Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Scott LeBrun This adaptation of the Newton Thornburg novel "Cutter and Bone" stars Jeff Bridges, John Heard, and Lisa Eichhorn in its principal roles. It's a sad, cynical story of friendship and loss, in a post- Vietnam, post-Watergate America. Bridges is Richard Bone, an unambitious but likable young stud currently earning a living as a yacht salesman. Heard is his friend Alex Cutter, a bitter, confrontational, and disabled veteran. And Eichhorn is Maureen, the despairing alcoholic whom they both love. One night, when his car breaks down in an alley, Richard sees a man disposing of a body. That man just might be filthy rich J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott), and Alex relentlessly prods Richard into doing something with this knowledge."Cutter's Way" is more of a character study than anything else, taking a blunt, unflinching look at our three flawed protagonists. Cutter bemoans the lack of "heroes" in the world, and doesn't approve of the way that Bone avoids commitments. Maureen doesn't get much love or affection from her husband Cutter, and finds herself drawn to the more easygoing Bone. All three of the leads are impressive, especially Eichhorn. But it's often Heard that steals the show; his Cutter is a force of nature much of the time, although the character is not without humanity.Czech-born director Ivan Passer gives us a film that is noticeably low key and slowly paced, so it won't appeal to all tastes. The main draw really is the acting, although it's commendable that the story isn't patently predictable. It's up to us to decide if Cord really is guilty of the crime.The offbeat music score by Jack Nitzsche (reminiscent of his music for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at times) and the gorgeous photography of various Santa Barbara locations are a big plus. Also among the supporting cast are Ann Dusenberry, Arthur Rosenberg, and Nina van Pallandt; look for Billy Drago in a bit as a garbageman.Fairly compelling stuff, with some truly sobering moments.Seven out of 10.

tieman64 "What is exaggeration to one class of minds, is plain truth to another." - Dickens Perhaps the last of its kind, Ivan Passer's "Cutter's Way" is a richly allegorical post-Watergate, post-Vietnam noir. Operating as a kind of sequel to Pakula's "Parallax View", the film stars John Heard as Alex Cutter, an angry Vietnam veteran who's returned from what he now regards as a meaningless war minus an arm, an eye and a leg.The casting of Heard is significant. The actor made a trio of films, now largely forgotten, in which he played disaffected twenty-something American's, all suffering from a 1960's hangover ("Between the Lines", "Head Over Heels" etc). In "Cutter's Way" Heard pushes these characters to their extreme. He paints Cutter as a perpetual drunk, a messy tangle of counter-culture eccentricities, post Vietnam angst, bitterness and barely contained rage. He's emblematic of America's Lost Generation, high on drugs, booze and paranoid blues.The film opens on a L.A. street parade. It's an ominous black-and-white image, into which patriotic reds, whites and blues slowly seep. We then begin to coalesce on a blonde girl dancing in a white dress. She vanishes, foreshadowing a girl's murder later in the film. The figure of a man riding upon a white horse is hidden, almost imperceptibly, in the centre of this introductory image. His significance becomes apparent later on.Passer's introduction conjures up every offbeat noir from "Out of the Past" to "Blow Up" to "Parallax View". But what's intriguing about "Way" is how much it actively tries NOT to be a noir. In this regard much of the film centres on Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges, always cool), a Santa Barbara gigolo, yachtsman, beach-bum and slacker (the genesis of Jeffery Lebowski?) who we first see trimming his whiskers and flexing his brawny body over the bed of a female conquest. Passer paints Bone as Cutter's opposite: self absorbed, non committed, forever without attachments and riding through life on a wave of perpetual youth. Significantly, Bone's nickname is "Rich" and he's periodically tantalised with the prospects of an "esteemed" job; the tanks of Reaganism are on the lawn, and Bone's soul is ripe for picking. "Sooner or later you're going to have to make a decision about something," characters say, but his ears remain deaf. This is the film's underlying preoccupation: making decisions, taking a stand on something.The film's noir plot begins late. Bone witnesses a man discarding a dead girl's body. He tentatively identifies this man as J.J Cord, a powerful oil tycoon, but isn't sure. Indeed, for the purposes of the film, Cord mightn't even exist. He's a spectral figure, part archetypal noir "puppet master", part scapegoat, part State power personified. Bone wants to leave Cord alone, but Cutter latches on to the murder mystery with the ferocious tenacity of a pit-bull. These two opposite motions – yin and yang – influence Passer's aesthetic. On one hand his film's oddly relaxed, non-committed, skirting around its red herring narrative and refusing to engage its own plot, let alone acknowledge the girl's murder. On the other hand, it's at this very apathy, this "narrative slackness", which Cutter chips away (Bone plays with toy guns while the impatient Cutter blasts away with the real thing). In his quixotic quest for justice Cutter's then transformed into a one legged Ahab obsessively in pursuit of his own Moby Dick (the white whale echoing Cord's saintly white horse). But whose side do we take? Cutter shows flashes of genius, mentioning Hamlet, Moby Dick, LA history and Marx, but he's a hothead, embittered and drunk, and his judgement may be clouded. Though it is suggested that Cord murders Cutter's