{"id":16477,"date":"2024-06-03T20:00:37","date_gmt":"2024-06-04T00:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=16477"},"modified":"2024-06-01T17:30:55","modified_gmt":"2024-06-01T21:30:55","slug":"ishtar-1987-elaine-may","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/16477","title":{"rendered":"Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read Mad Magazine in the 1980s, I know this is the worst movie ever made, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? At first I thought it’s a “bad movie” because the lead guys are playing cheesy songwriters, and people weren’t used to hearing “bad” music in a movie? Turns out it’s because behind-the-scenes drama, power struggles, and budget overruns made it a laughingstock before it even opened, a boring reason to pile on a movie.<\/p>\n

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Our guys are ditched by their girls (Tess Harper of No Country for Old Men<\/em>, and Carol Kane) and take a deal to do shows in the titular city (country?), where they’re immediately accosted by spy Isabelle Adjani whose murdered boyfriend has hidden a treasure map. Beatty is helping her, while Hoffman is spying for CIA Charles Grodin. There’s an overly helpful local kid named Abdul, because it was 1987. Cute movie.<\/p>\n

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In Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber calls out the<\/p>\n

brilliantly \u201cbelievably bad\u201d songs composed for the film by Paul Williams (whose work here rivals his inspired compositions for Brian De Palma\u2019s Phantom of the Paradise<\/a><\/em>, another long-underrated satiric dismantling of the entertainment business \u2014 though Ishtar<\/em> in some ways one-ups it with its critical allegory of Hollywood colonialism via the fusion of entertainment and politics).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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I read Mad Magazine in the 1980s, I know this is the worst movie ever made, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? At first I thought it’s a “bad movie” because the lead guys are playing cheesy songwriters, and people weren’t used to hearing “bad” music in a movie? Turns out it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,2881,1804,1363,1310,1857,417,534,3266],"class_list":["post-16477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-charles-grodin","tag-dustin-hoffman","tag-elaine-may","tag-espionage","tag-isabelle-adjani","tag-morocco","tag-pop-music","tag-warren-beatty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16477"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16527,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16477\/revisions\/16527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}