| Falling Down | | Cast : | Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey | | Director : | Joel Schumacher | | Studio : | Warner Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Dolby, Widescreen | | Released Date : | February 26, 1993 | | DVD Released Date : | February 08, 2005 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 08, 2005 | | Summary | FALLING DOWN - Michael Douglas at his very best. | Content
 | This film has had more controversy surround it than most, but let me tell you, it's one kick-ass piece of work. Like Richard Burton's reverend in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, who goes over the edge during a Sunday sermon, Douglas, as the victim of downsizing, makes that same trip while stuck in a traffic jam on an L. A. freeway during a summer heat spell. (I live in the Los Angeles area, and though I have never lost my job to downsizing, I still have total empathy for the character's breaking point every time I get stuck in similar traffic snarls!) Once he gets out of his car, leaving it abandoned in the middle of the traffic jam, and starts his march through the city to go home to his ex-wife and child, we know nothing positive is going to come. The trip is alternatively funny and tragic, thanks to Douglas's performance. He somehow manages to walk the very thin line between his character's Archie Bunker-isms and his character's horrible situation as he cuts a violent path to the ocean. There are some truly hard-to-watch moments in this film (the war surplus store sequence is particularly brutal), but one can't shy away from the out-of-control anger of this poor man, who can't understand why he's suffered his fate of unemployment after playing by all of the rules. Economic forces continue to leave many in similar circumstances, but Douglas starts connecting the dots to things that have nothing to do with his plight: a Korean mini-mart owner who marks up everything, including a can of soda; fast-food service providers who play by their policies with arrogance, etc. The tragic humor in the Douglas character is that he sees himself as the victim of all these forces and of the inner-city dry rot that he encounters on his journey. (Thankfully, most people shelve their victimhood and move on with their lives, often landing squarely and positively on both feet.) This film is great because it provokes reactions in the viewer, often creating a sense of discomfort. Not easily forgotten, FALLING DOWN should be enjoyed as the masterpiece it ultimately is.
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| Rating | | | Date | August 01, 2005 | | Summary | What a movie! | Content
| I absolutely loved this movie! It was awesome and very powerful! The movie was also hilarious! Michael Douglas gives a great performance as William, a layed off engineer who has a meltdown and a very hectic day. Will is stuck in awful traffic because of pointless road construction and just leaves his car. He wants to see his daughter on her birthday but his mean ex wife won't let him and threathens him. She was a character that I dissliked and I felt great pity for Will. Will has a crazy day where he revolts against society. This movie is very powerful as it shows some of society's problems. Will teaches a Korean guy that the prices in his store are all wrong, beats up some mean gang members trying to steal his briefcase, holds up a McDonald'sish store because he wants a breakfast meal and not lunch, destroys a payphone and much more. The classic golf sequence and the construction site scene are awesome and hilarious and worth it alone. Robert Duvall gives a good performance also as a cop. The movie is hilarious but also sad and makes an important point. It shows how society is srewed up in so many ways.
Here's my advice. Don't rent this movie. Buy it. It's worth it and is a remarquable film worht rewatching over and over again. I loved it and it's even in my top 25 movies of all time! Please check them out on my about me page and listamia list under my top25 movies! It's changing sometimes but I really recommend these movies to EVERYONE! So, if you want to see some excellent movies that I really enjoyed, check them out! I think that you'll really enjoy them! |
| Rating | | | Date | July 28, 2005 | | Summary | The Adventures Of An Ordinary Man At War With The Everyday World! | Content
| Falling Down is the best movie for its actors, for its bizarre plot, and for its great director. A story about a man just trying to get home... having to walk through the streets of L.A. Being harrassed, shot at, and threatened... giving him more reason to go insane.
Michael Douglas gives his most memorable performance I thought, as the innocent mad father walking home. The only other roles I thought people would remember him most for were Romancing the Stone(Kathleen Turner), Fatal Attraction(Glenn Close), and Wall Street(Charlie Sheen).
Robert Duvall as the detective, trying to find a guy wearing a suit and tie... on his last day before retirement, is all fun stuff to follow along with. Duvall has done 90 movies... and I seriously can recommend to see them all, Falling Down being one of his best.
Rachel Ticotin is best known for her stunning action character in the movie Total Recall(Arnold Schwarzeneggar). Who once again plays that attractive smart detective, helping Duvall unravel this case.
Joel Schumacher is one of my favorite directors. People hate him though for the way he butchered the last two Batman films, which I don't agree with. Look at what else he has directed... St. Elmos Fire, The Lost Boys, Flatliners, A Time To Kill, 8MM, Phone Booth, and The Phantom of the Opera... he's excellent.
This movie not only for its whacked story... is one of the best odd movies of the 1990's. As great as Pulp Fiction with John Travolta, I would say. Douglas takes his acting and villian performance to the best. The world really can be sick, and you see it in Falling Down.
