Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

The pocket pool hustler Fast Eddie tries to win against the king of billards: Minnesota Fats, but his blind ambition and hubris makes him lose. He manages to overcome his faults but pays a high price. Newman was impressive in the film, but the performances of Piper and Scott took the cake. Her vulnerable, strangely undetermined Sarah, confronted by the unscrupulous and straight-talking Bird was fascinating to watch. The way Piper delivered her lines was amazing, especially the love scene. I felt I could almost touch her constant wavering of opinions. Newman left me strangely cold, it's hard to pinpoint why - maybe he should have been established more ruthless in the beginning of the picture. There was a highly surrealist element in the script: the incessant drinking. The characters easily downed a load of bottles of Bourbon and who knows what during the first big match at Ames. Everybody seems to be drinking gallons of booze throughout the picture, yet they seem only ...

A headstrong chain-gang member who has a reputation of never giving up tries to escape from rural prison. The boxing, the egg-eating and the hole-digging scenes had a big impact on me. There is a progressive senselessness in the actions, the first being a sort of understandable pecking order fight, but after that everything Newman's character does is basically pointless - and it didn't matter if he was in control or not. All his other actions are just as aimless - the beheading of the parking meters, and the "fast working" performance with the road tarring machine, where he manages to motivate everybody to work like crazy. Because of all this, the story was deeply unsettling to me. The lead character is lost in life and the universe, and - very poignantly - dies inside a church. In a modern version, the church might be replaced by some kind of bank or corporation, that tries to give a bizarre mission to one's life while at the same time micromanaging it. ...