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Glengarry Glen Ross

A great movie with outstanding acting all around.

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- The title. One of the worst ever. A title must convey some idea or mood about the movie. As someone who has seen this flick a couple of times, it still doesn’t tell me anything. The areas of land it refers to are not central to the story- it could be any piece of land or any object these guys are trying to sell. So imagine a person who hasn’t heard of the movie and who comes across the title at her local videostore or hears it in a discussion. She won’t give it a second’s thought. And that’s a shame.

- The profanity. I felt it was too much. You can say that it was accurate as a reflection of such salesmen in real-life, but I’ll argue otherwise. In real-life, excessive swearing is cheap and crude, “a poor man’s poetry.” I wouldn’t want to hang around these guys for too long. So in a movie, which is larger and more poetic than life, hyper-profanity only deflates its strength. And in such a well-acted film, it’s simply stupid to have these guys talking like that.

If swearing in the movies had been around in the days of Bogart and Cagney, do you think their characters would’ve been tougher and charasmatic? I don’t. With those attitudes, they didn’t need to swear- and conveying a point without spelling it is the truest form of the cinematic language.

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