Customer Reviews

Ask the Dust

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

`Ask the Dust' is not a bad movie, not by any means, but I will say that even with it's under two-hour running time it seems a bit long. The fact that this is a slow moving drama of course doesn't help the matter, but what does help is the dedication both Colin and Salma give to their characters. This film is adapted from the critically acclaimed novel by John Fante about an Italian writer Aturo Bandini (Farrell) as he moves to LA in 1932 in pursuit of inspiration for his next short story. As he struggles to find that inspiration he meets a sassy young barmaid Camilla (Hayek) who both tests his patience and his heart strings, for she is everything he wishes he had and yet is trying to escape.

They begin their love affair fighting and they continue fighting throughout most of the film. It's a wonder they stay together, but it's apparent that they see in each other something that makes them happy. Both of them share the similar wanting of acceptance, and neither of them are comfortable with their place in society. Camilla in particular is ashamed of her name, and Bandini even makes mention to a day when he won't be ashamed of the name he was given.

There are two scenes in this film that brought me to tears, the first being Aturo's encounter with the lovely stranger Vera (Idina Menzel). It was the first scene in the film where I was brought to the realization that this movie had a meaning, and from that heart wrenching scene on I was absorbed in this picture. Her story is beautiful and touching, and the look on Aturo's face perfectly captures the essence of what we should be feeling at that very moment. The second scene is the love scene between Aturo and Camilla, which takes place towards the end of the film. It was so tastefully done, so beautiful and serene that it took all the tension between them out of the picture and delivered a touching and beautiful encounter that said more than words could ever do. Truly the most touching scene in the film and one of the most beautiful scene's I've seen in recent cinema (and that comment has nothing to do with the fact that both are eye-candy, it's all in the emotion, and believe me, the emotion was there).

So, my final analysis, after much thought and deliberation, is that `Ask the Dust' is a good movie made better by the chemistry of the two leads. It could have been much better had it paced itself a little better, but it's forgiven for once you understand the underlying message of this film you can appreciate it much better for what it is. I would have changed a few things but bottom line is it's still a wonderful film and it delivers what it intended to. Brilliant job on the actors involved, Colin who at first I felt was miscast blew me away with a few important scenes, and Hayek I feel is at her finest.

I know, the critics didn't love ASK THE DUST. I think I know why. Any film that has a writer as a protagonist, who writes what sounds like amateur prose and falls in love with a woman who seems to have more than a few similarities, at least health wise to the heroines of CAMILLE/LA TRAVIATA isn't going to make too many critics cheer. They've seen it all before and believe it was done better in earlier versions. It's also a bit far fetched to believe that a mediocre at best writer would have a champion in a figure like H. L. Mencken, but it all happens in this film. There is also a character who doesn't add much to the film but is played by a revered veteran, in this case Donald Sutherland. Fail to use a great actor in a proper way and the critics will balk. Of course there are times when clichés on the screen work well on the written page, and people I know who have read the 1939 classic on which the film is based say that the book does work well, but critics didn't seem to believe that it happened in this film.

While the critics may have their points, I enjoyed this film. Colin Farrell plays Arturo Bandini, a son of Italian immigrants from Colorado who hopes to become a successful writer. His character remains consistent throughout the film and while we know we should be rooting for him, we're not sure if we like him. Salma Hayek is Camilla, the Mexican waitress who becomes the love interest of Bandini. The two clash and become lovers and clash again. It had a feel of the 1930's and I enjoyed that a Depression Era story took place in somewhere other than Chicago, New York, or Boston. While I didn't buy the main character's success and luck--I may have believed it if he had received at least one rejection instead of a check for a short story and another check as an advance for a novel--he did have some characteristics of an aspiring writer. The immigration and prejudice issues were accurate for the period and the love story believable.

For me, this is a three and a half star film, but since I have to choose at either three or four, I'll choose four. The setting is incredible and while I wouldn't call this the best performance for either Hayek or Farrell, this is not meant to be a criticism. Farrell has demonstrated the ability to be at home in box office blockbusters and independent films, so we know he's versatile, and Salma Hayek's performance in FRIDA alone demonstrates her talent. The story does hold together and while far fetched at times is somewhat plausible. Overall, I believe the great talent both in front of and behind the camera (directed by Robert Towne of CHINATOWN fame) leads viewers to expect more, but what we have isn't bad and is enjoyable.

This highly enjoyable film is told in a narrated form like a Raymond Chandler story. Collin Farrell plays a young writer named Bandini who recently moved to Los Angeles from Colorado. He lives in a type of boarding house where he can just enter his room through the window and he has the view out of the window of the first palm tree he has ever seen. Donald Sutherland plays his alcoholic neighbor who constantly barges into Bandini's room (it is never locked ) to talk about life and to let Bandini know when he is entertaining the milkman so Bandini can grab some milk from the unwatched milk truck.

