1980 Week: Gloria

          Indie-cinema godhead John Cassavetes initially earned fame as an actor in mainstream films, and he spent most of his life parachuting back into Hollywood for paycheck acting gigs even as his pursued his real passion, writing and directing esoteric films exploring dark corners of the human psyche. The two parts of Cassavetes’ cinematic identity converged in Gloria, the most commercially oriented movie that Cassavetes directed, with the exception of two studio pictures he made in the ’60s before finding his arthouse groove with Faces (1968) and Husbands (1970). Starring Cassavetes’ wife and muse, Gena Rowlands, Gloria is a straightforward crime picture with a touch of Hollywood sentimentality—exactly the sort of formulaic schmaltz that Cassavetes generally avoided. Even for an iconoclast, the possibility of reaching a bigger audience (and scoring a financial windfall) must have been impossible to resist. Nonetheless, it’s significant to observe that after Gloria, Cassavetes transitioned back to making art films until his death in 1989. Given its mediocrity, Gloria could not have been the most edifying of experiences.

          The movie opens in the Bronx, where a frantic Latina runs home to her apartment, realizing she’s being chased. Jeri (Julie Carmen) is married to Jack (Buck Henry), a mob accountant-turned-informant, so Jeri and Jack both realize hitmen are on the way to wipe out the couple and their two kids. When Jeri’s friend and neighbor, middle-aged former gang moll Gloria (Rowlands), stops by for a visit, Jeri explains the situation and asks Gloria to hide the kids until after the shooting stops. Gloria reluctantly agrees, but only preteen Phil (John Adames) leaves with her, since his sister elects to die with her parents. Gloria takes Phil to her apartment and listens in horror to gunfire down the hall, then sneaks Phil out of the building and becomes a fugitive—because Jack entrusted his young son with a book containing incriminating facts and figures. Before long, Gloria finds herself yanking her life’s savings from a safe-deposit box and escorting Phil around the country while she works connections with old mob buddies in order to revoke the hit on Phil. The predictable contrivance of the movie is that the more time she spends with Phil, the more she warms to the idea of being the boy’s surrogate mother.

          Because it sprawls across a fleshy 121 minutes and because costar Adames’ performance is quite terrible, Gloria doesn’t work as a zippy little thriller; instead, it’s a weird amalgam of pulp trash and thoughtful storytelling. Some fine things occur along the way, and Rowlands believably incarnates a seen-it-all broad surprised by the emergence of long-suppressed compassion. (Rowlands earned Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for her performance.) As for the movie around her, it’s perplexing. Cassavetes populates scenes with his customary mix of grotesques and oddballs, employing improvisational techniques and nonactors to increase the movie’s realism. Seeing as how the storyline is inherently contrived, the imposition of these indie-cinema tropes feels awkward and unnecessary. Moreover, there’s a disconnect between the meditative nature of the movie and the oppressive noise of Bill Conti’s score. The Rocky composer, never known for his subtlety, drenches action scenes with exciting themes and uses noodly jazz riffs to energize sleepier stretches.
          FYI, Sharon Stone stars in a lifeless 1999 remake, also titled Gloria. Inexplicably, Sidney Lumet directed.

Gloria: FUNKY

Opening Night (1977)

          Indie-cinema godhead John Cassavetes cranked out his singular movies at a steady pace throughout the ’70s, culminating with this epic rumination on the dissipation of a middle-aged woman’s psyche—not be confused with the director’s previous epic rumination on the dissipation of a middle-aged woman’s psyche, A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Yet while that film earned two Academy Award nominations and is now considered something of a zenith achievement for Cassavetes’ improvisational style, Opening Night is easily the filmmaker’s most interminable movie of the ’70s, running a bloated 144 minutes without ever once revealing to the audience what’s causing the central character’s emotional spiral. As with all of Cassavetes’ films, Opening Night has many champions (the picture earned two Golden Globe nominations), but it’s telling that the picture was such a huge flop during initial engagements that it didn’t receive a proper theatrical release until the ’80s. By the time Opening Night was completed, Cassavetes had already made five previous auteur pieces laden with shapeless angst, including two starring his real-life spouse Gena Rowlands, so the public appetite for the director’s uniquely self-indulgent art had clearly been exhausted.

