Watch Minnie and Moskowitz For Free

Good movie but grossly overrated

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

A museum curator (Gena Rowlands) falls in love with a crazy parking attendant (Seymour Cassel).Although not one of the title characters, the most memorable actor in this film is Val Avery. He gives an incredible monologue where he goes from sad sack to abusive and everywhere in between. We never like him, but we might feel sorry for him one minute and despise him the next. Quite the performance.Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and singled out Seymour's "magnificent mustache" for appreciation. Indeed, that mustache is pretty amazing and one hopes it was not just the makeup department that provided that impressive tuft.

These incredible mustache and never-ending blonde hair really take us by surprise, how are we supposed to react with such a character? And it would be nothing if it was just for the physical appearance … His name is Seymour Moskowitz, as the namesake Cassel, a beatnik, whose car-parking job keeps him in constant movement. In fact, his whole life is made of movements, so abrupt and brutal; we never have time to see him moving. Seymour drives, comes, enters, gets in, gets out, and we're like stuck with the camera, unable to follow his track. Cassavetes direction of Seymour's character totally conveys the image of a man in advance, with a kind of irreverent and hasty attitude. Even the opening credits came back ten minutes after the film started … as if Seymour didn't let us time to get used to the film. He's the iconoclast, the rebellious one, the man we find in a place right after losing him in another. No time for transitions.And there is Minnie Moore, another character, another attitude, another direction. Minnie takes the cab, walks on the street or down the stairs, we have time to follow her, to listen to her, to her melancholic rant against the way cinema manipulates people with unrealistic romances. We have time to see her smiling, yawning, winking. The beautiful Gena Rowlands is guided by a more conventional timing, almost too slow sometimes. But this slowness is Cassavetes' depiction of Minnie, a lonely character, whose life is so empty and boring, the simplest steps are stretched and painful. She's the opposite of Seymour, he's active, and she's passive. Almost tired of her loneliness, she lost the strength to wait for the big love, though she keeps hoping to find one. She's romantic because she has an ideal but seems to drown herself in a lake of pessimism. No stability.Everything oppose the two Ms. And the talent of both Cassel and Gena, combined with Cassavetes' direction, highlights these differences. Even in little details: Seymour sees a passionate Bogie from "The Maltese Falcon" while Minnie contemplates the last scene of "Casablanca". Their opposition is the spice that gave the film its flavor. This is not an attempt to label this film, but it does feature the basic elements of a screwball comedy, that created such masterpieces as "It Happened One night", but here, the comedy is authentic without being unintentional, I mean laughs are not a priority but a natural way to underline the peculiarity of this couple. Cassavetes delivers the message that comedy only works when it trusts enough our intelligence not to deliver cheap laughs, as Seymour says in one of my all-time favorite quotes: "When you think of yourself of funny, you become tragic". True words of wisdom.Seymour hates the idea of taking stuff too seriously, he's indeed spontaneous, speaks loudly, and asks for respect. He speaks about practical stuff like car, money, life, and his approach to love is also practical, which makes it even more sincere. Minnie is more melancholic, she wants to be loved with normality, whenever she's with a man who acts like a maniac, and she's obviously embarrassed and masks herself with huge and black sunglasses. The disastrous date with Zelmo Swift, with an extraordinary comical performance by Val Avery, is ironic because she's helped by Seymour who reveals himself as en even weirder character. But with something new: a clear idea of what he loves, and one thing for sure he loved Minnie at first sight, and understood, despite her normality, that she was a misfit, just like him. This is the key element of the romance's sincerity and what makes it so unique, so poignant. The music of the "I love you truly" song is one of my favorite love themes, representative of my personal idea of romance ...And what will naturally happen is a fantastic adventure where we'll be driven by two opposite rhythms and an unconscious refusal to respect the conventions. They can't have a normal rendezvous and are fatally forced to dine in a sandwich shop turning their backs to the road, to conventionality. They're always in the border of a road, their love, their complicity, through a beautiful dance scene, is expressed in a parking area, as a symbol for the transition that needed Seymour's life, and the stability for Minnie. Minnie's destiny was like a car not meant for Seymour, but he managed to park in his heart. And to conclude, even the expected declaration of love was original: not at night, not during a beautiful sunset, but at the morning, after Seymour just finished with a hooker. Again, Cassavetes' directing is a tribute to life's extraordinary unpredictability. This unpredictability governs the film from beginning to end, the two characters are so different we can never know what's going to happen, every silence can lead either to a kiss or a burst of anger, no smile is to be taken for granted and we have to wait until the very end, until the marriage proposal to expect a happy ending. And then again, when they meet the two mothers, it's surprisingly Seymour's mother who almost ruins everything, an unforgettable Katherine Cassavete's presents her son, as a bum. "Einstein, he's not", "Not a pretty face" reminding of Minnie's cruel "This is not the face I dreamed of". Indeed, this is not your typical romance, Cassavetes wants to get detached from conventions and make romance governed by the rules of life. His film illustrates Minnie's point about manipulative romances. But as independent as he is, this is still a light-hearted comedy with two likable characters who deserved a break, and after Cassavetes made his point, we needed a break from this exhausting experience, and to end the film with the happy ending, letting us assume that Minnie and Moskowitz, one of the most endearing cinematic couples will live happily after and have many children

