After running across this movie last night late on cable I finally clicked on it. Like most nights on cable there is usually very little to watch that you haven't already seen or are categorically something you simply don't watch ever for any reason. One of my things is that I just cant take movies that are nothing but endless streams of suffering and pain and shootings and car crashings and people who get shot and don't bleed or cry or AND people who are splattered all over the screen. I just don't get all that crap. Life is hard enough, why do you have to absorb angry people on screen doing things that are mean and actually kill and torture others, be it with their words or their actions.
So, with all that said, this movie violates a tiny part of my overall total tiredness with nonsensical violence and extreme horrors being done to others on-screen. It is full of men who are being pretty much nothing but the lowest common denominator, which is simply the law of the jungle, eat or be eaten. But they're doing it in the format of a car lot as salesmen who have created careful scripts for handling customers and driving the customer to give up more than they may have had to if the customer had know the salesman's goal, which is just to get all they can get at all costs. And all costs means simply that being truthful isn't necessary or a reasonable thing for a salesman to do. But on top of that they're being mean to each other. Granted they're learning the hard knocks of that business and finding their way like the members of a pride of lions must find their way when the feeding frenzy begins otherwise they will starve.
And of course these guys are always busy couching everything in terms of being either a person who is a god of maleness who can have whoever he wants any time OR, he must be someone who can easily be pushed over by another man or anyone at all who can then rape him in the anus. Yes, you all know what i'm saying here. They're all full of stupid talk which, ever since Pulp Fiction, its pretty much that same nonsense that was fresh for a couple of years back in the mid nineties. But as this was made in 1998 for a 1999 release I guess we can forgive this tired way of talking on screen (though the guys at Entourage are certainly giving this way of speaking a much needed freshening up and making it fun again these days in 2007).
But, in spite of all this, this movie just just fun to watch. There is truly something going on here that transcends the story of these hungry wolves. It shows us we are all wolves.
And the way it does is to show that the customers aren't stupid either. But they have learned that if a used car saleswolf will behave in a certain way then customers have individually come up with strategies to keep themselves alive when the wolf makes his charge. And these are hilarious. Which make the men hilarious.
What the other people here who have reviewed this movie have noted is that there are some unfortunate (to the movie) side story lines that simply show that the writers here had something great going but didn't know what to do with it, so somebody just decided to send this movie down a tired and well-worn path to make it all end in a way that other movies have done. Most of this movie is fantastic movie making, but the tiredness of the side stories, as tedious and uninspired as they are, still somehow don't take away the joy of watching the majority of this movie.
Though its a bunch of men being mean to each other for the most part, its somehow great. When drug dealers and tired TIRED story lines like that disgrace the writers just realize that these are the moments you can slip away to the bathroom or get a snack. But when all that side crap goes away and the saleslions are taking to the zebra fields, then its great movie making.
If you rent it, I promise you'll be glad you did.
