| | | A killer comedy!
Features: DVD, Aspect Ratio 1.85:1, Scene Access
Big-city mobsters and the Broadway stage collide hilariously in this side-splitting, all-star comedy that has audiences and critics rolling in the aisles! John Cusack (Grosse Pointe Blank, Con Air) stars as David Shayne, an idealistic young writer who'll do anything to get his first Broadway play off the ground--even if it means teaming up with the mob! Surrounded by a wacky cast of characters, including a gangster's ditzy girlfriend (sexy Jennifer Tilly, Liar Liar), and a tipsy actress (Dianne Wiest in her Academy Award-winning performance), Shayne's got to pull it all off before the curtain falls, and the bullets start to fly.
"Hilarious!" Newsweek
"Two Thumbs Up!" Siskel & Ebert
"A howling good time guaranteed!" USA Today
"Side-splitting comedy!" The New York Times
Editor's Note
David Shayne (John Cusack, in performance his character that of a young Woody Allen) is an idealistic young playwright whose life (and play) is about to be turned upside down as it heads toward Broadway. In order to gain financing for GOD OF OUR FATHERS, Shayne agrees to hire Olive Neal (a wonderfully high-squeaking Jennifer Tilly), the actress/girlfriend of Nick Valenti, a potential backer--who also happens to be a gangster. Unfortunately, the lass proves to be not only talent-free but ditzy to boot, a hindrance since she is supposed to play a psychiatrist. But Cheech, Olive's hoodlum bodyguard, proves to be more intuitive artistically than anyone would suspect, as his contributions improve not only Olive's performance but the quality of the flailing play as well. Meanwhile, Shayne must contend with an odd assortment of actors, including the neurotic Eden Brent, with her omnipresent, yapping dog; the pompous Warner Purcell, a corset-wearing overeater; and haughty leading lady Helen Sinclair (a fabulous Dianne Wiest), the aging, boozing diva with whom Shayne begins a romance. The laughs keep coming like rapid machine-gun fire in this riotous Woody Allen farce.
| Features | Widescreen Version | | Interactive Menus | | English Dolby Surround |
| Technical Info
|
Release Information
| | Studio: Buena Vista |
| Release Date: 9/6/2005 |
| Running Time: 95 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1994 | | Catalog ID: 16789 | | UPC: 00717951001900 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English [CC], English | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | 1.85:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Oscar (1995) |  | Dianne Wiest, Winner, Best Supporting Actress | | | Susan Bode, Santo Loquasto, Nominee, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration | | | Jeffrey Kurland, Nominee, Best Costume Design | | | Woody Allen, Nominee, Best Director | | | Chazz Palminteri, Nominee, Best Supporting Actor | | | Jennifer Tilly, Nominee, Best Supporting Actress | | | Woody Allen, Doug McGrath, Nominee, Best Screenplay Written Directly For The Screen | |
Golden Globe (1995) | | Dianne Wiest, Winner, Best Performance By An Actress In A Supporting Role |
| Memorable Quotes| "Don't speak!"----Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest) |
|
| | Professional Reviews | Premiere
"...Unparalleled character acting..." - Recommended 05/01/1995 p.133Rolling Stone
"...BULLETS is one of Allen's best and most revealing comedies, as much a moral meditation as it is dazzling fun..." 11/03/1994 p.103-4 New York Times
"...A bright, energetic, sometimes side-splitting comedy with vital matters on its mind....The [film] in which [Allen] speaks most seriously from the heart..." 09/30/1994 p.C1 Entertainment Weekly
"...One of Allen's briskest yet densest movies....Wiest in a no-holds-barred, Oscar-winning performance..." -- Rating:A- 05/12/1995 pp.68-70 Film Comment
"...The Woodman's funniest movie in years....Lovely stuff..." 11/01/1994 p.71-3 Sight and Sound
"...Unabashed entertainment....It's enormously winning..." 05/01/1995 p.40-1 Chicago Sun-Times
"...The movie is very funny and, in the way it follows its logic wherever it leads, surprisingly tough..." 10/28/1994 p.41 Premiere
"[A] portrait of backstage Manhattan?with much to say about the demands of art." 07/01/2006 p.109 Chicago Sun Times 0 of 10
Allen's cast recreates some of the same madcap zaniness that's always associated with the Broadway of the late 1920s, when every night's foibles were rehashed the next day at the Algonquin Round Table. John Cusack plays David Shayne, the playwright, as a young man of terrifying seriousness, who nevertheless is cheerfully willing to compromise his art for success. He is the target of a seduction attempt by Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), a fading star with an alcohol problem, who loves to discuss her role over drinks. (In a speakeasy, she orders two martinis. He's flattered that she knows his drink - until she explains that both martinis are for her.) The other members of the play cast are peculiar in that focused, self-obsessed way that only actors seem able to obtain. There's leading man Warner Purcell, for example, played by Jim Broadbent as a man with serious eating and romantic disorders. He starts out consuming only hot water "with a little lemon" and ends up eating everything in sight, ballooning to alarming proportions while dangerously falling in love with the gangster's girl. And there's Eden Brent (Tracey Ullman), loud, confident and always late ("My pedicurist had a stroke"). And of course the shrill-voiced, spectacularly untalented Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly), the gun moll, whose presence on stage is a serious handicap for any scene. Allen and his co-writer, Douglas McGrath, play the backstage stuff for laughs, and get a lot of them, especially with the food subplot involving Broadbent. (He's the large, genial actor you may remember as the bartender in The Crying Game). But when the second level of the screenplay gets cooking, darker and more forbidden areas of humor open up. What, for example, is the responsibility of the artist to his art? We've heard of artists who would "kill for their art" - but would they, really? And should they? There's the sneaky suspicion that some of this subplot in Bullets Over Broadway may refer obliquely to events in the last two years in Allen's life. The heart has its reasons, he argued at a famous press conference, and in the movie that's echoed with "an artist creates his own moral universe." Only gradually do we realize that the only artist in Bullets Over Broadway who takes art really seriously is Cheech, the bodyguard. Bullets Over Broadway shares a kinship with a more serious film by Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a man committed murder and was able, somehow, to almost justify it. Now here is the comic side of the same coin. The movie is very funny and, in the way it follows its logic wherever it leads, surprisingly tough. - Roger Ebert
San Francisco Chronicle 0 of 10
Set in New York in the Roaring Twenties, when midtown Manhattan was teeming with show-biz dollies and wise guys in spats, Bullets Over Broadway, now available on home video, is Woody Allen at his best--a gem of a Broadway fable with a crafty premise, a raft of brilliant actors at the top of their form and a bouncy, just-for-pleasure attitude... Bullets Over Broadway is full of wonderful performances: Broadbent and Tilly are both surprising, but it's Wiest, as the vain and ludicrous Helen, who gets the juiciest part. Summoning a deep, bassoonlike voice that she's never used in a film before, Wiest plays the self-infatuated Helen like a second-class Norma Desmond -- pumped up with delusions, but savvy enough to get whatever she wants from her naive playwright. Wiest won her second best-supporting-actress Oscar for the role. Bullets Over Broadway is the most enjoyable and accomplished Woody Allen film in a long time, and it compares well with the broad, unpretentious comedies he made early in his film career. - Edward Guthmann
|
| |
|
|
|
