Ishtar
I have to just force myself to write this because I have no clue what to say about this one and it’s better for everyone if I just babble and be done. Around the halfway point I was thinking, “Okay it’s silly, but it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation …” but by the end I was completely sold. This is so my kind of movie, yet I’ve no idea why. It left me smiling … what more can you ask from a movie?
The story feels like it sprang from the movie world of Robert Altman’s The Player. You can imagine the pitching session – it’s The Fabulous Baker Boys meets Lawrence of Arabia ... with spies!
Dustin Hoffmann and Warren Beatty sound like a great team but they don’t work so well together. They always look like they’re gonna crack each other up – I know some people don’t mind this kind of thing but to me it’s way too offputting. There are some great lines, though (“We’ll never work in Morocco again …”) and Hoffmann posing as a translator had me in stitches. The fireworks of the climax come a little too late but they’re worth the wait.
Anyway, like I said, it left me grinning like an idiot. That rarely happens.