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Jimmy Hollywood
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Lions Gate Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (14th September 2010). |
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The Film
 If you spend any amount of time looking at actor’s filmographies, there are always a few that pop out that you’ve never heard of, have no desire to see, or never think you will encounter in your life. Before “Jimmy Hollywood” (1994) showed up, I was under the impression that Christian Slater had a great early 90’s (with “True Romance” (1993) and “Interview with the Vampire” (1994) it’s hard not to see) and Joe Pesci always played a bumbling robber or Mafioso. To my surprise “Jimmy Hollywood” showed that Christian Slater made some huge mistakes in the early 90’s and Joe Pesci played a blond. Jimmy (Joe Pesci) is an aspiring actor who recently purchased a bus bench ad to try and put his name out there to get a few more acting jobs. He spends most of his time hanging out by the pool with his out-of-it friend William (Christian Slater), with his girlfriend Lorraine (Victoria Abril) or watching old footage of Hollywood on a Sony Watchman. One night his radio gets stolen out of his car and he decides to wait outside of his apartment complex for the robber to catch him on tape and take him to the police. After leaving the robber, video and a note outside of the police station the police start looking for the mysterious S.O.S. group, a signature mistakenly left at the end of the note by William. Jimmy sees the S.O.S. as an opportunity to create a new character, Jericho, leader of the Save Our Streets group that video tapes crime and turns it over to the police. Writer/Driector Barry Levinson is obviously trying to send some message about out of work actors and the poverty and crime present in the L.A. area at the time. But any kind of message that Levinson is trying to send just gets lost in the tedium of the story, some really bad monologues delivered by Pesci and different scenes that just seem strung together for the sake of stretching out the movie beyond its premise. For something that could have easily been a 10 minute short film, it gets dragged out for a good 2 hours of meaningless story. The attempt at criticism or style is so hamfisted that nothing really comes through. It’s almost like a bizzaro version of “True Romance,” which takes Slater and puts him in a terribly written, boringly directed movie also taking place in L.A. and referencing movies but without an enjoyable voice or any compelling reason to watch. For my presumptions about the actors there’s not much to be said for either of their performances in the movie. Joe Pesci seems to play the same Joe Pesci in different movies, just varying between good guy and bad guy. This particular Joe Pesci tries to walk the line of a delusional guy with good intentions doing bad things, and he doesn’t do a great job of acting, even though he seems to mention his acting ability every few minutes or so in the movie. Slater sort of disappeared from major movies somewhere in the later 90’s and this is one of the reasons why. Some movies he just shouldn’t do that give you a bad impression of an otherwise good actor. “Jimmy Hollywood” is the exact kind of movie you see playing on some local channel in the middle of a staturday when nobody will be watching just because they have no other programming to play. “Jimmy Hollywood” isn’t worth the time of even a Pesci or Slater fanatic who needs to see their work. It’s a mundane look at Hollywood that feels like another generation waxing nostalgic on how it used to be when they were kids and their old visions of Hollywood turned into some poorly written diatribe against crime in Hollywood. In the end it’s still not quite worth the Saturday, nothing to do, viewing that it seems to be made for.
Video
Presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio is presented in HD 1080p 24/fps in AVC MPEG-4 encoding, the film fairly obviously comes from the early 1990’s and feels like it went straight-to-video since it has that quality. There’s some dense grain in scenes and the quality of film doesn’t look that great either, none of the colors come through that vibrantly and shadows seem to blend together in the backgrounds.
Audio
The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track mixed at 48kHz/24-bit is barely noticeable in terms of quality simply because the movie has such a 90’s video look to it the audio doesn’t do much better. The remastering doesn’t seem there, just a copy and paste job of the audio tracks from the old sound file into a Master Audio track. The sounds don’t really move and there’s not a lot of crispness to the audio. Still there are English, English for the hearing impaired and Spanish subtitles for you to get disinterested in reading while the movie is playing.
Extras
The only bonus feature is a start-up bonus trailer for “Lionsgate Blu-ray” which runs one minute and one second.
Overall
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