jovana-13676
The film looks like a fashion editorial shot by Francesco Scavullo or Guy Bourdin. That's great. But since this is a movie, one expects the leading man to be more than a two dimensional mannequin, which only happens for a second in the balcony scene - you will know when you see it. The character is flat 99% of his screen time which makes his romance with a mature and passionate woman completely unbelievable. You wonder what she sees in him and if he's capable of seeing anything in her. However, the film captures the pre-AIDS era, its aesthetics and lifestyle that we sorely miss.
SnoopyStyle
Julian (Richard Gere) is a high price L.A. escort. Anne is his pimp and he meets Michelle Stratton (Lauren Hutton). Leon (Bill Duke) gives him a job from Mr. Rheiman who hires him for his wife Judy. Later, he finds out that Judy is dead. Detective Sunday (Hector Elizondo) investigates but his alibi won't co-operate. Michelle falls for him. Somebody is trying to frame him.I think the movie was on its way to be a great paranoid psychological thriller. When he found the jewelry, there's a few different ways to go with the evidence. He chooses the stupidest road to travel on. It doesn't fulfill the promise of the movie and instead relies on a romantic melodrama. I never really feel invested in their relationship and it doesn't matter to me whether she supported him or not. I just don't care about the melodrama that Paul Schrader is so in love with.
vzwguyjay
I know different actors and such but same time frame of the 80's and same theme one center focused actor and some awesome cast. The way movies should continue to be written there really has not been an new recent movies that have hit me like the old movies do. This came up as a recommendation on x1 and man i am impressed, just noticed detective is same actor from fear and loathing and i love that movie also. This movie was so much ahead of its time with the topics and such they were discussing in the movie. Very well written another one of Richard Gere's roles that will always impress the fans. Just got to the part where he is shopping in the vinyl section, boy do i wish i had kept some of my old vinyl's.
PermanentRevolutionary
Paul Schrader has always come across to me as a particularly graceless screenwriter and especially director. Although he can create intense moments and thoughtful compositions, even a sense of stylishness, there is also a heavy element of cheesiness to the texture of his films, similar in many ways to the feel of Brian De Palma's work.However, "American Gigolo" is one of his more creditable efforts. There is sufficient intrigue in the film's second-half, once the crime narrative gets going, to hold one's attention. There is also a certain sordidness that is well-captured about a subsection of petty criminal to whom money, sex, clothes, social status are everything, and human beings nothing. Richard Gere and Schrader ably convey a sense of purposeless and drifting loneliness in the character of Julian Kaye. One has to ask, though: Isn't Schrader embarrassed to copy Bresson's "Pickpocket" so brazenly, as he has done in other films? His application of Bresson's themes to Gere's character here seemed strained at best. And anyway, no matter how skilled the filmmaker (and Schrader isn't all that skilled), you can't really effectively execute what Bresson pulled off within the context of a Hollywood film. There's too much surface nonsense, commercialism, and gratuitousness to arrive at the sublime emotional and intellectual rewards produced by the no-compromise "Pickpocket," "A Man Escape," "Mouchette," and "L'Argent."6/10.
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