EssenceStory Well Deserved Praise

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Steve Pulaski Paul Schrader's Hardcore features a rare performance that tows the fine line between believable lunacy and cartoonish behavior that never crosses over and subjects itself to the latter. The performance is that of George C. Scott, who plays Jake Van Dorn, a Calvinist businessman working in Michigan and serving as a single-parent to his eighteen-year-old daughter Kristen. While presumably on a church retreat to Bellflower, California, Kristen never arrives at the event, leading Jake to hire a private investigator (Peter Boyle) to try and find her whereabouts. Eventually, the investigator finds an 8mm film of his daughter and two other men around her age; it's clear just from the first frame of the film, which Jake sees at a local seedy theater, his daughter is now a porn star.Jake loses it, with enough questions, assumptions, judgments, and miscalculations racing through his mind to cripple the psyche of a dozen men. He comes to the conclusion that his daughter had to have been kidnapped to join such an underworld, and becomes dedicated to bringing her back home. He dives into California's sleazy, pornographic underworld, venturing through brothels, adult bookstores, and peep shows to find her, eventually meeting Nikki (Season Hubley), a porn star and hooker.Hardcore is the classic case of a character being immersed in a world he had no conception of and would've rather gone on pretending as if the world and all of those affected by it never existed. His tunnel-vision, conservative mindset has made it seem that since everything in his own life was perfect and completely free of any trouble, that there's no way anyone else's life could be troubled. He doesn't see problems, therefore none exist.Jake's rude awakening becomes more alarming with what he has to witness. To many audience members, presuming their braveness to already seek out such a peculiar film, the content in Hardcore isn't particularly jolting, but to Jake, it's some of the most revolting stuff he's seen in his entire life. Consider the discomfort and anxiety felt by Jake as he walks into a low-lit brothel, with pulsating, blood-red lights and wallpaper decorating the rooms and meets a young stripper, with a thick piece of glass separating them. The stripper plants both of her heels on the glass whilst sitting down, exposing her whole body for Jake's pleasure, as they communicate through the glass. Jake is beyond uncomfortable and is simply trying to get his daughter back, but in order to do so, he must subject himself to worlds he never thought could've existed.This kind of relativism makes for a deeply fascinating film, and in Schrader's screen writing and directing hands, Hardcore beams with life. Schrader includes a barrage of must-have locations for this kind of film, and captures them in a way that adheres to the principles of realism. Never does Schrader seem to go overboard in his depictions of this underworld, nor does he compromise Jake's character by making him unlikable. This is one of the first times I've seen such a close-minded, holier-than-thou, judgmental character on screen that I didn't detest; it's not entirely his fault he's been closeted to his own set of beliefs for so many years. He thought all was well and good.Scott captures this character so intensely that even his freakouts and mental breakdowns don't feel forced nor over-the-top. Scott eventually learns how to get ahead in this business, at one point going undercover as a director and interviewing male porn stars that could've perhaps had contact with his daughter. These scenes, when Scott dawns a wig, a fake mustache, and shag clothing, are completely transforming for his character, and we see a man's own personal ethics and values degrade throughout the entire film, in a slowburn fashion.Hardcore sizzles on screen, creating characters that exist, a fascinating underworld captured in details rather than in essences, and an impending sense of dread as time marches on and Jake's daughter's fate becomes more and more questionable. Much has been made about the finale, which is said to have been taken over by cautious studio executives rather than accurately reflecting the original vision of Schrader. For me, it works as a way to simmer down the film's explosiveness that it carries throughout, especially towards the end, as things intensify. The bittersweetness of the entire affair, in addition, compliments the film's nature of nothing ever totally being right or in place; not even in the beginning, as Jake is still so deeply lost in his own mannerisms.Starring: George C. Scott, Season Aubrey, and Peter Boyle. Directed by: Paul Schrader.

SnoopyStyle Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) is a furniture manufacturer and a leader in a religiously conservative community. His teenage daughter goes on a church youth trip to California. Then she goes missing. He's beside himself. The cops can't do much. So he hires sleazy private investigator Andy Mast (Peter Boyle). Andy finds a porno film with her in it, and Jake goes on a quest to find her in L.A.This is an ugly movie. There is no rose-colored glasses. This is not 'Boogie Nights'. The sex trade is dirty. The porno film industry is a business and not a family. George C. Scott is especially compelling as the distraught father, and Season Hubley as the sex trade worker who helps to track her down. Writing/director Paul Schrader has certainly been involved in some iconic movies in that era.

