On I List of Movie Reviews

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Ironweed (1987)

Rate: 5
Viewed: 10/23

10/23: Ironweed is a Jack Nicholson movie I had put off for a long time because it concerns alcoholics which is a boring topic if you ask me.

Okay, yeah...by the end of the show, it's exactly what I thought. What a surprise that Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep were nominated for Oscars. Then again, maybe not since they're big names which wasn't enough to sell this overlong depressing film. As a result, it was a big box-office bomb. The acting is nothing special, but Jack Nicholson is fine as usual.

Ironweed would've worked better if it focused solely on Francis Phelan, but expanding the narrative to include Helen Archer was a huge mistake. Honestly, who cares about her? She died...the end. Obviously, Helen was suffering from either liver or stomach cancer. Nobody will miss her anyway.

One critic said, "If you ride with the emotional undertow of Ironweed, there's no way you'll ever look at street people in quite the same way." Uh, right...bums are bums, and they got there by fucking up their lives. Get out of here. Here's a more honest assessment from somebody else: "I worked in a movie theater and the first night, we had a sold out audience. We had to wake most of them up at the end."

All in all, in order for Ironweed to succeed, I have to care about the characters, but Héctor Babenco failed big time, hence the death of his directorial career in Hollywood.

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