Apart from writing on ciao I spend most of my time sleeping.
I also write for dooyoo under a diff...
Apart from writing on ciao I spend most of my time sleeping.
I also write for dooyoo under a different name.
Member since:13.04.2001
Reviews:23
Members who trust:1
Right from the opening credits this film looks promising: a scrapbook of film clippings flicker beneath the atonal recitation of a poem about baseball. The effect is truly eerie. After that, there's not an original moment in this film.
Based on Peter Abrahams' book, The Fan chronicles the mental breakdown of a blue-collar chump obsessed with a baseball star. In this particular spin on the psycho fan theme, Robert DeNiro plays Gil Renard, a washed-up knife salesman with a failed marriage and an awkward relationship with his young son.
Gil's one passion, outside of selling really good knives, is baseball. His team is the Giants and his hero is Bobby Rayburn, a hotshot hitter played by Wesley Snipes. Incidentally, Rayburn is given a son by the script, perhaps so we can draw parallels to Gil, but more likely so that there's somebody to kidnap later on.
Gil gets fired for being a "perfectionist" rather than a businessman, and DeNiro goes goofy. At about this point, The Fan sprawls completely out of control, grabbing from pretty much every film and technique made before it, in a voracious (and remarkably shameless, even by Hollywood standards) free-for-all. We get innocent young boys and ball-busting mothers. We get the bloody-thing-in-the-refrigerator scene. We get the fan dressing up in his idol's clothes. We get the transformation of the cocky guy into the compassionate man. We even get the scene where a kid with cancer asks his baseball hero to hit a home run.
As The Fan progresses, Rayburn is booed, injured, terrorized, and forced to play in typhoon weather by an irate fan. Since the one distinguishing aspect of this particular revenge film is its object-an overpaid athlete-The Fan seems like nothing so much as a piece of hate mail delivered to the all-American sport of baseball. This bitter and angry story must have been driven by someone with a big chip on his shoulder-maybe a baseball fanatic who had season tickets for the Dodgers or the Giants when the players went on strike? My money's on the director.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Production Year: 2002 - Drama - Director: Michael Caton-Jones - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Robert De Niro, Frances McDormand, James Franco, Eliza Dushku, William Forsythe, George Dzundza, Patti Lupone
Production Year: 2004 - Drama - Director: Nick Cassavetes - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over, 12 years and over - Starring: Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, Gena Rowlands
Drama - Director: Kevin Smith - Original Language: English - Classification: 12 years and over - Starring: Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, George Carlin, Jennifer Lopez, Jason Biggs, Matt Damon
Lurid thrillers don't get much more shameless than this movie, in which Robert De Niro ... more
plays a pathological baseball fan whose obsession is focused on a San Francisco Giants all-star outfielder (Wesley Snipes). While the newly signed baseball star is h...
Postage & Packaging: £1.21 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Lurid thrillers don't get much more shameless than this movie, in which Robert De Niro ... more
plays a pathological baseball fan whose obsession is focused on a San Francisco Giants all-star outfielder (Wesley Snipes). While the newly signed baseball star is h...
Postage & Packaging: Free! Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) is a big baseball fan. Separated from his wife and son, and ... more
down on his luck, Renard's love of baseball becomes an obsession and he stalks his favourite baseball celebrity, Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes).When Rayburn falls in...
![The Fan [DVD] [1996]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78530975.jpg "The Fan [DVD] [1996]")
Aug 22nd, 2001
(Sep 30th, 2001)
very helpful by (63%):
helpful by (38%):
