Tim Robbins Movie:

Editorial Review:
A wicked satirical fable about corporate backstabbing--and actual murder--in the movie business, The Player benefits from director Robert Altman's long and bitter experience working within, and without, the Hollywood studio system. Rising young executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is tormented by threats from an anonymous writer. The pressure and paranoia build until Griffin loses control one night and semi-accidentally kills screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio), who may or may not be the source of the threats. From that point, Griffin's life and career begin to fall apart. In keeping with the ironic spirit of the film itself, Altman's scathingly funny attack on the moral bankruptcy of Hollywood was embraced by many of the same people it was intended to savage, and restored the director to commercial and critical favor. Michael Tolkin adapted the screenplay from his own novel, and the movie is studded with cameos by famous faces, many of whom appear as themselves. The digital video disc includes a commentary track with Altman and Tolkin, some deleted scenes, a documentary about Altman, and a key to help identify more than 50 of the picture's big-name cameos. --Jim Emerson

The Player Reviews:
"IF THE PRICE IS RIGHT, GRIFF..."
2009-02-07 - This is one of my all-time favorite films, a scathing, paced look at inside Hollywood that deciphers the netherworld of studio execs, producers, directors, actors and, most importantly, those over-abused prostitutes of the industry, screenwriters. Tim Robbins is Griffin Mill - smarmy, corporate and slick as cat manure on a vinyl floor. Robert Altman brought in an array of big names to lend this film their aura. Everybody was in it. Buck Henry pitches the best film idea that never happened, "The Post-Graduate", which is the sequel to "The Graduate".
Grif is getting poison pen mail and he explores it a little too much, leading him to an art house in Pasadena where he accidentally kills a teed-off scribe, then into the man's ice queen girlfriend. Plot twists and studio politics intersect, and Whoopi Goldberg is insane as the cop who knows Grif got away with murder, which he does.
There is no morality, just cold-hearted realpolitik. Do not miss Altman's interview at the end. Like "Sunset Boulevard", this one captivated and irritated this closed industry which still believes its press releases. Robbins is as good as it gets. This is sex and power, the ultimate aphrodisiac.
The plot twist that ends it is one of the best ever devised, with Grif and his blackmailer suddenly co-producers "if the price is right..."
As Matthew says in the Bible, "what does a man profit if he has the world but loses his soul?"

3 stars out of 4
2009-02-01 - The Bottom Line:

Though it's much better at satire than it is at developing characters or keeping the plot interesting, The Player is such a sharp and wicked satire of Hollywood that it can be recommended despite its small lapses in storytelling.

ALTMAN SKEWERS HOLLYWOOD
2009-01-09 - This is one of Robert Altman's best films, and quite possibly the greatest, and most venomous, satire about Hollywood ever. Tim Robbins is delectably acerbic as the charismatic, though morally-bankrupt lead. Greta Scacchi, and Whoopi Goldberg are also excellent in this film. THE PLAYER is by turns, acidulously humorous, outrageously funny, and sometimes just spot on. A must for Altman, or Robbins' fans.

Great Satire on Hollywood
2008-12-07 - This is one of the most underrated films in Hollywood about Hollywood. The main characters in the film give excellent performances and there are enough cameo appearances to make this one of the most star filled films of all time. The only performance that was lost on me was Whoopie Goldberg's which I felt was too arrogant and condescending to be convincing. Goldberg couldn't resist making a predictable jab about the Rodney King riot, the only instance in which I felt the film unsuccessfully attempted to mix real life politics and entertainment. Aside from this, the film delivers on all counts, taking us through the forbidden, seldom seen world of film making, in which everyone seems to be expendable and no one seems to maintain control. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it's that life presents all of us with luck, circumstance and opportunity. And no one understands this better than Hollywood.

Gaping and yawning on the deserted sound stage
2008-08-06 - A parody of Hollywood, once more, Gosh. Nothing new will ever be done on that subject. It is a rattlesnake nest and nothing else. Only the details may change but the wider and the finer pictures are always the same. This particular film what's more is showing that everyone hates everyone and that everything is crooked and that all the every's you may think of are all berserk and warped. So what! What's the point? Is there a point? A no star film that ends up with stars. A bad ending that becomes good , they say happy, I know. An author who sells his skin for a million dollars. An exec that sells his soul for ten times more. Each million of those ten millions are extracted from the bones of one body turned into corpse. Morbid, morbid, morbid ! You kill someone and then within a week you make his girlfriend pregnant to compensate for the death and then you drop your own girlfriend because she is becoming too much of an inside job whereas the new one is outlandish and in a completely different job. A witness in a line-up who goes for the cop in the line-up who is one foot shorter than the murderer - and we know who he is - and meager and dark-skinned, in one word just the absolute opposite of the murderer she has in front of her own eyes and with a cop who is definitely leading her. What a witness. She saw nothing. Such a film can only get a prize in Cannes, France, because that's the kind of melodramatic satire the French can swallow and yet pretend it is fresh milk. And what's more it takes the audience for retarded baboons. Who is still afraid of the big bad Hollywood rattlesnake? Who is indeed? A big yawning deception.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines