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+ Best Los Angeles Movie of the Year + Best Societal Critique of the Year + Best Thriller of the Year
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| Michael Douglas' white shirt, tie and crew cut character towers as a troubling exclamation mark in LA's simmering heat on this truly great poster for Joel Schumacher's Falling Down |
A man leaves his car in a traffic jam under a bridge during a heatwave one day in Los Angeles. He has had enough, and he is determined to go home to his ex-wife for their daughter's birthday, no matter the cost.
Falling Down is written by Ebbe Roe Smith (Car 54, Where Are You? (1994)) and directed by great New-Yorker filmmaker Joel Schumacher (Flawless (1999)), whose best film it arguably is, matched in quality, probably, only by his very different type of thriller, Veronica Guerin (2003) .
Michael Douglas (Coma (1978)) is utterly peerless as the man who 'falls down', William 'D-FENS' Foster, in a kind of paralleled plot, which other side is Robert Duvall (Network (1976)) as the police sergeant on his last day on the job, who gets the unenviable task of stopping Foster's rampage.
Falling Down is lit by a zeitgeist in its bold tackling of modern, urban themes, an indignation in the Foster character, which may seem persuasive even as it becomes amoral and wrong, and a societal critique arriving in the guise of pure loathing. Foster is a unique character in mainstream American cinema, who is repelling yet keen in some of his observations.
Falling Down is a character-driven, masterly thriller with torrid scenes, major suspense and a killer plot. It is a must-see.
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Cost: 25 mil. $
Box office: 40.9 mil. $ (North America only)
= Uncertain - but likely a box office success
[Falling Down was released 26 February (USA) and runs 113 minutes. Shooting took place from March - June 1992 in California, including Los Angeles, partly during the race riots, which caused production delays in March and April. The film opened #1 with an 8.7 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it retained the spot for another week and stayed in the top 5 for a 3rd week (#3), grossing 40.9 mil. $. The world gross is not reported, as was common at the time, but if we make the cautious estimate of the film making 50 % of its gross domestically, its 81.8 mil. $ end gross would render it a box office success. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. Douglas' film legend father Kirk Douglas praised his son's performance as "his best piece of work to date." Roger Ebert gave the film a 3/4 star review, translating to a notch harder than this one. Korean Americans, Korean grocers and unemployed defense workers were among the groups who protested the film. The man responsible for shooting and killing 3 Muslim neighbors in an alleged parking dispute in North Carolina's 2015 Chapel Hill shooting allegedly praised Falling Down as his favorite film and watched it "incessantly". Schumacher returned with the European music video for Lenny Kravitz's Heaven Help (1993) and theatrically with The Client (1994). Douglas returned in Disclosure (1994). Falling Down is certified fresh at 73 % with a 6.7/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Falling Down?
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