The Fan - underappreciated Tony Scott thriller This weird…
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The Fan - underappreciated Tony Scott thriller
This weird mashup of a Sports Movie and Psychological Horror seems to have been completely forgotten, undeservedly so.
Impressive that De Niro made this and Casino the same year, very different characters. Here he’s in Rupert Pupkin/Max Cady mode as an obsessive psycho, he’s sad, pathetic, dangerous and nasty. Annie Wilkes with a dick.
Snipes does a fine job as the baseball champ targeted by De Niro’s nutcase.
Tony Scott is an odd choice of director. His flashy and hyperactive music-video style is an unusual fit for a psycho thriller but it kinda works. His pacing means that we leapfrog over some of the usual beats of the genre and get to more interesting fodder about the relationship between fans and their heroes.
One bit of Tony’s snappy editing I liked - early on De Niro takes his kid to a game and starts yelling at other fans to ‘fuck off!’, we see a couple of shots of a concerned older woman a few rows back, then he leaves his kid at the game. Later De Niro bursts into his ex-wife’s house and we glimpse the same old woman. A neat shorthand for her having approached the abandoned child, found out where he lives and taken him home.
At heart the film is really a character study of De Niro’s ‘fan’. We spend plenty of time sympathising with him as his life crumbles - he’s on the brink of getting fired, he loves his kid but his ex won’t let him near. He desperately wants to climb out of being a loser with mottos like ‘positive thoughts lead to positive outcomes’, but all we can do is watch as life beats him down and the last few marbles of sanity roll out, and those hunting knives he sells for a living? They’re gonna be put to use…
The angst and dread is there from the beginning and never lets up, it’s an *uncomfortable* watch which maybe explains why the film ironically doesn’t have as many ‘fans’ as it should.
Baseball fans were apparently annoyed that the film doesn’t accurately represent the game, but I don’t care about that.
Ridley made a great psycho thriller with Hannibal, check this out if you want to see how his brother handles the material…
#movies #video
This weird mashup of a Sports Movie and Psychological Horror seems to have been completely forgotten, undeservedly so.
Impressive that De Niro made this and Casino the same year, very different characters. Here he’s in Rupert Pupkin/Max Cady mode as an obsessive psycho, he’s sad, pathetic, dangerous and nasty. Annie Wilkes with a dick.
Snipes does a fine job as the baseball champ targeted by De Niro’s nutcase.
Tony Scott is an odd choice of director. His flashy and hyperactive music-video style is an unusual fit for a psycho thriller but it kinda works. His pacing means that we leapfrog over some of the usual beats of the genre and get to more interesting fodder about the relationship between fans and their heroes.
One bit of Tony’s snappy editing I liked - early on De Niro takes his kid to a game and starts yelling at other fans to ‘fuck off!’, we see a couple of shots of a concerned older woman a few rows back, then he leaves his kid at the game. Later De Niro bursts into his ex-wife’s house and we glimpse the same old woman. A neat shorthand for her having approached the abandoned child, found out where he lives and taken him home.
At heart the film is really a character study of De Niro’s ‘fan’. We spend plenty of time sympathising with him as his life crumbles - he’s on the brink of getting fired, he loves his kid but his ex won’t let him near. He desperately wants to climb out of being a loser with mottos like ‘positive thoughts lead to positive outcomes’, but all we can do is watch as life beats him down and the last few marbles of sanity roll out, and those hunting knives he sells for a living? They’re gonna be put to use…
The angst and dread is there from the beginning and never lets up, it’s an *uncomfortable* watch which maybe explains why the film ironically doesn’t have as many ‘fans’ as it should.
Baseball fans were apparently annoyed that the film doesn’t accurately represent the game, but I don’t care about that.
Ridley made a great psycho thriller with Hannibal, check this out if you want to see how his brother handles the material…
#movies #video
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