Bandini idolizes M L Menckin and aspires to be just like him. He writes stories based on his experiences and submits them to Menckin, hoping that Menckin will publish them. Down to his last nickel, Bandini goes to a bar and orders a cup of coffee from the exotic looking Mexican waitress (Salma Hayak). The coffee comes literally curdled from probably spoiled milk. Bandini uses this to appear angry at Hayak because he can think of no better way to strike up a conversation. He later goes back to apologize to Hayak by having the bartender give her a copy of his one published article (Bandini seems to use this ruse with other people when he owes them money). What Bandini doesn't know is that Hayak cannot read English so she cannot really appreciate the "gift" that he left for her and this throws Bandini into a rage.

However, Bandini seems to be totally smitten with Hayak's looks so he continues to pursue her until he has another fight with her. In the meantime a woman comes into Bandini's life who worships Bandini for his writing. The woman is an abuse spouse and Bandini is eventually smitten by her as well. Later when Hayak comes back to Bandini because she too was abused, Bandini then re-falls in love with her. Their relationship has to go through tribulations because of society not readily accepting Mexicans and because Hayak is hiding a serious illness from Bandini.

The film is wonderfully directed and is very open about the racism that existed at that time. Hayak never looked more beautiful and all the acting is first-rate.

Ever since Frida, I have been waiting for Salma to come back and do a similar impressing movie and of course Salma pull this one off very well same goes for Collin Farrell. I don't think a lot of people really understand what they're seeing here. Never mind the source material; this is a glossy Hollywood melodrama in the vein of 'Some Come Running,' which is a good comparison, for that movie also dealt with the Artist Coming Into His Own and evolving into a more empathetic human being through a disastrous love story. I personally enjoyed it throughout. For me, the characters seemed real - people who were trying to be someone they were not, which fits with their environment.

Arturo and Camilla seemed to "fight" their love for each other, moment to moment alternately revealing or suppressing their prejudices. Take out the racial element and it reminded me a bit of Deanie and Bud in 'Splendor in the Grass', you almost expect them to burst into flames as they battle the demons that conspire to keep them apart. Just when they finally seem to find some peace with each other it all falls apart during the simple gesture of going on their "first" date. The passion between Atruro and Camillia is great and the love scenes are fantastic especially a flashback scene that takes place in the ocean. I was touched by Arturo's attempts to teach Camilla to read from one particular book (title of my review) and attain citizenship.

I was also impressed with the performances of Idina Menzel (especially the scene's with Atrturo mention by reviewer Damian) and Donald Sutherland (the latter a bit reminiscent of Sutherland's Homer Simpson in ("The Day of the Locust"). I was so glad to see Robert Towne's name in the credits again, I based my decision to see the film on my high regard for his work and that of Salma's as well. I find it ironic that Robert Towne, a product of the last golden age of cinema, would re-appear just as we seem to be having a 70's-like renaissance in independent film, just like the 70's/Vietnam era? The parallels are there.

`Ask the Dust' is what it is. If you don't like melodramatic tropes you won't like this, as the movie adheres to a lot of them: After this movie, watch the milk you put in your coffee.

Ask The Dust is a film of great beauty, but it's also a film of great disappointment. The art direction, the gorgeous creation of Downtown Los Angeles circa 1933 is unsurpassed and is one of the most spectacular set pieces you will ever see. Unfortunately though, the movie is long and sort of outstays it's welcome and it commits the inexplicable sin of being rather boring, particularly about two thirds of the way through when it really loses steam.

Colin Farrell - a bit miscast here - stars as Arturo Bandini an Italian writer who has arrived in Los Angeles where he hopes to make it big as a writer - he's already had one story published, in a fictionalized version of Mencken's American Mercury magazine. Ensconcing himself in a shabby hotel near Bunker Hill, downtown Los Angeles, Bandini begins to write what will hopefully be his masterpiece.

Ablaze with ambition and sexual frustration, Bandini is down to his last dime when he buys a cup of coffee at a downtown cafe and meets Camilla (Salma Hayek), a fiery Mexican waitress who can't read English, has a real attitude towards upstart young writers and has aspirations to become as Anglicized as she possibly can. Each in their own way, hopes to escape the horrors of racism, but they find themselves enigmatically drawn to each other and eventually fall in love.

Their relationship, however, is faced with many tests full of love and hate as they struggle to overcome their own fears and biases to form a meaningful bond. And much of the action comes out of the maddening way that two compatible people will unaccountably behave when thrust into each other's presence.