          Rowlands plays an actress named Myrtle, who’s doing out-of-town previews for an upcoming Broadway show. Following a performance one night, Myrtle encounters a loving but troubled fan (Laura Johnson). Immediately thereafter, the fan dies in a traffic accident that Myrtle witnesses. This event spins Myrtle into a series of meltdowns, from alcoholic binges offstage to bizarre ad-libs onstage. Myrtle’s behavior worries the show’s costar (Cassavetes), playwright (Joan Blondell), and producer (Ben Gazzara), among others. The majority of Opening Night comprises dull, repetitive scenes of Rowlands acting strangely; sometimes she seems obnoxious, and sometimes she seems unhinged. Viewers are also subjected to excerpts from the trite play that Myrtle’s rehearsing. Whereas A Woman Under the Influence slid its title character’s dissipation into a narrative about a marriage under stress, Opening Night fails to surround Myrtle with formidable characters, so it’s as if everyone else in the movie exists only to watch Rowlands’ flamboyant acting. (Incidental scenes of Gazzara’s character with his wife, played by Zohra Lampert, don’t amount to much.) In the end, Opening Night seems more like a parody of Cassavetes’ more-is-more aesthetic than an actual example of the filmmaker’s craft.

Opening Night: LAME

Husbands (1970)

          Actor/director John Cassavetes’ cycle of semi-improvised movies reached a new level with Husbands, a showpiece for the acting of Casssavetes and his pals Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. By melding his signature style of spontaneous performance with the specific energies of established screen personalities, Cassavetes achieved a noteworthy synthesis of Hollywood artifice and verité grunginess. Yet while the picture is historically significant as a formative step for the burgeoning indie-cinema aesthetic—of which Cassavetes is now considered the de facto godfather—Husbands is an acquired taste. Like all of the director’s improv-driven pictures, Husbands is an overlong and repetitive survey of unappealing behavior, presenting endless scenes of self-involved people groping with language and violent physicality as they strive to articulate petty anxieties. The problem, as always, is that Cassavetes fails to explore his fascinations in a balanced way, so there’s no real context around the characters. Thus, viewers are subjected to a world in which men have tacit license to follow every whim, no matter how injurious the results might be to other people—and yet viewers are expected to sympathize with these boors.

          The story is so simple that the film could (and should) have run 90 minutes instead of nearly 140. After a close friend dies of a sudden heart attack, buddies Frank (Falk), Gus (Cassavetes), and Harry (Gazzara) go on a drunken bender as they wrestle with the shocking reminder of their mortality. The first half of the movie comprises the pals meandering from the funeral to various New York dives, drinking and singing and whining all the way. The second half of the picture begins when Harry fights with his wife and impulsively decides to fly to England. Concerned for Harry’s emotional welfare, Frank and Gus tag along, so the pals end up in a London hotel with three women they pick up in a bar. And so it goes from there, up until the inconclusive ending.

          Fans of Cassavetes’ work generally single out the freshness of the acting as a core virtue, but the performances by the three leads in Husbands hardly seem praiseworthy. While it’s true that Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara generate verisimilitude by channeling the sloppy way real people move and talk, there’s a reason screen acting generally involves shrinking normal human behavior down to illustrative indicators—watching “real” people in real time is boring. And that, from my perspective, is the best possible adjective for describing Husbands. Sure, critics have spent decades talking about how the picture captures the unchained id of the male animal, blah-blah-blah, and there’s a kernel of truth within that interpretation. After all, the characters in Husbands are as likely to break down in tears as they are to physically and/or verbally abuse women, so there’s nothing flattering in the picture Cassavetes paints. Whether there’s anything interesting in the picture, however, is another matter.

Husbands: FUNKY

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

          I wish I could see the qualities in John Cassavetes’ work that are so obvious to his admirers, but having watched most of the major pictures in the writer-director’s revered canon, I’m hung up on a few things. First, why are the movies so self-indulgently long and repetitive? I get the idea of trying to capture reality in all of its messy rhythms, but since Cassavetes edited his raw footage, why didn’t he keep editing until scenes become concise? Did he really believe everything his actors did was interesting? Furthermore, isn’t there something inherently precious about the whole concept of “capturing reality” anyway, seeing as how Cassavetes’ movies feature actors? How true can pretending be? Finally, why are so many of Cassavetes’ pictures filled with wall-to-wall ugliness? The implication seems to be that the only genuine characters are those who are perpetually at each other’s throats for craven reasons.

