good movie, worth a watch | Ask the Dust | Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek

Does the Dust Have an Answer? | Ask the Dust | Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek

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	• Ask the Dust Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek Paramount, 2006 average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Salma Hayek is delicious. The rest of the movie... not so much.

Ask the Dust (Robert Towne, 2006)

While Ask the Dust is not the travesty I was expecting it to be, I can't say I was overly impressed with it, either. Colin Farrell's take on Arturo Bandini just never really clicked for me (more than once I wondered what Robert Downey, Jr., would've made of the role), though Salma Hayek does a fine job reminding me why I was so excited whenever a movie she was in showed up on the screen a decade or so ago. Donald Sutherland, on the other hand, is almost thoroughly wasted here; one wonders how many of his scenes ended up left on the cutting room floor, because I can't imagine an actor of his caliber taking a role so small and so incidental to the story. Other small oddities surface (why is it that the landlady, so dead set against Bandini having women in his room, never comes pounding on the door during his 4AM screaming fights with them?). One gets the feeling this should have been a much longer movie with a great deal more detail, but it's unlikely we'll ever get a chance to find out. ** ½

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good movie, worth a watch

I think "Ask the Dust" succeeds as a film in that it gets the viewer emtoionally involved and suspends disbelief. The movie was not bad, and it was in fact great. The filming and sets were very authentic. But it was the acting that made the movie good. Salma Hayek proved that she is an artist by displaying her skill as an actress. She was fiesty and at times mean, but also vulnerable and loving. Colin Farrell also proved he is a good actor as he captured the character so well: he displayed fears and hopes at the same time. Those people that think the relationship was just abuse are wrong. They were two strong willed people that hadn't opened up to the right person until they found eachother. It was great to see them thawing throughout the movie and change from hard of heart people to the end when they admit their fears and the love they have for eachother. Salma and Colin are underrated as actors. Watch this movie to provoke thoughts about human weakness and strength and to see a social commentary asking what it means to be an American in the melting-pot U.S.

*****/***** Beautifully filmed, acted, etc...

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Does the Dust Have an Answer?

I must admit that I have not read John Fante's novel on which this movie is based. The big question is, did I need to? Ask the Dust as a movie is a delightful little self-contained drama, almost a melodrama if it had not been changed for ever from being that by its ending. It was a film never destined to be a blockbuster or win a Oscar (if that means much anyway). Nevertheless, it is a work of art and while it may lag in places for those of short attention span, if you stay with it, the film is most entertaining. Colin Farrell is more impressive as Arturo Bandini the would-be novelist than in his flat lead role in Alexander, and Salma Hayek, as beautiful as ever, playing the role of the earthy and highly sexual Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez, whether buck naked in the moonlit ocean, making soft porn love in a seaside cottage or fully clothed shod in native espadrilles serving coffee in a bar, is an excellent actress, something that was not revealed in thinner roles she has played before such as with Antonio Banderas in the mindless but entertaining Desperado romp. To her credit it is hard to realise that Miss Hayek is ten years older than Farrell.

One does not need to be a geographer to learn that the film story based in Southern California in the early 1930s was actually shot in South Africa near Cape Town. This fact is revealed in the ending credits if you care to read them. Maybe it was cheaper to shoot there but more likely it was easier to capture an image of what Los Angeles may have looked like back then than any attempt to produce the film in modern day California. The desert scenes are very convincing even though a pendant might say the vegetation is not quite right, where are the Joshua trees? But that is nit picking.

There are several themes in the film which are not hard to discern. Indeed, this movie is empty of mysteries or surprises. There is much awkwardness in the relationship between two young people who are inevitably attracted to each other and deeply in love, although they don't realise this truth until near the end. They are always at each other's throats almost as if they are struggling to resist the deep feelings they have for one another. The meaning of the "battle of the sexes" becomes very clear. Their relationship is not only complicated by their almost virginal youth and inexperience (inevitably more in the young man than the woman) but by the fact that they both belong to "coloured" minorities; she a Mexican probably with some Indian blood, he of Southern Italian parentage, both with black hair, dark eyes and swarthy complexions. she is a Lopez he a Bandini, therefore both are liable to the open discrimination considered acceptable in the pre-holocaust era.

