BuzzFlash Reviews
"Bulworth" with Warren Beatty and Halle Berry DVD at a Special Price: The Dark, Offbeat 1998 Political Dark Comedy That is Timeless
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
Click to view the hilarious, politically lacerating rap scene.
Buy other progressive premiums at the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace. Open 24 hours a day.
From an online reviewer:
"Bulworth may have been the most singularly eccentric big budget movie of 1998. It's about a politician, but whereas Primary Colors stayed within a defined framework, Bulworth is all over the map. Yet, depending on your sense of humor, it may be the funniest political satire you will see for some time to come.
Beatty is Jay Billington Bulworth, a United States senator from California who is up for yet another term. The time is 1996. As the movie notes, Clinton is running unopposed, and Dole is definitely going to get the Republican nomination. The public is unaroused, which means that the political climate is completely status quo. Meanwhile, Bulworth is about to have one heck of a nervous breakdown.
The reason Bulworth goes bananas is never specifically stated, but the implication is that the games, deceptions and deceits that make up modern politics have finally undone him. In deep despair, he gets ten million dollars worth of life insurance and promptly arranges for his own assassination. The next day, he changes his mind. He spends the rest of the moving running both for office and for his life.
He goes to fund raisers and insults his wealthy backers. He attends a church in Compton and tells his black audience that they are never going to get any help from Washington, because lower income people are only exploited by the big businesses that pay to get politicians elected. He becomes outrageously incorrect politically. The media, of course, always looking for a hot story, embraces him.
There's that hit man to be avoided. We see groups of reporters following Bulworth, who hasn't slept in days. A car backfires. Bulworth starts walking very fast, and then breaks into a run. The reporters run after him. This is a visual sight gag that is hysterical. Sometimes, he makes a getaway by driving off in his big black limo. Such a vehicle looks ridiculous in a chase scene, to say the least.
Beneath the sometimes dark comedy, Bulworth has a lot of insightful and painful comments to may about our often hypocritical and ineffectual government. These observations are made satirically, but effectively. This is not a heavy-handed work."
If you like political truthtelling wrapped in an imaginative, often bizarre script, "Bulworth" is for you. We just love it.
Like "Wag the Dog" and "The Candidate," "Bullworth" is an essential edition to a film library that gets to the essence of American politics.
"Bulworth" to some may be too whacky. To BuzzFlash, it is visionary, imaginative and both joyfully and painfully sardonic.
Put it in the class of "Network."
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS