I laughed all the way through this movie. I had seen parts of it before but overall, it was new to me. I had no idea how cynical it all was. And what a great cast – Dustin Hoffman, Geena Davis, Chevy Chase, Joan Cusack… Andy Garcia I can pass on. Chevy Chase… I mean, honestly, I can understand how people might want to kill him for his performance in this movie, but he cracked me up.

The movie this most resembles for me is another Dustin Hoffman movie, Wag the Dog – it really made me want to see that movie again. Wag the Dog is funnier, I think. Hoffman is definitely funnier in Wag the Dog (“This, this is nothing!”) Here he gets to do some seriously heavy acting in places. It breaks my heart when I see how much Hoffman can feel some things… when he talks about the world being a jungle etc, you can just feel how far down he’s reaching, and you can forgive the camera for getting just a little too close up at times. Then, he also has great comedy stuff in the movie… the entire plane crash scene, for example. A plane crashes in front of your car, what do you do? Hoffman releases the steering wheel and innocently enquires to no one in particular, “What now?”

I love how cheap the whole movie appears. You don’t even see the plane crash at the beginning… I never thought I’d see a plane crash in a Dustin Hoffman movie achieved by flashing a few lights off screen and adding sound effects. And when Hoffman and Garcia are on the ledge at the end, it’s such a plainly framed shot, so obviously only a few feet off the ground. I had no idea of what year it was from until I started digging around online during the commercials, and I would’ve probably guessed it at 1990 at the latest, so I was fairly surprised to see a Terminator 2: Judgment Day poster on the kid’s wall. It seems kind of ahead of its time with the cynicism about the media etc, but 1992 was also the year of Robert Altman’s The Player, which won all kinds of awards.

Overall, a great high concept comedy with the pace of the 80s but the cynicism of the young 90s, and a fantastic cast.

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