There are lots of heavy-handed narrative developments - Hayek and Farrell cavort together in the Pacific Ocean, there's an earthquake, an out-of-left-field fatal illness - that dominate the film's second half and the efforts at showing societal racism particularly towards Camilla are often not as developed as they should be.

While the script is often clunky and wooden and it's two stars don't really have the sort of fiery sexual passion that they should have in a movie such as this, Ask The Dust is saved by its beautiful images and sumptuousness. Visually, the film is filled with evocative details of an innocent L.A. before the oil companies stripped away the wonderful Red Trams and all the cars and the freeways turned it into the dirty, filthy city that it is now.

Ask The Dust offers a stunning depiction of 1930s Los Angeles, and the director Robert Towne has really managed to capture the essential ingredients of Robert Towne John Fante's source material. Farrell and Hayek are also charismatic performers, but the movie as a whole is rather wet and innocuous - it isn't nearly as involving as it should be. Mike Leonard July 06.

I love both Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek as actors/performers, which was why I got the movie in the first place, and I was not disappointed by either performance.

Salma is a woman who is exquisitely beautiful and is an excellent artist. This movie, like the few others I have seen of her, she is a bit type-cast, but works very well with that, I think. There must be scripts out there who can stretch her performance abilities to the limit and I as a fan hope that will soon come about.

Colin was a surprise for me. I have, since the first movie I watched of him, thought him to be a very good actor/artist - most of his movies (that I've watched) have been action-packed, hard-hitting, yet here he portrayed an inexperienced debonair young man, and pulled it off beautifully. To me, he was real convincing in the role he portrayed, and he has a beautiful voice, so listening to the narration throughout the movie was easy on the ear. The length of the film did not bother me at all (just under two hours.)

It is a lovely story, and for me, it was well-played, and the characters were well filled by the actors who portrayed them, even Donald Sutherland. Being a romantic at heart and watching movies and reading books that are romance based, I usually prefer those with the fairytale, happy ending, no matter how unrealistic, so was sad about the ending of this movie, but it seems to fit the story very well.

Great actors such as Sutherland do not always have to be the star of the show to make an impact, and Donald Sutherland is one of those who has such a range and scope of talent, every role I have seen him in, he has fitted himself to the character, like a glove. So as Hellfrick, he is a good fit in this movie.

The dialog was interesting and gave me a few good giggles, got tears in my eyes, and made me squirm with embarrassment for the characters at times. With the conflict between Arturo and Camilla, the dialog was just fine, and the narration was well played by Colin Farrell.

Set during the depression, Ask the Dust examines what happens when two immigrants expectations of what they want to get out of life changes drastically when they meet each other.

Arutro Bandito (Colin Ferrell) is an Italian American, first generation who moves to LA to write a great novel, a love story. But his experience in life is limited and he finds himself stumped on what he should write about. Flat broke and desperate, he spends his last nickel on a cup of coffee at a diner. There he meets Camilla (Selma Hayek), a beautiful and feisty Mexican woman who is trying to get her citizenship. The two of them spark immediately. They have chemistry, but not always in a good way. Arturo is infatuated with her but wants to meet a blue eyed California girl that are so abundant in LA. Camilla is enamored as well but she is looking for a rich man to marry and bring her up to high society.

As Arturo starts to have success in his writing, Camilla warms up to him and the possibility of loving him. Arturo finds, with the help of a woman who is physically disfigured, that his anger toward Camilla is based on the fact that he has great passion for her but can't imagine diverting from his dream.

The movie is unsympathetic in it's display of racism and character differences. Things are rough, and the life of these two young people is not envied on many levels. Farrell and Hayek give spectacular performances for what they have. Hayek is especially striking and powerful, embracing the role with no fear, especially with the nude scenes. If the movie were better I would say she should get an Oscar.

But alas, the movie is not great. It is good. It's character study is original and the love story is not like anything we have seen on screen before. The ending is not neat and tidy. Director Robert Towne seemed to want it that way. He didn't want a polished version of the novel this movie is based on, he wanted something that spoke in the same manner, which is not always welcomed with wide audiences. So you'll have to make your own opinion, watch it and decide for yourself.

Writer-director Robert Towne is responsible for a few first-class screenplays of the last thirty years. For example, he wrote or co-wrote Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza and Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes. Not bad, isn't it ?

I had read the novels of John Fante a few years ago and liked them a lot. Arturo Bandini, John Fante's literary double, is a character one doesn't forget easily and the description of the post WWI Los Angeles was particularly shabby. Now, in my opinion, Robert Towne's movie perfectly describes the mood of that period and the difficulties met by the Americans of the first generation to obtain the right and the opportunity to enjoy the American dream. ASK THE DUST is not a masterpiece but provides for the movie buff a kind of pleasure that starts to become more and more uncommon nowadays: the feeling to have been considered as an adult by the director.