          Anyway, I gave up trying to enjoy Cassavetes’ movies a while ago, even though I admire his integrity; there’s no question he showed nerve by shunning nearly everything one associates with Hollywood filmmaking, from brisk pacing to smooth camerawork to tidy resolutions. Consider: Around the time A Woman Under the Influence was made, actresses including Ellen Burstyn and Joanne Woodward were using their influence to make Hollywood movies featuring themes similar to those found in A Woman Under the Influence. Yet while the Hollywood productions starring Burstyn and Woodward offered crisp explanations for why certain women behave erratically, Cassavetes simply depicted a woman succumbing to unnamed mental difficulties, leaving the viewer as bewildered as the afflicted woman’s loved ones.

          Is one approach better than the other? Who’s to say?

          Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, plays Mabel, a Los Angeles housewife and the mother of three young children. Her husband, Nick (Peter Falk), supervises a municipal road crew, so he’s often called away unexpectedly. When the story begins, one of Nick’s sudden absences knocks Mabel out of balance, so she cycles through several types of odd behavior. She forgets facts she should know well, like the names of Nick’s co-workers; she flirts recklessly and even brings a stranger home one night; she explodes into screaming rages; and she humiliates Nick by creating scenes in front of his family and friends. As in most of Cassavetes’ movies, these events are shown in long, shapeless scenes filled with seemingly improvised discursions the camera captures with blurry, documentary-style fluidity.

          Rowlands gives a committed performance, but whether her acting choices feel authentic or forced is open to debate. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences praised her work with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.) For me, however, Falk’s characterization is a greater stumbling block than Rowlands’. Watching him berate and lie to his wife, hearing him threaten to kill his own children and those of his neighbor, and seeing him slap Rowlands to the ground on two occasions, I kept wondering why everyone in the movie regarded Rowlands’ character as a lunatic. But then again, maybe that’s why I can’t find a place for myself in Cassavetes’ cinematic world. Between the rampant misogyny and the tiresome preoccupation with unmotivated anger, the director’s vision seems to be focused myopically on the worst parts of the human experience. 

A Woman Under the Influence: FUNKY

The Fury (1978)

          Apparently hopeful that lighting would strike twice in terms of creative inspiration and box-office returns, director Brian De Palma followed up his breakthrough movie, the 1976 supernatural shocker Carrie, with another horror flick about killer psychics. Yet while The Fury has bigger stars and glossier production values than its predecessor, it’s so far-fetched and gruesome that it lacks anything resembling the emotional gut-punch of Carrie. That’s not to say The Fury is devoid of entertainment value—it’s just that De Palma badly overreached in his attempt to blend elements of the conspiracy, horror, and supernatural genres into a sensationalistic new hybrid. Written for the screen by John Farris, who adapted his own novel, the convoluted movie pits former friends Ben (John Cassavetes) and Peter (Kirk Douglas) against each other. They’re both secret-agent types, and Ben is exploring the possible use of psychics as trained killers. One of Ben’s star pupils is Peter’s adult son, Robin (Andrew Stevens), although Ben expects even greater things from Gillian (Amy Irving), a gifted but troubled woman Robin’s age.
          You can probably guess where this goes—the young psychics fall in love even as they realize they’re being manipulated, Peter tries to rescue his son, and corpses hit the floor when the psychics get pushed too far.

          This being a De Palma picture, one is unwise to expect restraint on the part of the filmmaker, and, indeed, the movie’s finale involves a human body exploding. Moreover, despite the sophisticated contributions of cinematographer Richard H. Kline and composer John Williams, nearly every scene in The Fury ends with the cinematic equivalent of an exclamation point. Hell, the picture even features two performances (provided by Douglas and Stevens) distinguished by actors indicating intensity by flaring their nostrils. Regarding the other leads, Cassavetes sleepwalks through a paycheck gig as per the norm, and Irving elevates her scenes with the delicate sensitivity that distinguishes most of her work. None of the major performances is particularly good, per se, but each is lively in a different way, so at least De Palma achieves a certain overcaffeinated tonal consistency. Considering its assertive direction, colorful cast, and outlandish storyline, The Fury should be memorable in a comic-book sort of way, but ultimately, the picture is as anonymous as the silhouetted models featured on the poster—instead of delivering unique jolts, it’s Carrie Lite.

