BALLS AND MY WORD: SCARFACE

Ok, so I can see why Scarface is popular with rappers. The hard-won life lessons about the drug trade and making your way from poverty to kingpin, obvious parallel, same trope, same cliches. But why is the movie part of the American popular film lexicon? Lo, it is almost unwatchable; you know that is a real possibility as soon as the Oliver Stone screenwriting credit appears, but, yet, it is still downhill from even your lowest of expectations. Nearly 3 hours of hambone violence where a bunch of Italians play Cubans with varying degrees of HORRIBLE accent. I thought Robert Loggia’s character was supposed to be a New York Jew until they showed his car dealership and the sign read LOPEZ MOTORS. As unintelligible as the dialogue was frequently rendered by various mush-mouthed interpretation of “Cuban”, really, all props to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio for sometimes doing a girly version of Luigi The Pizza Guy accent, like total Fuck-It™ style. “Tony, I’ll even fock eem eef I wan to!” LIVE YO LIFE, GIRL!

Al Pacino has been good in a few things, but mostly, I think people cast him in movies where they need someone to yell for the entire duration, which I realize, now, upon viewing this movie, stems from this role, which is mostly sweating and yelling as well 3 speeches about his balls directing his life’s course (welcome to the patriarchy, bro). Save for Michelle Pfieffer, who outacts the entire cast, in the restaurant scene alone, the rest is a cavalcade of face-acting and shouting.

I think the best bad part is the Moroder-soundtracked montage that includes Tony and Elvira’s poolside wedding/tiger viewing. You gotta hand it to Oliver Stone, man, that is what stinking rich and no taste looks like, white marble, twin pools and full-grown angry tiger chained to a tree. That whole sequence is a mindblower: It starts with the unwashed, blood flecked hand feeling on silk sheets and then a dawn-light, blimp-born epiphany as Tony inherits a prissy woman from a now-dead Robert Loggia… I think the highlight of that 3 minute story-arc manic-progression has to be the looks exchanged between Mastrantonio and the dude playing the right hand man (never caught his name in all 3 hours), where they basically raise eyebrows and then she parts her lips and and he flares his nostrils (FACEACTING BLOWOUT) and the music cue is just pure synthetic triumph.

I think the really exemplar thing about this movie and basically anything–video, film-wise, made before 1990, but is especially potent around 1979-86 is that in scenes of a disco, there is a too-multi-culti mix of people, which invariably includes old people. There are no longer old people in movies or TV. Sometimes in commercials about incontinence or running for office or cameos, but not like their used to be. The scene where Tony gets shot at Babylon The Cocaine Club, when they pan the audience during Richard Belzer’s cocaine knock knock jokes or w/e, the place is lousy with old people! Like pushing AARP-entrance age! Grey hairs giggling it up at the coke humor. I mean, yeah, sure, it’s taking place in Florida, but bullshit there would have been young coked out disco goers and actually rich Floridian retirees sharing a laugh and a line. I know drugs really unite people, but young people don’t hang out anywhere where old people go. It was also in this scene that I knew the movie was about to go into sharkjumping overdrive was when the club entertainment inexplicably turns to a vaudeville-style puppet routine just to make the assassination-attempt possible. Can you imagine anything scarier even if you were only a tiny bit high on drugs? I am straightedge and I was terror-fied by that dude’s giant paper mache face-nose (ps. What if that was actually exactly what Bin Laden looked like?). Whats the point of that guy, other than merely a plot device? Like, are we supposed to think GEE THE GLAMOUROUS DRUG LIFESTYLE IS CUH-RAZY? Or that the person who is booking this club REALLY has a drug problem? Or that Babylon had every kind of entertainment a rich person could want–cocaine, dancing, comedy and avant-garde puppet theatre?

The main thing I wonder now is why so many dudes everywhere love this movie? Also, why do people think this movie is about the truisms of the drug-game, when really it is most instructive about how to decorate the inside and outside of your home with vast amounts of golden statuary?