wife, Passer is careful to leave every act of violence ambiguous. Cord's wife, Mo, may have killed herself, their home may have been burnt by a disgruntled neighbour and not Cord, and the film's climax never resolves whether or not Cord is guilty. Are Cutter's actions radically, politically and righteously motivated, or is he deranged? In "Neon Noir" author Woody Haut argued that Vietnam not only damaged the body politic, but blurred the line between the perpetrators of crimes and those who investigated them. In "Cutter's Way", social justice has been left up to rejects, outsiders and the dregs of society. Cutter himself is plainly a visual emblem of cultural trauma (see Ashby's "Coming Home"). Interestingly, while Passer emphasises Bone's masculinity, his chiselled body, his physical perfection, it is the cripple Cutter who emerges as the film's masculine ideal. "It must be tough playing second fiddle to a one eyed cripple," Mo tells Bone. Meanwhile, Cutter attempts to force his friend out of passivity and into emotional and ideological commitment. The film then ends with Cutter and Bone holding the gun that kills (we assume) Cord, at last joined in previously denied phallic power. Hence the film's title: doing things Alex Cutter's way is doing things right, pursing a moral conviction all the way (see Altman's "The Long Goodbye").End result: while the film registers a certain masochistic pleasure in the loss of centrality, of white privilege, its ultimate message is fairly subversive for a Hollywood noir. Wealth/power may exist beyond the reach of the ordinary, Passer says, but more importantly, change is bulldozed by escapism, non-commitment and vacillation. "I don't feel anything," Cutter's wife repeatedly states, as she drowns herself in alcohol. Her husband may have zombie limbs, but she's the zombie. By the film's end you're left with two poles: Richard "walking away is what you do best" Bone, seemingly on the fast track to a white collar wonderland, and Cutter, whose existence suggests that agency now lies only in a radical form of madness. Beyond all this, the films works equally well as a detective movie, romance and a drama about the camaraderie between a gang of castaways and would-be gumshoes.8.9/10 – Worth two viewings.

seymourblack-1 With its tremendous sense of time and place, its trio of disillusioned characters and an overriding atmosphere of despair and disaffection, "Cutter's Way" is a powerful and often poignant murder mystery in which paranoia, bitterness and cynicism are never far away.Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) is driving through an alleyway one night when his car stalls and through the rain he sees a man dumping something into a trash can. The man then drives off at speed and after abandoning his broken down vehicle, Bone completes the rest of his journey on foot.On the following day, the body of a high school cheerleader is found in the alleyway and Bone becomes the chief suspect. After having been questioned by the police, he gets released and later joins his friend Alex Cutter (John Heard) at a street parade where he sees the man that he believes he saw in the alleyway the night before. Bone doesn't know who the man is but crippled Vietnam War veteran Cutter does and immediately wants to follow through on this lead.J.J.Cord (Stephen Elliott) is a powerful oil tycoon who Cutter has known about for many years. He's aware of some terrible things that he's done in the past and resentful of the fact that people like him don't seem to get punished for their crimes. Cutter learns that Cord's car was found burnt out on the night of the murder and the victim (who was sexually assaulted before being brutally murdered) was last seen near the hotel where Cord was attending a function. These pieces of information are enough to convince Cutter of Cord's guilt and he decides to try to expose him as the culprit.Cutter and the murdered girl's sister then devise a plan to blackmail Cord. Bone is reluctant to get involved but is eventually (against his better judgement) persuaded to help. The blackmailing scheme doesn't go as planned but Cutter continues with his efforts to bring Cord to justice right up until the movie's excellent conclusion.Cutter and Bone were part of a generation that, after the idealism of the 1960s , became deeply disenchanted in the 1970s. The ways in which the two men reacted to this situation, however, were quite different. Cutter had lost a leg, an eye and part of one of his arms in the War and returned home angry and bitter and also full of hate for some of the powerful people in society (such as J.J.Cord) who never suffer in the same way that the veterans do. Cutter's ever present fury led to him becoming a volatile alcoholic who became obsessed with satisfying his overpowering need to take his revenge out on Cord who, in his eyes, was the very embodiment of evil and corruption.Bone by contrast worked as a yacht salesman and was a part time gigolo. His experiences had made him cynical and seriously apathetic. He no longer had any beliefs or commitment to anything and had no desire to challenge anyone with Cord's type of wealth and position.Cutter's wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn) had seen her world collapse and had also responded by hitting the bottle. She was tolerant and understood the ferocity of her husband's feelings but her situation had also made her habitually depressed. She cared deeply for both Cutter and Bone but also felt that her existence had become directionless.The portrayals of Cutter, Bone and Mo are all exceptionally good and leave a lasting impression. Ultimately, it's the performances by Heard, Bridges and Eichhorn and their memorable characters who are so redolent of the time in which they existed, that make this movie a work of considerable substance.