The youth is an aspiring but not yet successful writer of short stories, with one published in a magazine,who has yet to produce a novel (he can only type 2000 words a day or that's his excuse). He meets the beautiful Mexican girl serving at a slightly down at heel café bar near the gloomy entrance to a highway tunnel in one of the less salubrious parts of Los Angeles. Their first encounter is not encouraging, which leads the girl to say much later in the movie "Why do you have to be so mean when you first meet somebody?"

The theme of race also interferes in their relationship where they sling insults at each other. Camilla, an immigrant, is hoping to become a US citizen, Arturo is already one by birth. They both desperately want to believe in the myth of American equality and in the US constitution which he teaches her for her citizenship exam. She is illiterate, at least in English (hardly the ideal companion of a writer,)so he also helps her in reading English via a children's illustrated book about a dog.

The young man had arrived in LA with several hundred dollars in his pocket, almost a small fortune in those days, but with virtually no income and rather wasteful habits at first so he is down to less than a single nickel (the price of a cup of coffee)when the story begins. He rents a room in a cheap boarding house,whose grimy back abuts on a hillside. His view is of the scaly trunk of an uncared for scraggy date palm dying slowly from the already evident LA pollution. However, the rear window of his room provides him with an escape route from the middle-aged landlady always at the front hall desk who is after him for seriously past due rent. When he arrives in LA- in a flashback- and asks for a room the landlady assumes by his colour that he is Mexican and bluntly informs him that she doesn't rent rooms to Jews or Mexicans but seem reassured when he tells her he is Italian (she probably doesn't know what an Italian is).The old fellow (played by Donald Sutherland) across the way is a down and out who like most of the neighbourhood came to LA seeking success and failed. He owes Arturo some small change but arranges to seduce the milkman so the author can pinch a couple of bottles from the cart while the Milko is occupied. The implication, when the dilapidated alcoholic neighbour appears (though never spoken) is "look at me and what I am now-thus you in time will also become". It is on the day when the old neighbour pays back a nickel debt in coin that the story is launched as Arturo rushes off to the nearby café bar for his long-awaited luxury - a cup of coffee- where he is destined to meet Camilla.

The girl is in a somewhat better position as she has a regular though obviously low-paid job. She runs a 1927 convertible and is apparently supported by the young blond barman Harold. It is unclear what Harold's sexual preferences are and they probably don't sleep together. He is a kind of protector. Camilla reveals to Arturo that Harold suffers from tuberculosis and won't live very long. Unfortunately once this fortuitous piece of information was given I guessed where the film was going and how it would end.

There is one diversion which doesn't seem vitally necessary to the story line when a good looking thirty-something New York City exile pursues the writer. She is a disfigured one-time wealthy Jewess who has been evicted by her husband who could not bring himself to accept her scarred body. She is another LA misfit whose passion serves the young man as a test for his real love for the Mexican girl. The woman is conveniently evicted again, this time from the story itself by her sudden death in an Long Beach earthquake. The scenario of the film is not very complex beyond the battle of the sexes and the need for people- who did not quite fit the contemporary image of the ideal Americana, as fair skinned, blue eyed and blond- to establish an identity as they had wrongly been induced to believe that they were somehow inferior.

Unlike King of the Hill, (itself a movie perhaps too glossy to describe the reality of that era despite the "Hoovervilles" in it), Ask the Dirt is not a tale of the 1930s economic depression. While late for the rent at the beginning neither Arturo or Camilla are ranked with the homeless who briefly appear in the movie. True Arturo is often skint, but he is saved from destitution by an unexpected cheque from his magazine publisher. At the very end of the film he is apparently wealthy and successful but that is an add-on which has little or nothing to do with the story.

The cinematography is superb and the low key jazzy guitar music on the background soundtrack is haunting and appropriate to the setting. If you don't believe me just Ask the Dust! Altogether a good, though not a great movie.

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Original but not great

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.

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IT'S THE STORY OF A YOUNG WRITER WHO WRITES ABOUT A YOUNG WRITER WHO...

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.

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Colin Farrell is Arturo Bandini a young would-be writer who comes to Depression-era Los Angeles to make a name for himself. While there he meets beautiful barmaid Camilla (Salma Hayek) a Mexican immigrant who hopes for a better life by marrying a wealthy American. Both are trying to escape the stigma of their ethnicity in blue-blood California. The passion that arises between them is palpable if they could only set aside their ambitions and submit to it. Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown) directs this outcasts tale of desire in the desert co-starring Donald Sutherland (Pride and Prejudice).System Requirements:Running Time 116 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 097363441748 Manufacturer No: 344174

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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