You won't be disappointed!

Masterful Movie

A lot of fun.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

From the 1975 play, "common" people spout philosophy and psychology in street slang. By attributing middle-class "hang-ups" like greed, paranoia and vanity to "losers," Mamet dramatizes "our" similarity to "them" (we all have our investment "bubbles") and vice versa. Luckily for the audience, this is done within the context of a deceptively simple (if we can piece it together from the fragmented conversations) crime story (touches of O. Henry) and some uniquely funny dialog and situations. Good acting, esp Nelson. In a recent interview, Arthur Miller had decried how difficult it had become to be a "serious" Broadway playwright. Apparently Mamet saw the "writing" on the wall and turned to screenplays, and has managed to appeal to a sufficiently wide audience. Many writers have been less successful at that transition, as satirized in "Barton Fink."

Watching this film on screen and on stage (I imagine) wouldn't be a hell of a lot different. It's still a 3-character film that revolves around the same setting--most of the time. But when you see great acting like this, how can you complain?? Dustin Hoffman is great at whatever he does, and he's perfectly believable as the foul-mouthed Teach. He has some of the greatest lines. My favorite is "Guys like that, I'd like to f**k their wives." He is rude and obnoxious with barely a sympathetic quality, but he's the guy you love to hate. I just recently started watching "NYPD Blue" and just from watching a few episodes, I can say that Dennis Franz is one of the best actors I've ever seen. He deserves to be on the big screen a lot more, because he has abilities as an actor that only few TV actors also possess. He delivers every line and every emotion with such power that your eyes are wide open with amazement every minute he's on screen. Even young actor (I assume he's now in his late teens) Sean Nelson is perfectly cast, blowing me away with a performance I'm sure very few young actors can pull off just as effectively. He only has about 20 or 30 minutes of screen time, yet he's the character you most feel sorry for at times, despite the fact that he lives an unclean life, dealing with thugs and earning his money via dishonest methods. You can just sense that he didn't have any parental leadership, and he wasn't sure what path in life to take, so he took the most easy one--and also the most dangerous one. In a way, the two guys are like his surrogate parents. I've never seen the play, but when I see the name "David Mamet" under the writing credits, I immediately know that I'm gonna hear some priceless dialogue. I don't know how he does it, but he just has a relentlessly quick wit when it comes to creating dialogue. Like a play, this movie is composed of 80 % dialogue, but the dialogue is so great that I don't really care if there's no exciting visuals. And last but no least, I loved the opening and closing theme song. It just has that grungy quality that perfectly fits the tone of "American Buffalo." If you're a fan of superb acting, this will be a real treat! A real treat! My score: 8 (out of 10)

I remember driving through New Providence, New Jersey with my family in the fall of 1963 as a 16-year-old expatriate from the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. We were relocating to this community because the large corporation, which had employed him as a personnel manager and labor relations mediator for years, had transferred my father. On that day, riding in the backseat of our two-tone ghastly green, pre-Iacoca Dodge, I caught my first glimpse of the dark side of unrealized human potential. This jarring insight triggered a shifting of the youthful tectonic plates of my ‘Happy Days' Weltanschauung and has remained in my memory with a stark, persisting resonance for over 40 years. In fact, the benign hypocrisy I associate with this memory, probably laid the cornerstone of my assault on society's most sacred cows as a student later in the ‘60s. On the street corner, stood an older man of indeterminate age with raggedy clothing, needing a shave and being more toothless than not. He was waving a cane wrapped in shredded newspapers and grinning idiotically at all that passed. I recall vividly how incongruous and puzzling this scene was to my young mind. I asked my parents who is this man… what is he doing… why is he like that? They responded nervously and, I thought, rather inadequately. I don't remember how they explained it, but I was perceptive enough to know that: a) they didn't really know b) they didn't want to know and, more importantly, c) he represented something that repelled them and stirred their deepest insecurities as adults. Now, as an adult, I know about homelessness and alcoholism… about shattered dreams and failure. I understand the fears that all adults have about the interconnectedness of social, economic and emotional life and its fundamental frailty. We all hope to create meaning and security for ourselves. The old man was an irksome anthem to all the ‘crazy old uncles' in the attic, untethered to established melodies and outrageously adrift from convention… a poster boy for the well known adage, `There but for fortune go you or I.'‘American Buffalo' with Dustin Hoffman (Teach) and Dennis Franz (Don) are two guys in a junk shop planning a theft of a coin collection. The plot involves a rare ‘buffalo' nickel and plotting about a totally speculative coin collection that they plan to rob. Pathetically, this collection may not even exist. The heist never takes place. All that does happen is a descent slowly into a world of plans and paranoia, more plans, contentiousness and self-delusion brought to us by…you guessed it….the dark side; the side of handguns without permits, the side where transient hotels are euphemisms for ‘flop houses', and everybody seems to be aimlessly strolling toward that street corner in my childhood memories, each with their own cane & newspaper flag. In spite of all their pugnacious, animated posturing, it's just another glimpse of those same insecurities that challenge and motivate us all. It's why we all work so hard on ‘Maggie's Farm.' The dialogue is the ‘thing.' It is tangential and circuitous. It seems to lead nowhere. One senses that these are routine exchanges. The Franz character emits an occasional spark of redemptive compassion, but Hoffman plays a man consumed by the code of the ‘streets' and he harangues Franz for being so weak. This is a brave and challenging play put to the silver screen but I'm guessing that its dialogue-dense script would better engage on stage. However…bear this caveat in mind, afterall David Mamet wrote it. This film is a sad and stressful ‘black tie' film of the interior and requires a companion mood to suit the color. I was left feeling raw and hollowed out by the poverty and folly of human endeavor. The viewer should dress their affect accordingly.

Your average movie goer will not enjoy this film. With a small cast of three main characters, the majority of the film takes place in a single room. This alone may explain why the film never took off as the blockbuster it should have been with actors such as Dennis Franz and Dustin Hoffman. The direction of the film could have been much better that it turned out to be. Like other critics have said, the film was shot like it was being acted on stage. This is very true. The film has no unique directing style nor does it have any strong motif to add to the films creative look and style. The acting in the film, on the other hand, is wonderful. Franz and Hoffman are excellent together. With a stronger movie maker in the director's chair, the movie could have been much much better.