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Leaving Las VegasRating:
Release Date: 01 January, 2000 Retail Price: $14.94 OUR Price: $10.99 You SAVE: $3.95! Cast: Complete Cast (12 total) |
Leaving Las Vegas Reviews
"The Hole You're In."
Leaving Las Vegas is a dark, depressing, haunting film that stays in your thoughts until it hurts to think. Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue are extraordinary in Leaving Las Vegas. Cage received an Oscar and Shue got a much-derserved nomination for best actress. I have always admired and liked Shue, she is a real and talented actress, she is good in every role even if it is a crummy movie. Cage's performance just blew me away, I knew he could act in Peggy Sue got Married but this is best and most appreciated role. They have amazing chemistry, they are electrfying together. Director Mike Figgis did a wonderful job, the opening credits and the musical score are fantastic. Leaving Las Vegas can be hard to watch but this is real and important film. One of my favorite dramas of all-time. You have to see this one.
A considered perspective
I first saw this movie in the theater and at the time, I was fooled. I had no experience with alcoholicism and no education about it. I also had a fascination with prostitutes and so, you see, I was fooled by the two main characters. I thought it was a really good movie.
If I judge my life from the ages of 17-23 I think my opinion on the movie matches nicely with the stupid behavior and incorrect opinions with which it was contemporary. In other words, I was wrong.
Later in life I've learned a thing or two about alcohol and I've at least figured out that street walking prostitutes tend to be drug addicts and are not really very attractive at all, so I no longer have a naive attraction to the CONCEPT of either main character, and thus their false characterization is highly apparent. ON which flawed foundation the rest of the move cannot stand. So on re-watching the movie recently I was disgusted with its falseness and ridiculousness.
Cage plays a man who is in such pain over the loss of his family and all that was good in his life that he wants to drink himself to death. Here's a stupid contradiction for you: he wants to die so he drinks, whereas in real life, alcholics drink because they believe they need it to live. As in, if you stop drinking you think you're going to die from the hardship/emotions/stress of it.
If you want to commit suicide try jumping off a cliff. It works faster and you can leave your booze money to charity. Plus you might provide food for some animals. There's your noble sacrifice to ease your infinite pain. By comparison, the cliff method makes drinking yourself to death on expensive booze seem pretty selfish, neh?
Shue plays a drop dead gorgeous streetwalking prostitute (here's your 2nd stupid contradiction). She decides she loves the man who wants to die so bad that he drinks an insane amount. She agrees not to try to save his life because she honors the nobility of his quest to die. (snerk)
So we have a couple of completely unrealistic characters who then fall in 'love' and proceed to be miserable for a few weeks. Problem is, when you have stupid unrealistic characters, their relationship simply _can_not_ be plausible either.
Hollywood has a lot of people fooled into thinking that pain is beauty, and that contemptible behavior ostensibly motivated by that pain is honorable.
All you people calling this film beautiful or "honest", please explain a) why these characters can be believed AT ALL, and b) what is beautiful about suicide and apathy.
Please everyone, wake up to the realizty of movies like this. Physically beautiful characters combined with nice cinematography, stirring music, plus titillating scenes do NOT equal a "beautiful" creation. A movie can be well made and still be utterly stupid and dishonest by the human story it attempts to convey.
As was explained by a previous reviewer, substitute some physically ugly and utterly uncharming characters for Cage and Shue, and re-evaluate.
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