The Fury: FUNKY

Two-Minute Warning (1976)

          The premise of Two-Minute Warning couldn’t be more appealing for fans of cheesy ’70s blockbusters: A sniper takes a position in the clock tower of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during a crowded football game, so cops led by Captain Peter Holly (Charlton Heston) must take the sniper out. Chuck Heston versus a psycho against a backdrop of tragic melodrama—pass the popcorn! Unfortunately, the title of Two-Minute Warning is itself a warning (to viewers), since virtually nothing exciting happens until the last two minutes of the game that provides the film’s narrative structure. Most of the movie comprises a long slog of “character development” in the superficial disaster-movie style, meaning Two-Minute Warning is nearly all foreplay with very little payoff.

          That said, if you dive into the movie aware that it’s a slow burn, the combination of enterprising location photography and enthusiastic performances might be enough to keep you interested. The main relationship in the movie is between Captain Holly, who spends most of his time watching the sniper through a video feed originating in the Goodyear Blimp (!), and hotshot SWAT team commander Chris Button (John Cassavetes). Holly wants to remove the sniper without gunplay, whereas Button is itching for a shootout. Watching these alpha males clash provides a smidgen of macho entertainment, though one wishes the filmmakers had found a way to make their conflict more dynamic. The lack of strong leading characters lets supporting players run away with the picture. Brock Peters stands out as a Coliseum maintenance man who tries to be a hero, and Beau Bridges has some sorta-affecting moments as an unemployed dad fighting with his wife and kids in the stands, unaware of the danger lurking behind the end zone.

          Two-Minute Warning hews so closely to the disaster-movie paradigm that the story also includes an aging pickpocket (Walter Pidgeon), a football-loving priest (Mitchell Ryan), and a bickering couple (played by David Janssen and Gena Rowlands). Yes, it’s the old “Who’s going to live, who’s going to die?” drill. Director Larry Peerce rounded out the cast with his then-wife, Marilyn Hassett, the star of his maudlin The Other Side of the Mountain movies, although casting his missus appears to be as close as he got to emotionally investing in this trifling potboiler. Since the Coliseum figured prominently in ’70s pop culture (it was used for Heaven Can Wait, North Dallas Forty, and innumerable TV episodes), the venue provides as comforting a presence as any of the name-brand actors, and Peerce shoots the location well. Overall, however, Two-Minute Warning is a missed opportunity given all the possibilities suggested by the premise. Fumble!

Two-Minute Warning: FUNKY

Brass Target (1978)

          Crammed with big-name actors, colorful locations, and complex schemes, Brass Target should be a rousing thriller. Unfortunately, the team behind the picture tried to do too many things, and the starring role was unwisely given to John Cassavettes—who by this point in his career preferred directing low-budget films to acting in Hollywood flicks—so the combination of a confusing script and a phoned-in leading performance makes it difficult to appreciate the picture’s many admirable qualities. Set in 1945 Europe, just after the defeat of the Nazis, Brass Target begins with an exciting robbery: Mysterious criminals attack an Allied train and steal a fortune in Nazi gold. The theft divides Allied powers, because Russians blame Americans for the loss, so belligerent U.S. General George S. Patton (George Kennedy) vows to recover the gold and prove his country’s innocence. And then the movie veers off-course.

          Instead of focusing on Patton and the conspirators who want to impede his investigation, the picture shifts to an Army detective, Major Joe De Lucca (Cassavettes), who digs into the robbery while dealing with myriad personal melodramas. Among other things, he’s got a fractious friendship with Col. Mike McCauley (Patrick McGoohan), a schemer who trades in stolen war loot, and both men love Mara (Sophia Loren), a European who survived the war by sleeping her way to safety. The movie’s plot gets even more complicated when the conspirators—primarily Col. Donald Rogers (Robert Vaughn) and Col. Walter Gilchrist (Edward Herrmann)—hire an enigmatic European assassin (Max Von Sydow) to kill Patton lest the general discover their crime.