I'm not a huge fan of slick Hollywood phoniness, but this film made me long for "Hollywood values". At least the boys and girls of Tinseltown know how to tell a story. If you are going to tell a story about a cultured, upper-middle-class woman falling for a not-too-bright, ill-mannered jerk of at best average appearance, you need to develop the characters, their motives, and the dynamics of their inherently implausible relationship convincingly. What this film needs is a lot more preliminary development of Minnie's character and a good deal less of the repetitious, one-note, top-of-the-lungs interaction between her and Moskowitz. It needs, in short, a better script and better direction. Cassavetes may have been a luminary of US independent cinema, but on this evidence at least his importance is strictly historical.

This is an incredible achievement for John Cassavetes. Not only has he made an outstanding screwball/romantic comedy, but he has also made a deep and biting attack on the way we let the movies(and also our culture) shape the way we see the world. For those of you who are seeking a love story, Cassavetes provides an extremely lovely one. The rules of the screwball genre are strictly followed. A man meets a woman, they are an impossible match in terms of personality, they try to fall in love, then comes the inevitable 'hiccups' in their relationship, and last but not least, the happy ending. But, as has always been the case with Cassavetes, that is only a very small fraction of what you'll get. He obviously has got a lot more to say. The 'surface' story is not the only story here. Beneath it lies another 'story'. And I don't think the other story will ever get past you unnoticed. The real story here is a 'cultural' one. It is a biting attack on the way we let movies and our culture influence our way of seeing the world. How does he present this attack? Well let me give you an example. The other day I watched this film with a friend. He made quite a few comments but the most striking one was when he complained about how is it that someone as unattractive as Seymour Moskowitz could get a woman as pretty as Minnie to like him(when you see the film you'll see). Now that is exactly the kind of attitude that Cassavetes is attacking. Why must everyone be 'handsome' or 'good looking' to be able to get a girl to like him? Minnie will constantly say to Seymour in the film that, "That's not the right face. You're not the man I'm in love with." It's a subtle attack but no less powerful. There's even one instance where Minnie, while in conversation with her friend, talks about movies as being a conspiracy because "They set you up. And no matter how bright you are you still believe it." This is a shining example of the fact that it is not enough to just recognise the problem, because it doesn't mean anything until you do something about it. There's a lot more, but I don't think it will be fun if I talked about everything. Part of the thrill of watching a movie like this is figuring it out. So I'll just talk about the 'surface' story a little bit more. A lot of people has called this movie 'earnestly real'. But don't be put off by that because like this world we live in, it's not all grim and grin. This isn't a Ken Loach film. While Cassavetes definitely does show us how ugly the world really is and can be, he has got enough insight to also show us that life can also be wonderful. I can give you a lot more examples, but I think it's best if you discover them for yourself. My comment here does not do justice to the movie. There's too much for me to say. And I don't think the space here allows it. So just go and see the movie. It'll be worth every minute.