Product Details

• Actors: Robert De Niro, Allen Garfield, Lara Parker, Charles Durning, Abraham Goren
• Directors: Brian De Palma
• Writers: Brian De Palma, Charles Hirsch
• Producers: Charles Hirsch
• Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, French, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
• DVD Release Date: December 7, 2004
• Run Time: 87 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00062IVJ4
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,491 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "Hi, Mom!" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

"Alive, amusing, interesting and inventive" (Newsweek), Hi, Mom! established Brian DePalma (Carrie) as a formidable directorial talent and premier social satirist. Bursting withincisive parodies of home movies, TV documentaries and '60s off-Broadway "encounter theater" groups, and starring Robert De Niro in one of his earliest roles, Hi, Mom! is "brilliant and engaging" (Variety)! De Niro stars as Jon Rubin, a charmingly directionless Vietnam vet and would-be "erotic filmmaker." Convincing a film producer to finance his "peep art," Rubin sets up his camera to film the nocturnal activities of his unsuspecting neighbors. In short order, he goes from voyeur to participantand mild-mannered milquetoast to full-fledged urban guerrilla!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Strange Movie October 31, 2000

By "[e-mail]"

Format:VHS Tape

Robert De Niro has played many odd ball characters in his day and perhaps none more so than Jon Rubin, in Brian De Palma's Hi,Mom! The movie begins with De Niro renting a run down apartment in the city where he can begin his new career. This career, he has decided, will be in the adult film industy. He tries to convinces a smut producer to give him a budget to film his neighbors in the buiding across from him. Eventually, he agrees so using a telephotolens De Niro begins recording their every move. Unfortunatly his targets(who have no idea they are being watched) are not very interesting. So De Niro begins to date a girl in the building he has noticed is lonely in an attempt to spice up his video. However, this does not pan out and De Niro's porn career is over. He turns his camera in for a television. This leads him to take a role in a play called Be Black Baby playing a police officer. It is being put on by some black radicals to illustrate to white people what it would be like to be black in contemperary America. The play is shocking and probably the most interesting part of the film. After the play is over De Niro returns to the girl from the building across from him and the movie ends in a melodramatic and bizarre fasion. This movie is definatly worth watching. This film put Brian De Palma on the map, and De Niro shows flashes of the brilliance that in years to come would create so many classic characters.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful and provocative film from the young De Palma December 12, 2003

By Lawrance M. Bernabo HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:VHS Tape

I saw both "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom!" back in the early 1970s at a college art theater, which was well before director Brian De Palma and actor Robert De Niro became big names. "Greetings" was De Palma's 1968 anti-war movie and "Hi, Mom!" was sort of intended as a sequel of sorts. In this 1970 film De Niro plays John Rubin, a Vietnam vet who returns from the war to settle in Greenwich Village. His big idea is to film the people in the apartment across the street and to sell Pepping Tom type films (where you even have to look through a the little windows in a little brick front to get the correct experience). Eventually John's obsession with making films gets him involved with a radical "Black Power" group. This results in two unforgettable sequences, the first involving what we would not call a Yuppie audience being subjected to urban guerrilla theater in the play "Be Black, Baby," and the second an act of urban terrorism that gives Jon a chance to say the film's title while smiling into a camera.

De Palma is clearly exploring the idea of breaking the barrier between actors and audience in the act of performance. I can appreciate this idea because every time I see theater in the round I keep watching the audience watching the play instead of just watching the play. Pay attention to De Palma's use of the split screen to explore the dual perspectives and get the audience watching the movie involved more involved in the equation as well. Repeatedly, it all comes down to point of view, meaning the point of view of the camera. This idea is reinforced by Jon, for whom life is not real unless it is on camera, a point most notably made in his sexual encounter with Judy (Jennifer Salt).

However, the most powerful part of this film is the "Be Black, Baby" sequences, and this is where you either find this film totally brilliant or grossly offensive. Throughout "Hi, Mom!" De Palma and De Niro have made the viewers party to Jon's voyeurism, albeit in more subtle ways than splatter flicks that let the audience see through the killer's eyes. Having persuaded (coerced?) us into this perspective, De Palma makes us pay for it in a most brutal manner. If you cannot appreciate the payoff of this sequence, and that could well be most of the people who bother to watch this film, then you are not going to be able to appreciate this film. But at the very least you should be able to understand not only what De Palma is doing, but why.

After that point the film section of the film seems quite anticlimactic. De Palma is trying to take his argument to the next level, but having been blown away by "Be Black, Baby," there is no way for the director and actor to top that moment. "Hi, Mom!" is a provocative film that provided me with one of the most memorable experiences in a movie theater that I have ever had. Watching this film again, this time knowing where De Palma and De Niro were taking me, really made me appreciate the purpose behind that powerful moment. Of course from the vantage point of today it is rather startling to compare this rather raw film with the slick Hollywood productions for which De Palma is best known, but this film is so powerful it is hard not to consider it his best work.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hi, Bomb! June 1, 2001

By moontang

Format:VHS Tape

The most overlooked movie of the 1970's. Probably one of DePalma's best efforts. Also, a great example of DeNiro's early acting range. Funny, terrifying, brilliant. A great dissection of race issues, voyeurism, war, random violence, the family, and gender relations as well as a terrific homage to Hitchcock's Rear Window...