          Any one of these storylines would have been enough for a satisfying movie, so Brass Target ends up giving each of its component elements short shrift. More damningly, the best scenes, which depict the assassin’s meticulous planning of an attempt on Patton’s life, feel like repeats of similar scenes in the acclaimed thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973). Nonetheless, Von Sydow gives the picture’s best performance, especially since the other acting in the movie is highly erratic.

          Cassavettes preens and scowls like some sort of irritable peacock; Loren looks lost, which is understandable seeing as how her character is anemically underdeveloped; Kennedy plays Patton as a foul-mouthed bully, his acting inevitably suffering by comparison to George C. Scott’s Oscar-winning turn in Patton (1970); and McGoohan is terrible, his accent shifting inexplicably from one line to the next. Still, Brass Target has tremendous production values, and the milieu of the story—postwar Europe as a lawless frontier—is fascinating. Plus, the central gimmick of the narrative, a conspiracy-theory explanation for the real Patton’s death in 1945, is imaginative. One suspects, however, that the premise was explored to stronger effect in the Frederick Nolan novel from which this film was adapted. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Brass Target: FUNKY

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

          Stepping outside his comfort zone of intimate character dramas, writer-director John Cassavetes took a stab at genre filmmaking with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which takes place in the criminal underworld of Los Angeles. Regular Cassavetes collaborator Ben Gazzara stars as Cosmo Vittelli, the proprietor of a dingy strip club. After incurring a large gambling debt he can’t repay, Cosmo agrees to murder an Asian criminal on behalf of the mobsters holding his marker, ostensibly to erase his debt. Unbeknownst to Cosmo, the mobsters plan to take him out after the hit.

          The story is simple enough to generate pulpy tension, but Cassavetes explores the narrative through his signature prism of on-the-fly filmmaking and semi-improvisational acting. In fact, the indie auteur’s first cut ran an excruciating 135 minutes, thanks to unnecessary discursions like vignettes of performances at Cosmo’s club. Cassavetes released the original version for one disastrous week in New York during 1976, then pulled it from exhibition and chopped the movie down to 109 minutes for a better-received 1978 re-release. Today, both cuts of the picture are held in high esteem, largely due to the widespread critical contention that everything Cassavettes did was surpassingly wonderful.

          Assessing the 1978 cut, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie offers an interesting spin on the usual tropes of crime pictures. Intense realism heightens the drama in pivotal scenes, because Cosmo comes across as a completely believable character. Therefore, even though he’s responsible for his own problems because he arrogantly places bets he can’t cover, it’s easy to feel sympathy for his plight. (That’s different from actually liking the character, of course, since Cosmo is a sexist pig.) Nonetheless, there’s a strange disconnect between the film’s simplistic action scenes, which include a tense foot chase in an abandoned building, and the picture’s loose conversational sequences. Every time it seems like Cassavetes is about to step on the gas, he slows down to admire the scenery.

          Another jarring element is the overpowering ugliness of the milieu. One doesn’t expect much dignity in a story about killers and strippers, but Cassavetes seems to revel in the unattractiveness of supporting actors with the same zeal he brings to close-ups of strippers’ breasts. There was always more than a bit of the voyeur in Cassavetes’ directorial style, but since the storyline of Chinese Bookie gave him license to film sleaze, one senses a lurid fascination with sex and violence. (For instance, Cassavetes cast pin-up models and strippers for key female roles instead of hiring proper actors.)

          Still, one could argue that Cassavetes was simply capturing the right atmosphere for his story, and, indeed, Chinese Bookie has a seedy vibe of which Scorsese might be envious. It’s not, however, a particularly well-made film. Seeing how poorly Cassavetes handles standard-issue scenes like shoot-outs reveals the crude nature of his visual artistry, even though his ability to create a comfortable working atmosphere for actors is on ample display.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie: FUNKY

Mikey and Nicky (1976)

          This hyper-realistic crime drama should hit my ’70s art-cinema sweet spot: It’s a quiet character piece about low-level hoods, grounded in energetic performances by two creative actors with a long offscreen history. It’s also a novelty as the only drama helmed by the great Elaine May, best known for her work in the realm of sophisticated light comedy. So, why doesn’t Mikey and Nicky work for me? In a word: Cassavetes. I realize it’s heresy to criticize the father of American indie cinema, but Cassavetes’ onscreen persona was grating at the best of times, and he’s downright insufferable here. It’s not just that he’s playing a pain-in-the-ass character; the problem is that Cassavetes treats every scene like an acting-class exercise, spinning into seemingly improvised riffs and repeating dialogue over and over again, presumably while awaiting the “inspiration” to say something different. Actors may find this stuff endlessly fascinating, but there’s a reason films usually capture results instead of process—nobody needs to see the sausage getting made.

          As the writer-director of this sloppy enterprise, May has to take the blame for letting her leading man run away with the movie to such an extent that Mikey and Nicky feels like one of Cassavetes’ own directorial endeavors. It’s a shame May didn’t exercise more discipline, since the premise could have led to something exciting. Small-time crook Nicky (Cassavetes) is convinced he’s on a Mafia hit list, so he reaches out to his long-suffering best friend, Mikey (Peter Falk)—and that early moment is when the story goes off the rails. It’s never clear what Nicky wants from Mikey, except perhaps companionship, since Nicky shoots down every suggestion Mikey makes for avoiding danger. Instead of running to safety, Nicky drags Mikey along for an evening of boozing and whoring, with more than a few pit stops for childish tantrums and emotional meltdowns. Nicky’s behavior is so obnoxious that it’s tempting to cheer when Mikey finally asks the obvious question: “Don’t you have any notion of anything that goes on outside your own head?”

          Appraising May’s contributions to Mikey and Nicky is almost impossible, since she seems like a passive observer capturing Cassvaetes’ tempestuous “genius” on film; stylistically, there’s nothing recognizable here from May’s other pictures. And befitting its on-the-fly nature, Mikey and Nicky is fraught with technical errors. In one scene, a boom operator is plainly visible in the mirror of a hotel room supposedly occupied only by the title characters. These amateur-hour mistakes are exacerbated by the fact that supporting actors including Ned Beatty, William Hickey, and M. Emmet Walsh are wasted in nothing roles. Mikey and Nicky gets all sorts of credit for trying to be something, and doubtless many discerning viewers will find admirable qualities. However, if there’s any great redeeming value buried in the self-indulgent muck, it was lost on me.

Mikey and Nicky: LAME

Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)

          “There’s some kinda crazy going on that’s not right,” Minnie Moore exclaims during a harrowing argument with her would-be paramour, Seymour Moskowitz—and that pretty much sums up the problems with this shambling character piece written and directed by indie-cinema icon John Cassavetes. The original anti-Hollywood auteur, Cassavetes practiced a unique style of filmmaking in which actors built improvisations around his scene ideas, resulting in pictures short on story but long on unique behavior. In Minnie and Moskowitz, however, the behavior veers way too far in the direction of absurd hysterics and repetitive melodrama. So instead of seeming incisive and intimate, the picture feels shapeless and shrill.

          The basic story of lonely, middle-aged museum curator Minnie (Gena Rowlands) stumbling into love with eccentric parking-lot attendant Seymour (Seymour Cassel) is innocuous enough, but the characters spend so much time enmeshed in shrieking arguments that it’s as if they live in some parallel Method-acting universe where every emotion is expressed via primal-scream therapy or simply repeating the same words over and over again. (This excess gets even more tiresome during lengthy cameos by familiar character players Val Avery, Timothy Carey, and Cassavetes himself, all of whom play frightening grotesques.)

          The title characters are in nearly every scene, either alone or together, so the picture belongs to Cassavetes regular Cassel and the director’s real-life wife, Rowlands. Cassel’s performance is undisciplined and wild, a string of colorful but unbelievable behaviors assembled into a hodgepodge that feels less like a character than an overeager audition reel. Rowlands offers her usual grounded work, but the storyline saddles her with irritating behaviors like drinking to excess and talking about her feelings in such introspective detail that her stupid life choices feel incongruous with her personal insights.

          The idea that these characters are compatible with each other is the movie’s biggest and least convincing contrivance, more or less rendering the whole enterprise moot, and the film is so monotonously screechy that it’s a relief when the director’s mother, Katherine Cassavetes, shows up for a funny but stereotypical featured role toward the end of the picture as Seymour’s overbearing Jewish mother.

Minnie and Moskowitz: LAME