A New Leaf (film)
1971
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"Ishtar" is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. Elaine May, the director, has mounted a multimillion-dollar expedition in search of a plot so thin that it hardly could support a five-minute TV sketch.
41% Tomatometer 59 Reviews 39% Audience Score 5,000+ Ratings Booked in Marrakech, two New York singers (Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman) stop in Ishtar, meet a beautiful rebel (Isabelle Adjani)...
- (59)
- Elaine May
- PG-13
- Warren Beatty
- Prodigious Talent, Two A-List Partnerships
- The Promise of A Blank Check
- The Folly of A Good Movie About Bad Artists
- A Win For Representation, A Loss For May
- Reappraising The Legacy of A Fiasco
Elaine May made films by feel. She had every right to believe this was permissible. After all, her improvisational comedy partner Mike Nichols was given no shortage of slack to find his voice as a director on Who’s Afraid Of Virgina Woolf? and The Graduate, the latter of which earned him a Best Director Oscar. That was the post-Easy Rider New Holly...
When Guy McElwaine was hired as Columbia Pictures’ head of production in 1983, Beatty basically had a standing greenlight at the studio. McElwaine was his former publicist and close friend. They’d made each other’s careers. Beatty, however, hadn’t made a movie since Reds, so his star had slightly dimmed. Nevertheless, once he decided to jump back i...
During the scripting phase, the story goes that Hoffman and his playwriting pal Murray Schisgal believed Ishtar should’ve remained in New York City and made hay out of the inept songwriting antics of Beatty and Hoffman. Their instincts weren’t unsound. Ishtar roars out of the gate with its masterfully edited montage of two talentless dopes attempti...
This is typically the part of a troubled shoot where the director gets fired, but the liberal Beatty wanted no part of firing a woman director he’d pledged to protect against studio interference. May survived the shoot and hung on through post-production. But Columbia’s corporate overlords at Coca-Cola, distressed by Beatty’s vote of no confidence ...
There’s no giving May back the career she lost due to Puttnam’s sabotage and the unduly savage reviews (and good ol’ industry sexism), but it’s at least a little heartening that she’s been able to watch Ishtar’s critical reputation improve over the years. One major reason for the upswing: people are finally watching it. As May noted during a 2006 Q...
Ishtar Reviews. All Critics. Top Critics. All Audience. Verified Audience. Mattie Lucas From the Front Row. Plays its humor much more straight than the Hope/Crosby comedies, which may explain...
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On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 40% of 58 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and laughter itself get lost in the desert during a flawed spoof of classic road movies that proves ill-suited for its mismatched and miscast stars."
Aug 7, 2013 · “Ishtar” has one of the greatest credit sequences ever—the voice-over of the two delusionally bad singer-songwriters, Chuck Clarke (Dustin Hoffman) and Lyle Rogers (Warren Beatty), trying to ...
Jun 7, 2021 · Mon 7 Jun 2021 02.14 EDT. I t’s a rare movie bomb that’s such a catastrophe it becomes a byword for cinematic failure. Ishtar, Elaine May’s 1987 comedy about two musicians who become wrapped up...
