Why is ishtar so bad

And finally, in Marrakech, they end up on opposite sides of a Cold War conflict, wandering together in the desert, condemned to death by the C. Is there such a thing as self-delusion, or is there just a life spent putting a brave face on longing, failure, and despair?

The wild pathos of Rogers and Clarke is that their delusion is mutually reinforcing. As a child, Elaine performed with her father in his traveling Yiddish theater company, which he took around the country. Clearly, May brought some of this on herself. But the studios shunned May, putting her in directing jail for life. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

Much hay was made of these misadventures. Starting this week at Film Forum, viewers can make their own judgments about the much-maligned flick, which runs June 28th to July 4 in a new, 4K restoration. At minutes, it is longer than it needs to be. Rarely in film history has so much talent been assembled for so frivolous a feat of film-making. Elaine May called in a favor from one of her leading men Warren Beatty.

The movie cannot be said to have a plot. It exists more as a series of cumbersome set pieces, such as the long, pointless sequence in the desert that begins with jokes about blind camels and ends with Hoffman and Beatty firing machineguns at a helicopter. It probably is possible to find humor in blind camels and helicopter gunfights, but this movie leaves the question open. As I was watching "Ishtar," something kept nagging at the back of my memory.

I absorbed Hoffman and Beatty, their tired eyes, their hollow laughs, their palpable physical weariness as they marched through situations that were funny only by an act of faith. I kept thinking that I'd seen these performances elsewhere, that the physical exhaustion, the vacant eyes and the sagging limbs added up to a familiar acting style. Then I remembered. The movie was reminding me of the works of Robert Bresson , the great, austere French director who had a profound suspicion of actors.

He felt they were always trying to slip their own energy, their own asides, their own "acting" into his movies. So he rehearsed them tirelessly, 50 or 60 times for every shot, until they were past all thought and caring. And then, when they were zombies with the strength to do only what he required, and nothing more, he was satisfied.