Scarface

When #grindset goes to far 

Get me your pointiest shirt collars

So when you talk about movies that people know but don't actually “know”, as in they can let loose a couple of quotes but can't actually re-count the plot or name more than maybe 2 or 3 characters, what springs to mind? The Italian Job? The Great Escape? Movies that have wedged their iconography and a handful of lines into the collective unconscious but most people don't actually know the plot. Scarface is probably the best example of this. There is a surprisingly high chance that you can see the poster for it from where you are right now! They're like rats, you're never more than 6 feet away one from! No where is safe! But why are they everywhere? Whose fault is it?

Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone are the ones to blame. Originally setting out to remake the 1932 Howard Hawks movie of the same name (which is very good by the way), the two of them pivoted to making a crime thriller set in the then still active Miami drug scene with a cast of Cuban gangster played by almost exclusively non Cuban actors. There is only one Cuban American in the whole cast, which raised eyebrows even back then during the days were dipping Alec Guinness in Bronzo was still considered good casting. Al Pacino chews the scenery so hard that legends say he's still picking bits out of his teeth to this day and that it took him a full year to scrape the ludicrous accent out of his mouth.

And that's just about all I can say about this movie that's positive. It just kinda hokey, the performances are either dull or that kind of hyper-intense to the point of parody that comes out from bad Pacino movies. The soundtrack is Giorgio Moroder either playing what sounds like Phantom of the Opera or just holding one note while Pacino looks kinda angry. The best part of the movie is the mid-movie time jump montage, scored to the greatest 80's song ever written Push it to the limit, and rather tellingly, it has no dialogue. And basically every line is just some edgy growl or Al Pacino doing a wildly inconsistent accent or wanting to hump his sister or saying “Cock-a-Roach”. There is a phenomenon in modern film making of screenwriters trying to make their scripts not good but “quotable”. One pithy or vaguely laconic phrase every 5-6 lines and they think they're the next Trumbo. Well they ain't, they're just ripping off Scarface and Pulp Fiction (which in and of itself is inspired by Scarface) and memorable quotes are just free marketing for their shit films.

Anyway, Scarface is a poorly paced gangster flick with some good quotes and big collared shirts that birthed the genre of cheap movies with occasionally cool dialogue. The best part of this movie is the poster. We will never escape that poster. I can't, you can't, no one can. But by god I wish we could.