Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 02, 2005 | | Summary | Loved it | Content
 | There aren't many movies out there which surprise me, and there are even fewer that have a plot. This scored in both ways.
Roy, the con man, has a partner and an obsessive compulsive disorder. The movie starts with a darkly humorous insight into a con, and we are shown in a series of short vignettes exactly what the problem is. The whole thing is skilfully done and a delight.
When Roy flushes his meds down the sink, he becomes a wreck; eventually, his partner comes and sorts him out, and hooks him up with a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist persuades him to touch base with his ex wife, and he finds out about a daughter whom he had never met. Enter the daughter - of course. She wins his heart and turns out to be a girl after his own leanings.
There are so many little insights into the characters' psyches that this movie is a delight. Little details emerge about what each person likes, and the acting is wonderful and feel-good. Yet all is not as it seems, and the twists and bucks to the plot keep on coming right until the bittersweet end. If nothing else, it's a story about "what goes around, comes around" - but for once, I didn't see it coming, until the last minute. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 23, 2005 | | Summary | Always know if the person you're conning isn't conning you.... | Content
| Matchstick Men is a story of one man by the name of Roy who is germophobic, is obsessive compulsive, and just happens to be a con man......
Nicholas Cage plays Roy, a man who is utterly brilliant when it comes to conning other people. However he considers himself to be a con "Artist," that is, he doesn't take people's money by force. He also absolutely despises harsh language, instead of using any bad word he simply says, "Oh Pygmies!"
He is also obsessive compulsive; his rituals include closing and opening doors three times in a row while saying the numbers out loud, and sometimes even in a different language. He lives on keeping his carpet clean, sometimes reminding people three or four times to always take off their shoes before they step on the carpet.
Roy's world is turned upside down when he realizes that his ex wife's 14 year old daughter [Allison Lohman] heard about him trying to talk to her mother and wants to meet him. In the few awkward moments that he meets his daughter, Roy feels drawn to her, in a sort of protective father figure.
I found that the relationship with Roy and Angela, his daughter, was very heartwarming, and genuine. A father trying to make up for 14 years of not growing up with her, and a girl who is curious about her father's past and what he does, and also acts as a rebellious child. [But all teens act like that]
It doesn't take long for Roy to start taking Angela on some of his cons to teach her after being pressured into it by her to begin with. One very good scene involves an old lottery ticket that won 600 bucks, only to have a woman give 300 to Angela for finding the ticket. But Roy's responsible parent comes into play and makes Angela give the money back.
This is a great movie, one of the best of Nicholas Cage's career. His portrayal as a man who is desperate to be a father and to make his life simple is brilliant. The big twist at the end, which you can see clearly the second time you watch this movie, is done brilliantly as well.
This is definately a movie worth checking out. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 29, 2005 | | Summary | good movie | Content
| this movie was well-directed, sometimes funny, but the best thing about it was the drama. Nicolas Cage did a very good job of acting. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 06, 2005 | | Summary | justin teplitz of MA enjoyed Matchstick Men a lot!!! | Content
| nicholas cage stars as a millionaire con man with many problems, proving that money is worthless if you are not happy. nick cage meets his daughter when his psychiatrist mentions he has one. at first, she is useless in his lifestyle of hustling innocent people out of money and his obsession of a spotlessly clean house. however, once the fourteen year old sees him more often, nick cage realizes the importance of his daughter and how happy she makes him. it's offspring over money at the conclusion of this flick, which gets us all to think that children really are more important than anything. Justin Teplitz
|
| Rating | | | Date | April 20, 2005 | | Summary | Record of damaged life (caution, possible spoilers) | Content
| Cage portrays a common character in latter day America, a man addicted to a drug whose name he can't remember, who was last in a relationship 15 years ago, and who has developed a variety of tics and cons to get by.
In this movie, Cage enters what turns out to be a "long con" in which the con man is taken for a ride.
The intellectual pleasures of this movie are high, not only in figuring out the con but also the sessions of required talk in the shrink's office.
But this is an America which dares not spend time on the couch and which prefers a comforting, multi-level marketed scam to the brutal truth, both personally and politically. With the Fascist convergence of business and government we see the emergence of a long con in the "reform" of Social Security.
Of course, the message is ambiguous. It could very well be that it's good to feel emotions which later turn out not to have content (see above warning concerning spoilers). The lottery ticket holder gets a buzz, doesn't he, from quantum possibility.
For the same reason, the populace as a whole gets a buzz, don't they, from allowing WMD and Social Security pigeon drops to occur.
The content of a quick smoke by the loading dock is actually damage, so the buzz is at variance with the content. Emotions, like Cage's in the movie, are dulled because the buzz is activated too often in a false alarm.
But this is also to insist that it's hopeless to dream of a real daughter personally, or a meaningful election politically. Buzz becomes an ersatz for reality.
Which is to speculate that objectively, any Hollywood apparatus will increasingly virtualize emotion and cynically deprive it of content so that the disempowered audience will itself be conned into norming its responses to an unbearable reality.
The norming will continue on ever more extensive lines of credit until human voices wake us, and we drown. |
|
Picture 01 (20)
