Warren Beatty is a California Senator who hasn't slept or eaten anything for days. He's distracted, exhausted, going mad. He decides to take out a large insurance policy and then arranges to have himself murdered by a hit man he's never met. Since he knows he's losing his life, losing his political position begins to look like a small matter, so he appears disheveled at fund raisers and criticizes Jews at a meeting of movie moguls, blacks at a meeting of blacks, refers to Catholics as "mackeral snappers," and so on. His staff are going mad too by this time.
Eventually, Beatty falls in with a large and diverse black family in the ghetto, led there in a sinuous path by Hallie Berry. He picks up a skill at rhyming speech, dresses like a home boy in shades and phat pants, and gets one too many capitalists angry at him when he takes up liberal causes.
I don't know why it doesn't work better than it does. It's not Beatty's performance, which is about as good as it usually is, and he has some very funny moments. The performances of Beatty's staff, led by Oliver Platt, are fine as well, except that they turn chaotic at the end. It's not Hallie Berry, who is so sexy, so beautiful, so fey in her prospect that she can do no wrong.
Her father was African-American and her mother was a white European. She's only categorized as "black" because we all agree that she should be. Just as it's only common agreement that gives English separate words for "blue" and "green", while other languages have only one word for both colors. Sometimes "reality" is what we make of it. I'm throwing that in, just in case anyone is curious about issues like this. They should look up "the social construction of reality" in Google.
Beatty's improvised rap lyrics are amusing when they're not too fast or too complicated to understand. The hip hop music is execrable. My heart sinks when I hear it because it takes so little skill to produce. I have more than enough electronic percussion ringing in my ears from the moment I get out of bed. And when my nervous system started to go berserk, my thoughts took on a peculiar configuration too but it had class -- iambic pentameter.
I'm not sure of the significance of the ending. We've had a kind of lecture on the positions that many blacks are forced into, including the children, and the bitterness they feel towards whites. When Bullworth begins to spout his more generous views, at least some of them, like Don Cheadle, are so amazed that they reform. Okay. A nice warm and uplifting ending. But if it's supposed to be a feel-good fairy tale, why have Bullworth end up as he does? It doesn't seem as if the writers had a clear end game in sight. They're like some of our politicians trying to manage events in the turbulent Middle East.
Eventually, Beatty falls in with a large and diverse black family in the ghetto, led there in a sinuous path by Hallie Berry. He picks up a skill at rhyming speech, dresses like a home boy in shades and phat pants, and gets one too many capitalists angry at him when he takes up liberal causes.
I don't know why it doesn't work better than it does. It's not Beatty's performance, which is about as good as it usually is, and he has some very funny moments. The performances of Beatty's staff, led by Oliver Platt, are fine as well, except that they turn chaotic at the end. It's not Hallie Berry, who is so sexy, so beautiful, so fey in her prospect that she can do no wrong.
Her father was African-American and her mother was a white European. She's only categorized as "black" because we all agree that she should be. Just as it's only common agreement that gives English separate words for "blue" and "green", while other languages have only one word for both colors. Sometimes "reality" is what we make of it. I'm throwing that in, just in case anyone is curious about issues like this. They should look up "the social construction of reality" in Google.
Beatty's improvised rap lyrics are amusing when they're not too fast or too complicated to understand. The hip hop music is execrable. My heart sinks when I hear it because it takes so little skill to produce. I have more than enough electronic percussion ringing in my ears from the moment I get out of bed. And when my nervous system started to go berserk, my thoughts took on a peculiar configuration too but it had class -- iambic pentameter.
I'm not sure of the significance of the ending. We've had a kind of lecture on the positions that many blacks are forced into, including the children, and the bitterness they feel towards whites. When Bullworth begins to spout his more generous views, at least some of them, like Don Cheadle, are so amazed that they reform. Okay. A nice warm and uplifting ending. But if it's supposed to be a feel-good fairy tale, why have Bullworth end up as he does? It doesn't seem as if the writers had a clear end game in sight. They're like some of our politicians trying to manage events in the turbulent Middle East.