I watched Hoffa for the first time tonight, and while the acting was superb...nothing else was. I watched the whole movie without getting an inkling of what Hoffa was really like in life. You see Hoffa the image, not Hoffa the man. If this is a person's only source of info about the Teamsters and Hoffa's Mafia ties, they're not getting much information, either. That stuff doesn't even come into play until the movie is halfway over, and then it's so whitewashed and tainted with emotional background music that you couldn't be blamed for thinking Hoffa was a true American hero.
Half of the outdoor scenes were filmed on indoor sets that were made to look like indoor sets. I'm not sure what this was supposed to mean. "What you see isn't what you get", maybe?
Only about three of the characters were based on specific people; the rest were amalgams or fabrications. Hoffa was apparently alone when he vanished, but in the movie he's accompanied everywhere by the fictional Danny DeVito character.
And the ending! Don't even get me started! Do you really think a hitman would sit around a truck stop for four hours pretending to be a disgruntled truck driver, while Hoffa was sitting in the parking lot the whole time? Never mind that Hoffa went to a restaurant on the day he disappeared, not a diner in the middle of nowhere. If this is supposed to be a "what might have happened" scenario, it's painfully clear why David Mamet chose screenwriting over a life of crime...
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5 comments:
Being from Detroit, I can tell you a bit about Hoffa. He was a thug who used strong arm tactics, including murder to cow trucking companies into signing contracts. He gave the labor movement a bad name.
He dissapeared from a Pontiac restaurant after being stood up for lunch by his foster son, Chuckie O'Brien, and two members of the Geovese crime family.
that should say Genovese
That's what I thought. All the violence and threats and extortion weren't in the movie. Also, a lot of the loans he made to mobster friends out of the Teamsters' pension fund were never repaid, so he wasn't increasing it like he claimed in court.
I've read there was some suspicion about his foster son, but I don't know what became of him.
Ever seen the movie F.I.S.T.? It starred Stallone as Johnny and it was loosely based on Hoffa. Good movie, and I'm surprised it's not liked too much by imdb.com readers.
You got to see two sides of Johnny - one as a guy who really cared about the Union and its members, and also a thug who beat scabs to death with a baseball bat. Very well done flick. Of course, Johnny disappears in the end, just like Hoffa. Although Berkeley Breathed knows where Jimmy Hoffa is hiding - he's under Tammy Faye Baker's make-up.
HA! I was gonna use the Hoffa-under-Tammy-Faye's makeup line.
It might be hard to find a copy of F.I.S.T., but it sounds waaaay better than Hoffa.
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