| |
Sam: Don't negotiate my emotions!
|
Lou Potts: Jeez, I sent you to cover a piece of fluff, and you come back with a hostage situation.
|
Kevin Hollander: This guy's a poster child for the disenfranchised.
|
Max Brackett: You've got to ask for a fast car, a Learjet or a Greyhound bus.
|
Max Brackett: Mrs. Banks, go make sure the buffalo are grazing properly.
|
[Sam finally decide's to let the hostages go]
Kevin Hollander: [on megaphone] Sam Baily! You have 5 minutes to let the hostages go!
Sam Baily: Damn. I wanted it to be my idea.
|
Lemke: I don't want him understood. I want him out here and arrested.
|
Max Brackett: A man has been shot; a line has been crossed.
|
Kevin Hollander: I'm who Americans trust for their news.
Max Brackett: You really shouldn't let a marketing slogan go your head.
|
Amazon.com
This earnest effort at media criticism is never convincing enough to stir a viewer's outrage in the way filmmaker Costa-Gavras (Music Box) might have intended. John Travolta plays a barely educated museum guard who is laid off from his job and ends up holding his former boss (Blythe Danner) and a bunch of schoolchildren hostage. Dustin Hoffman is a former television-network journalist making a grab at the limelight again by pushing and controlling press coverage of the story. What follows is by the numbers and not nearly as enlightening or enthralling as other films (such as Dog Day Afternoon or Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole) about simple events manipulated into a media circus. Despite Travolta's tragic performance and Hoffman's impassioned one, the film breaks up over efforts to blame electronic voyeurism for social chaos. The DVD release has optional full-screen and widescreen presentations, production notes, theatrical trailer, television spots, optional French soundtrack, French or Spanish subtitles, and Dolby sound. --Tom Keogh
|
|