Overall, you can not be a fan of these actors and this genre... and still, you'll love this movie when you're done watching it. Falling Down should be up their with titles like Cliffhanger, The Fugitive, and True Romance... movies also out of the year 1993. In my opinion, Falling Down is the best out of the four. BUY IT! |
| Rating | | | Date | June 05, 2005 | | Summary | Zorba the White Guy | Content
| I somehow managed to miss this movie when it was new and saw it for the first time a few days ago (circa mid 2005) and have been haunted by it ever since. Michael Douglas gives a masterful performance, the best I've ever seen him give, as a thoroughly forgettable middle class White Guy facing the same urban pressures many of us (at least here in the good old USA) face daily, and snapping. After being caught in an L.A. traffic jam with a disfunctional air conditioner he does the thing many of us have thought of doing but somehow never managed to quite do: He gets out out his car (license plate D-FENS) and walks away. From there, Douglas' character goes on an orgy of 'doing the things we all have been tempted to do, but somehow don't'. From trashing a rude, venal convenience store owner's enterprise to offing a homophobic Nazi sympathizer (who makes the mistake of assuming Douglas' character is 'one of us'). Douglas is on a mission and at the point of dispatching (by any means necessary) any and all impediments to that mission. The mission: to give his little girl a birthday present, ultimately to "go home" and reestablish his life (somehow) to "what it used to be" before his ex-wife (understandably) kicked him out. I won't synopsize the movie any further (except to say that Robert Duvall gives his typical amazing performance, the kind that justifies the art and profession of acting in spite of everybody else out there who call themselves actors), others here have done a fine job at that, so I won't try to repeat them. I'll just add a reaction that I had that I didn't see in other's reviews. Somewhere in the middle of the movie I realized that I recognized Douglas' character, that I'd seen this guy somewhere else and couldn't for the life of me quite figure out where. Now, this character is a pretty unlikely one, a guy whose entire being is focused down to exactly one tiny little, gleaming, diamond hard task that he will let NOTHING interfere with, or even slow down. A guy whose goals we tend to sympathize with, but whose methods we can't (quite) bring ourselves to tollerate. As Daniel Jolley put it in her review above, "in a clearly psychotic way, I find this movie somewhat touching," a sentiment apparently shared by almost all the other 'amature reviewers' on Amazon's site (who for the most part did a magnificent job reviewing this movie, by the way). Touche, Ms. Jolley! Back to my own point: After brooding over it for a long time I finally realized where I'd seen this character before; as the hero of almost all of Nikos Kazanzatkas' novels. In particlar, Douglas' character IS St. Francis of Assisi as portrayed in Kazanzatkas' novel of the same name (published as 'God's Pauper: Saint Francis of Assisi' in England), or, to a somewhat lesser extent, Jesus in 'The Last Temptation of Christ', or Zorba in Kazanzatkas' best known novel. For anyone who has ever read a Kazanzatkas novel, this should strike a chord. Kazanzatkas' heros are NEVER 'good guys', their goals are far too big for such trivial classifications to be appropriate, at least in the view of the hero in question, as they are for Douglass' character. They are habitually, and constantly, at odds with society around them, are on missions that (by their lights) are far more important than the few little people who may, regretably, become incidental casualties of their quest. They are, in a word, psychotic. I, for one, have found Kazanzatkas' work so magnificently powerful in part because of the way he manages to explore this tension between personal lunacy (his St. Francis would spend his entire life in a straight jacket today) and the quest for higher truths/goals. Perhaps, if it could have happened, 'Falling Down' would have recieved a far less ambivalent reception oh, say 200 years ago, when people were more used to thinking of the 'big picture', more willing, at least hypothetically, to sacrifice the individual in persuit of the larger truth. I'm not sure what that reception would have been, but I don't think it would have been ambivalent. I also believe that the Amazon reviewers of the early 1800's wouldn't mistake this as a movie about 'White Rage', or 'Urban Violence' any more than the story of St. Francis is a story about 'animal rights', or 'The Last Temptation of Christ' is a call for marriage in the priesthood. Kazanzatkas (and St. Francis, and Jesus, and Douglas' character) had bigger fish to fry. I won't presume to propose an opinion on the nature of those fish, since that would undermine the entire point of this movie I think, to get YOU to think about the nature of the big fish. It's had that effect on me at any rate, as a Kazanzatkas novel does.
If you've ever read a Kazanzatkas novel (all the way through I mean) then you should own a copy of this movie. You will look at it periodically, and brood, and think of St. Francis, and big fish, and other psychotics. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 03, 2005 | | Summary | Great Anti-Hero Movie | Content
| I loved this movie. Michael Douglas is masterful and plays one of the best anti-hero characters since DeNiro's Taxi Driver. If you love dark comedies this movie is for you.
Michael Douglas plays a man (with a temper) who becomes overwhelmed with the "BS" of the world and finally fights back. He proceeds to go on a rampage and act out against all the things he finds to be wrong in the world.
This movie is great and is worth owning in one's DVD collection.
Movies I recommend in addition to this one OR movies that, if you liked them, I think you will like this:
-Welcome to the Dollhouse (Solondz)
-Any Quentin Tarantino
-Big Lebowski
-Taxi Driver |
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