dr_alexander_reynolds I admit I am also very puzzled by the huge predominance of positive reviews given to this movie on this site. The only possible explanation I can see for this is a sort of "virtue by association", since certain features of the film (the presence of actors like Bridges, Heard and Eichhorn; the setting in a seedy milieu with the Vietnam War and Watergate lurking vaguely but potently in the spiritual background) do draw it, superficially, into proximity with masterpieces of 70s cinema like certain films by Bob Rafelson or Arthur Penn. But the proximity is indeed superficial and misleading. "Cutters Way" displays certain stylistic and thematic points in common with the profound, structured, satisfying masterpieces of 70s cinema - but the sad fact is that it is itself neither profound, nor structured, nor - for just these reasons - in the least bit satisfying as a film. We are - or should be - all aware of the dangers of praising "ambiguity" as a meritorious quality in a work of art. I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced by the implied contention - and in most of the reviews here this contention is indeed only IMPLIED, not frankly asserted and argued for - that Passer somehow made a conscious artistic decision to break with conventional structures of plot and narrative here. The fact that we are left, in the end, radically uncertain whether the man Bridges and Heard are pursuing - and whom Bridges presumably actually kills - committed the crime or not cannot seriously be presented as a dramaturgical or moral strength of the film. The vague piece of empty existentialist piety that some of the reviewers come out with - "the film is not about the need to do any particular thing but rather the need to TAKE ACTION per se" - is one of the most repellently ridiculous things I have ever heard. Does this film seriously propose to us that, since society is vaguely rotten and the true "culprits" of this rotten-ness cannot be reached or even clearly identified, we are morally required to break into the houses of random rich people, who look suspiciously content and well-situated, and murder them? I think we do the director a favour if we choose to classify the utter inconclusiveness of the final scenes as an example of the same narrative confusion and sloppiness as, say, the unexplained vanishing, two-thirds of the way through the movie, of an apparently central character: the victim's sister. I honestly don't see how anyone can fail to get the impression that - far from conveying some deep "symbolic meaning" - the final sequences of the movie were just cobbled together in an attempt to close with as many dramatic and emotional images as possible. Certainly, any psychological coherence that the Cutter character might at some point have had is jettisoned in the last five minutes. After being portrayed for an hour and a half as being doggedly and single-mindedly determined to carefully coordinate the exposure of the Cobb character as a murderer, Cutter's "plan" to do so turns out in the end to consist in nothing more than to go hobbling wildly around the man's house, run away from his bodyguards, jump on a horse he finds in his stables, and then fling himself randomly through some French windows, promptly breaking his own neck. I have no idea whether this scene was present in the original novel, but I must honestly say that this risible spectacle of the hero careening wildly through the garden party - emotionally "beefed up" by some cheap and predictable "subjective camera" shots intended to positively FORCE the viewer to identify with Cutter in a way that his actions themselves make it pretty much impossible to do - seems to me a textbook example of directorial desperation and the frantic attempt to give direction and conclusion, by the sheer illusory spectacle of velocity, to a film that really wasn't going anywhere at all. Sorry, but to even vaguely imply that a messy, confusedly pretentious movie like this can be mentioned in the same breath with 70s classics like "The King of Marvin Gardens" or "Night Moves" is to do grave disservice to the memory of 1970s US cinema.