A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Stephen Hopkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Hopkins. Show all posts

Monday, October 13, 2025

Judgment Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993)

Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven, Emilio Estevez, Stephen Dorff, and Michael DeLorenzo in Judgment Night

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Denis Leary, Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven, Peter Greene, Erik Schrody, Michael Wiseman, Michael DeLorenzo, Relioues Webb, Will Zahrn, Eugene Williams. Screenplay: Lewis Colick, Jere Cunningham. Cinematography: Peter Levy. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Tim Wellburn. Music: Alan Silvestri. 

Judgment Night is a routine thriller about four suburban knuckleheads who head into the big bad city and wind up in a preposterous amount of trouble. They're the usual types: the Good Guy (Emilio Estevez), the Kid Brother (Stephen Dorff), the Adrenaline Junkie (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and the Jerk (Jeremy Piven). In the Dark City -- the Chicago of Donald Trump's imaginings -- they face off against the Sneering Gang Boss (Denis Leary), his Menacing Sidekick (Peter Greene), and a host of undifferentiated Thugs. They're chased through a Bleak Railyard, into a Decaying Housing Project, and everything winds up in a place where there's a lot of Stuff to Break. Director Stephen Hopkins, working from a much-rewritten script, treats it all as if it were new and interesting, but this is a case where if you've ever seen an action thriller you know what to expect. 


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