Well, this is pretty good. Dennis Quaid is a cop, corrupt in a small-time way, who is found out by the enticing District Attorney of Ellen Barkin, with whom he has a sexy but inexplicit scene -- "How about this?" It hums along in its own commercial way, enjoyable without being the least bit memorable.
A lot of its success depends on Dennis Quaid's performance as the cop who found out that corruption could be a serious business. And he's really good too. Handsome, sinewy, and gruff-voiced, and not at all narcissistic. I'm not sure Quaid takes his career all that seriously. He's not intense in interviews and seems happy enough to let someone else do all the talking, not in an attempt to make himself mysterious but just out of politeness. Yet I can't think of a single film he's botched. Even when the movie is strictly mediocre, "Great Balls of Fire," he brings something to it that is uniquely his. Ellen Barkin as the DA is sexy and competent.
The movie makes use of its New Orleans locations but doesn't revel in them. There is one of those warehouses full of big heads for the Mardi Gras, but, thank God, no Mardi Gras. I don't recall much of the French Quarter either.
But you can't help wondering how much of this raffish, historically mixed atmosphere is now a thing of the past. I mean, what would a resident of New Orleans make of it? Lots of Cajun music. People speak with what sounds like a quasi-French accent. In fact, New Orleans has undergone a great deal of change in the last two generations or so -- not counting the flood. Yes, it was once Spanish, and French, and Edgar Degas visited relatives there, and its cuisine is distinctive. ("HOT BOUDIN" shout the signs over the doorways of the take-out joints. Oh, yeah?) Much of this, alas, is disappearing. New Orleans is turning into an ordinary Southern Baptist big city with crime and alienation, except for a couple of isolated enclaves set aside for tourists who insist on visiting The Paddock Lounge. The Quarter has become a kind of theme park.
The people in this movie speak with an accent, but most New Orleans residents don't. Not a Cajun accent anyway. They don't sound entirely low-country South either. "First" becomes "foist", almost as much as it does in Brooklyn. But in my experience nobody calls anybody else "Cher," and the monolingual French-speakers of the area are about extinct. Even down in the delta. I once talked to some ordinary residents who lived south of New Orleans about whether the Freedom Fighters of the 1960s had gotten down into the delta. "Nope," said the informant, "and it's a good thing for them that they didn't." None of this has much to do with the movie, I guess. So it gives us a fairy tale New Orleans. So what? "The Quiet Man" gave us a fairy tale Ireland. Let us, by all means, continue to believe in our myths, as long as we don't let them govern our actions.
A lot of its success depends on Dennis Quaid's performance as the cop who found out that corruption could be a serious business. And he's really good too. Handsome, sinewy, and gruff-voiced, and not at all narcissistic. I'm not sure Quaid takes his career all that seriously. He's not intense in interviews and seems happy enough to let someone else do all the talking, not in an attempt to make himself mysterious but just out of politeness. Yet I can't think of a single film he's botched. Even when the movie is strictly mediocre, "Great Balls of Fire," he brings something to it that is uniquely his. Ellen Barkin as the DA is sexy and competent.
The movie makes use of its New Orleans locations but doesn't revel in them. There is one of those warehouses full of big heads for the Mardi Gras, but, thank God, no Mardi Gras. I don't recall much of the French Quarter either.
But you can't help wondering how much of this raffish, historically mixed atmosphere is now a thing of the past. I mean, what would a resident of New Orleans make of it? Lots of Cajun music. People speak with what sounds like a quasi-French accent. In fact, New Orleans has undergone a great deal of change in the last two generations or so -- not counting the flood. Yes, it was once Spanish, and French, and Edgar Degas visited relatives there, and its cuisine is distinctive. ("HOT BOUDIN" shout the signs over the doorways of the take-out joints. Oh, yeah?) Much of this, alas, is disappearing. New Orleans is turning into an ordinary Southern Baptist big city with crime and alienation, except for a couple of isolated enclaves set aside for tourists who insist on visiting The Paddock Lounge. The Quarter has become a kind of theme park.
The people in this movie speak with an accent, but most New Orleans residents don't. Not a Cajun accent anyway. They don't sound entirely low-country South either. "First" becomes "foist", almost as much as it does in Brooklyn. But in my experience nobody calls anybody else "Cher," and the monolingual French-speakers of the area are about extinct. Even down in the delta. I once talked to some ordinary residents who lived south of New Orleans about whether the Freedom Fighters of the 1960s had gotten down into the delta. "Nope," said the informant, "and it's a good thing for them that they didn't." None of this has much to do with the movie, I guess. So it gives us a fairy tale New Orleans. So what? "The Quiet Man" gave us a fairy tale Ireland. Let us, by all means, continue to believe in our myths, as long as we don't let them govern our actions.