Protraph Lack of good storyline.
Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?
Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.
Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.
jovana-13676 The film looks like a fashion editorial shot by sco 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 ionate 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.
Lebowskidoo Watched American Gigolo last night for the first time, and knowing it came first I could spot all sorts of ways it could have influenced things like Thief and Manhunter, and countless others. A big hit movie like this, there's no doubt its influence trickled down. I just love this era, from 79-83, Schrader/Moroder or Mann/Tangerine Dream movies seem to perfectly encapsulate that period for me. It's odd when you watch a movie so long after it was made, you are never sure if you love it for what it is or if nostalgia feeds into it. The Giorgio Moroder and Blondie music is perfectly at home in this movie.Gere is great here in the movie that solidified his fame. This could be one of his best parts, the wounded lost boy, which he also plays in An Officer and a Gentleman. He's an underrated actor but the man rarely has made any career missteps (we won't mention First Knight).A little sleazy but not too much. Worth a look for a perfect time capsule of 1980 if nothing else.
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.