A DVD it would be a shame to look down upon.

Ask the Dust the film takes a few liberties with the John Fante novel, particularly insofar as it brings to greater prominence the racial and ethnic aspects of the book. Whether this hurts or helps is beside the point, since Fante's work is not readily available, and few today can claim to have read the source novel. Such as things are, we are presented with a story of Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell), an Italian-American who travels from the Colorado boondocks to the big city to write his book while being self-consciously aware that a lot of people don't view him as quite American as they are. While in LA he meets a Mexican barhop named Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek) whose goal in life, apparently, is to become a white man's strumpet to achieve artificial social status, selling the only thing she has to offer (which she displays to Bandini during a late-night rendezvous at the beach). Bandini himself is not confident enough of his own status in the Anglo world to give-in easily to Lopez charms, which explains his own lack of charm as he provides some less-than-romantic views on her position in the human ladder.
(At this point it should be noted the movie strays from the book in another significant way. As Fante himself said, the plot of Dust resembled that of Of Human Bondage; the Lopez character was desperately in love with an Anglo who despised her, while she despised Bandini and rejected his overtures. Eventually he found his place in the world while she became a dope addict and went insane.)
Bandini does come around eventually, since as Lopez points out his name is no great improvement over her own (although he gets in a back-at-you, joking that she wants to be "Mrs. White"). Never-the-less, the ethnic and racial divide between them won't go away, and after an ugly scene at a movie theater (not in the book) we realize that Bandini may still be holding out for that blondie. The film ends with Bandini the successful author confessing that the reason he treated Lopez so badly could be traced to his own pain, when as a youth in Colorado he was called various uncomplimentary names based on his Italian heritage by the Aryan youth there, and how he knew he wasn't one of them and could never be. And now, of course, he was ashamed of the way he had behaved (this polemic occurred early in the book, so we didn't have to guess what his problem was).
It is interesting to note that Fante--an Italian-American who was raised in Colorada--apparently had a similar relationship in real-life, and he was able to confront the failings of society and his own faults so honestly. Compare this with another Italian-American from Colorado--congressman Tom Tancredo, who currently is on an anti-Hispanic hate crusade (masquerading as an undocumented-worker campaign) and who clearly has issues that for him can only be dealt with by out-bigoting the bigots.

Robert Towne's obvious love affair with John Fante's Depression Era novel, ASK THE DUST, is evident throughout this somewhat over-long film. While the story is a bit clumsy and self-indulgent with so many sidebars that the momentum of the movie gets bogged down in the telling, there are enough fine attributes to make it a recommended evening of reminiscence about Los Angeles, the City of the Angels in the 1930s.

Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell) narrates the tale of a lad from Colorado with one published story in a magazine edited by H.L. Mencken who moves to Los Angeles' Bunker Hill apartments to write his big novel. The city of LA has never seemed so strange as it seems with Caleb Deschanel's magnificent photography outlining a city filled with dust blown miscreants - people with dreams at varying stages of dissolution. Arturo quickly becomes penniless, is pestered for rent by landlady Mrs. Hargraves (Dame Eileen Atkins) and for handouts by drunkard Hellfrick (Donald Sutherland), and still a virgin he plies his vision as a writer in a local cafe where he encounters the beautiful Camilla (way too much of a play on the character of Dumas' 'Camille'...). The two play a battle of wits and insults to cover their apparent infatuation with each other: Mexican Camilla is looking for a wealthy 'white man' to raise her out of her illiterate station and Arturo is looking for a sexual encounter to spur his writing.

During their extended 'courting' Arturo is vamped by Vera Rivkin (Idina Menzel), a Jewish housekeeper with grossly deformed legs who dreams of a man who will call her beautiful, and in a touching encounter Arturo displays the kind vulnerability lying under his rather callous and naive exterior.

Arturo and Camilla at last connect, and in a Laguna beach house they fall under the spell of love, a state that ends tragically, like the dust from the desert winds burying all hopes of the people of Southern California.

The story is a bit clunky and the dialogue feels forced at times but it is always a pleasure to see the work of Farrell, Hayek, Atkins, and Sutherland. The true beauty of this truly beautiful film is in the atmosphere and the mood captured by Towne and Deschanel. Their work offers a mood piece that forgives some of the awkwardness of the threadbare story and shows off the actors well. The film may move a bit too slowly for some, but for others, this is a moment of history well captured. Grady Harp, July 06