3 Mulligans

Okay….

Mikey and Nicki

Good Lord…I was tired after I watched this.

I will go with my good and bad format…sicnce that works best for my martini addled brain.

The good

Acting…just top notch.!

Therse are 2 pros working the skills that they have honed to a tee. Which also was what I will address in the bad as well.

Peter Fauk is always amazing to me.

He plays the same role and yet is diferent all the time. I have a special place in my heart for him…” Serpentine, Shell, Serpentime!!!”

I thought his charachter was true  and honest except for the scene with the kinda hooker that John took him to.

John played his part so well I couldn’t stand him! I guess thats a compliment but I wanted to shoot him after their first 15 minutes!

I loved the locations they used here…seemed like they just followed there 2 around New York…into the cafes and restaurants…what a fun shoot this must have been.

The bad

I HATED the John Cassevettes charchter so much it ruined the movie for me.

Now…that being said…he was so convincing in his mouse-like/shrew derelict loser guy I addressed the main issue of the movie for me…..

Why were these 2 friends?

John treated Peter SO shabbily that I couldn’t buy into he fact that Peter was his friend.

Totally killed it.

If my “friend” treated me that way, I would Not be his friend…ever.

Don’t know why this is duoble spacing, but it is .

Not the martinis….I can double space on my own.

I had an issue with not enough back story.

Why were therese 2 friends, why were they loyal, why why were willing to to do what they did….just not enough back story.

Not that I need a lot…just enough to to let me flesh the the movie.

Again…I love movies.

These 2 hit it it out of the park as far as acting…….story was lacking but took a back seat to watching 2 gifted pros doing their chemistry.

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One of my favorite parts of movies that are set in a single night (like After Hours or even Harold and Kumar go to White Castle) comes near the end when characters are at their most exhausted from a long string of misadventures; they are craving sleep and rest, but the sun is coming up on a new day for better or worse. Mikey and Nicky has this same nighttime setting and sense of exhaustion by the movie’s end (“Would you go to bed?” is even the movie’s last line), but unlike Griffin Dunne’s character in After Hours who has to face another identical, awful day, Nicky’s eyes are opened, just too late to change his fate.

Mikey and Nicky chronicles two friends, one under the threat of a mob hit, and the other who tries to help him escape and keep him out of harm’s way. I was predisposed to think of Mikey (played by Peter Falk, with his doughy, kindly Columbo face), as being the good friend and savior of Nicky, played by John Cassavetes. But as the movie unfolds, Mikey’s selfishness and violence is more startling than the paranoid and crazy (and in an odd sense predictable) Nicky. By the end of the movie, I almost felt more allegiance to Nicky, but both of them are so villainous, cowardly and cold that life in their world seems like a hostile, empty existence and I wanted little to do with either. The end for Nicky comes predictably, but for all that, is still shocking.

I loved the movie in all its violent, misogynist, 1970s grit. There are no heroes here, or even sympathetic roles. But we do get a human perspective when the characters express themselves over loss of family and being snubbed by the boss (Mikey) and the desire to see a newborn daughter one more time (Nicky). Even the hitman has a bad night and, if we’re not exactly supposed to feel bad for him, at least he shares the same kind of frustrations over traffic the rest of us face.

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With characters so well-defined and scenes that developed so naturally, it’s hard to believe they started as ideas on paper. Peter Falk and John Cassavetes played the roles of Mikey and Nicky so perfectly that I felt like a bystander to their intense badgering. And man do they go at it. The cemetery scene – an absolute classic – was representative of the whole film; I felt sad for their torn relationship, but laughed at how they handled each situation. As washed-up as they were they still tried staying two steps ahead of each other and I found myself trying to figure out what each of them were thinking. After seeing such a great film and watching actors of this caliber it’s easy to dismiss another dozen Hollywood movies as nothing more than unconvincing high-gloss fluff, but the greatness of Mikey & Nicky more than makes up for them.

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