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Loon over Miami
Matthew Modine plays an out-of-control actor on a drug-and-drink binge in Miami in the pointless "The Blackout" by the director of "King of New York."
By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com
"The Blackout" is a complete waste. With vacuous dialogue and little sense of
character or direction, it oozes from one amateurishly conceived scene
to the next.
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| | | THE BLACKOUT | Directed by: Abel Ferrara.
Written by: Abel Ferrara, Marla Hanson, Chris Zois.
Cast: Matthew Modine, Dennis Hopper, Beatrice Dalle, Claudia Schiffer, Sarah Lassez.
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Matthew Modine stars as the out-of-work actor Matthew binging on booze
and cocaine in Miami with his French sometimes-girlfriend Annie
(Beatrice Dalle, who played the blind passenger in "Night on Earth").
Meanwhile, Dennis Hopper plays a strip-club owner who's making a movie,
the only evidence of which is that he carries a video camera and
constantly rants, "We're makin' a movie here. It's a fuckin' great
movie." It is apparently a movie about being in a strip club with a lot
of strippers around, which is pretty much all the Hopper character does
in life.
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| Claudia Schiffer only has a dozen lines and mumbles them incomprehensibly. | |
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All that Matthew does in life is drink, snort, screw and yell at his
girlfriend. When this all comes to an end, we next see him sobered up
and living in New York with Claudia Schiffer, who only has a dozen
lines
and mumbles them incomprehensibly.
Matthew is haunted by his breakup with Annie, which will eventually
lead
him back to Miami where a shocking revelation awaits. But by then the
movie has taken us nowhere for so long that we don't care.
"The Blackout" is packed with hackneyed images — like that Matthew
hugging the image of his lost girlfriend on a TV screen, which is
repeated endlessly in case we didn't appreciated its brilliance the
first time — and it's strewn with drugs, drinking and undulating
women as if all by themselves they can make the movie serious and
hard-hitting. It's an inadequately thought out, clumsily written and
tediously paced effort from Abel Ferrara, director of "King of New
York," "Bad Lieutenant" and "The Addiction," that went justly
unreleased from its filming in 1997 until now.
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AUGUST 3, 2001
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
Reader comments on The Blackout:
Unreal from Steve, Feb 28, 2002
its ok from bryan, Dec 11, 2005
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