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Captivating movie !

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The pianist/loan shark collector at the center of writer-director James Toback's "Fingers" is a quirky, volatile character, one with a defensive edge and a hair-trigger temper. Yet, by the end of the film, he's in far worse shape than he was at the beginning, making him not so much a crestfallen anti-hero as simply a bad example. Harvey Keitel is marvelous in the lead--tense and coiled, yet magnetic--and he's allowed room by the director to give his character some boyish shading (when he's playing his beloved vintage pop tunes on his cassette recorder in public). But the character has no life outside of his duties for his father, his attraction to a teasing sculptress and his dark, personal world of music. He has no friends, he fights with everyone he comes into contact with, he argues with his doctor doing a prostate exam and his virtuosity at the piano does not pay him back in kind. Some see this, Toback's directorial debut, as a portrait of a character in hell, but by not writing a full, rounded life for this man, it's a movie traveling a dead-end street. It seems extremely lazy and monotonous from a narrative standpoint, although the picture (filmed in wintry New York City, with its brown buildings and bare tress) certainly looks good. Personal taste will have to decide its ultimate impact. ** from ****

Does anyone remember or know the name of the Trailer or Movie preview, or Short or Skit that was shown before the actual movie Fingers began playing in the theater? I remember couples as contestants on a game show, at one point they were naked, then they were farting back and forth. It was pretty funny from what I remember. Maybe it was X rated? I don't know, I was a kid and I remember me and my friend were taken there by his older brother who snuk us in that's why we had access. It may not have been X rated, I only suggest that due to the nudity - this was 1978. I have no idea how to track it down. Internet searches based on descriptions of a nude farting game show proved futile. If someone knows the name or remembers what it was from, please comment I only have a foggy memory of it and that it was damn funny, a lost gem. Thank-you, JOHN

****SPOILERS**** Outlandish motion picture that tries to cover too much ground and in the end gets buried under it. Harvey Keitel, Jimmy "Fingers" Angelelli, comes across as a borderline psycho who's about to explode, which is just what he does at the end of the movie. Jimmy is pressured by wanting to become a Carnegie Hall caliber Bach playing pianist and at the same time doing his job for his dad Ben, Michael V. Gazzo, a Mafia loan shark. Jimmy who's very sexually active with the ladies he even seems to be interested in men as well. We get to see Jimmy early in the film making eye-contact with an obviously gay waiter at a restaurant as if he wanted to pick him up. Jimmy unfortunately has a very severe prostate condition that becomes inflamed and unbearable when ever he has sex. It turns out that having sex for Jimmy is more like rape and his prostate condition drives him almost out of his head. I did like the brutal mobster, debt collector, contrasted by the sensitive artist, pianist, angle of the movie. This contradiction stems from Jimmy's gangster father Ben and pianist mother Ruth, Marian Seldes, who we later see in a hospital ward suffering from a mental breakdown. Writer/Director James Toback seemed to add something in "Fingers" straight out of the movie "Taxi Driver", which Harvey Keitel also stared in, into the story. We have Jimmy falling in love and then wanting to save Carol (Tisa Farrow) who's, when we first see her, a sculpture. Later when we meet Carol's boss or pimp Dreems, Jim Brown, we realize that Carol is hooker which makes her a combination of both Iris & Betsy in "Taxi Driver". You begin to think that Jimmy like Travis Bickel in "Taxi Driver" will in the end dispatch Dreems and his henchmen and save Carol from her life of sin and have her back living with her parents and family. Instead the movie just can't make up it's mind and as it comes to it's brutal conclusion Carol and her pimp Dreems are totally written out or forgotten about! It's as if they were put in the film just to fill in some time to make it a full-length 90 minutes motion picture!I felt that Jimmy's unrestrained brutality in the movie was more due to his failure to become a concert pianist then to his painful sexual experiences due to his prostate condition. Since his prostrate is treatable with medication but his failure as a concert pianist isn't. It's just that Jimmy can't mentally get it all together whenever he's on stage playing th piano and being judged by music critics. We see Jimmy in action early in the film when he cold-cocks the massive and powerful pizza store owner Luchino, Lenny Montana, who owed his lone shark dad Ben money that he lent him. But as the movie goes on it's obvious that Jimmy is getting more and more out of control because his both uncontrolled and painful sexual urges. Jimmy virtually rapes Julie, Tanya Roberts, in order to intimidate mobsters Riccamonza's, Tony Sirico, girlfriend who also owes Jimmy's dad money. Later Jimmy forces himself on Carol who you thought up until then he was trying to rescue from a life on the streets and practically rapes her as well. The worst and most sickening act by Jimmy is when as an act of revenge he savagely beats and murders Riccamonza who had Jimmy's father killed. Jimmy murders Riccamonza by blowing his eyes out of his eye-sockets like he said that he would do earlier in the movie; luckily for Riccamonza he was already dead when that happened! As the movie "Fingers" ends we see Jimmy stark naked playing the piano in his apartment with absolutely no musical skill at all and obviously insane. All alone in the world, everyone that he loved and cared for have either died or left him, Jimmy is just waiting for the men in the white suits to take him away in handcuffs and a straight-jacket.

Why do we want to spend the hour and a half that it takes to watch this movie in the company of a character so loathsome that we would do anything to avoid him if we met him in real life? Jimmy Fingers is arrogant, self-obsessed, sexually violent and just plain creepy. O.K., there are moments in which we get to see that he has a better side, when he comforts a destitute women who is crying in a doorway, or when he sticks by his small time hoodlum father, in spite of the fact that he is even more repellent than Fingers himself. There is so much in this movie to make you squirm from the no-holds barred, bloody violence and a painful proctological exam to the scenes in which Fingers annoys everyone in earshot by playing loud doo-wop music on his portable tape player and threatening violence towards anyone who objects. With its fine acting and totally unpredictable story-line, this film is undeniable entertaining, but it's appeal is a rather masochistic one.