muckraker TV producer pretty darn fascinating--despite the fact that I knew how it was all going to turn out. Oh yeah, and I finally got the fact that the title is supposed to be a little ambiguous and that,yes, Pacino's Lowell Bergman character is an "insider" too.
Sometimes I'm a little slow, but eventually, if I'm lucky, I catch on. THE INSIDER is a quietly powerful and effective film. Apparently, it didn't manage to convince Russell Crowe to quit smoking, but--as a morality tale and as sheer drama--it's still pretty darn effective.