HumanoidOfFlesh Jake Van Dorn is a businessman from the American heartland who shares strong Calvinist convictions with most of his countrymen.His teenage daughter is missing from the trip to L.A. and Van Dorn hires a private investigator to find her.The result of the investigation is:his daughter is spotted in a cheap X-rated movie.Van Dorn decides to bring her back personally and during the quest he becomes familiar with the pornographic underworld.Paul Schrader's "Hardcore" is a powerful thriller about sex market and snuff underground.The script is suspenseful and the location sets are sleazy and authentic.There is plenty of nudity and a bit of gruesome violence.The central performance of George C.Scott is truly awesome.A must-see.8 out of 10.

jzappa Prosperous Grand Rapids businessman Jake Van Dorn is played by George C. Scott, hooker and sometime porn actress Niki played by Season Hubley. They have moments in the movie when they talk, really talk, about what's important to them, to each other. And they evoke how much movie dialogue just recaps itself, before and since this film's unsullied, lively, sexual, fervent and artistically indispensable era. There's a scene in this sort of Taxi Driver counterpart---sharing with it a theme of a self-perceived man of purity exploring an undetected subculture---where Van Dorn, who is a stern Calvinist, and the prostitute, who began selling herself in her early teens, talk about sex, religion, and morality, and I'm virtually astounded by the conviction, idea and unadorned literary value in their words.This relationship, between two people with nothing in common, who meet at an intersection in a society where numerous have nothing in common, is at the core of the movie, and makes it crucial. It's headed and trailed by another of those plot ideas that Paul Schrader seems to create so effortlessly, but what makes it so riveting and risible is his injection of bona fide humor, understated, intermittent, and intermingled with the gravitas of his zealous hero's journey. His movies are about people with ideals, at odds with society. He wrote Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder and helmed Blue Collar. All three are about people primed to preserve, perhaps with violence, their unwavering values. And in Hardcore's journey into hedonism, the purposefully peripheral nodding lechers and harlots who populate Schrader's L.A. loom to relegate the disparity between Van Dorn and the people he confronts to a circle of carnivalesque bane.Where Taxi Driver had an ominous New York denoting the world by never hazarding outside the boundaries of the city, Hardcore, by advantage of opening in Van Dorn's (and Schrader's) snowy hometown and having his teenage daughter waft into porn just after her youth group stops in California, entails that vice and degeneracy is a controlled germ. The opening scenes ensconce us in the family setting, at Christmas, with a substantial theological discussion going on around the dinner table. A few days later, Scott's daughter leaves home for a church rally in California. She never returns. Scott hires a private detective to attempt to locate her, and Boyle does find her, in an 8mm porno movie. Can it be tracked? "Nobody made it. Nobody sold it. Nobody sees it. It doesn't exist." Nevertheless Scott swears to pursuing his daughter into the sexual gangland and return and restore her. His labors to find her, through San Francisco, L.A. and San Diego, make Hardcore into a deviously intriguing guidebook expedition through massage parlors, whorehouses, and the world of porno movies. Schrader occasionally appears to be having it both ways, here: Scott is revolted by the sex scenes he deals with, but is the movie? That makes no difference after he meets Niki, who might know some people who might know where his daughter is. She is in several ways like all the other forlorn young girls who waft to California and vanish. But she has brains and a particular insight into why she does what she does, and so their dialogue together becomes opportunity for shared examination between characters whose likelihood of ever crossing paths is quite remote.She has a deep-rooted emotional requirement for a father figure, a basic she at first contemplates maybe Scott can meet. She also has insights into Scott's own moral fiber, insights his life hasn't before made apparent to him. There's a scene near the waterfront in San Diego that seamlessly elucidates both of their personalities, and we take in how uncommon it is for the movies to show us people who are speaking in genuine words about genuine things.The most shocking element of Hardcore, then, is not any of the squalidness it apparently renders, but rather Van Dorn's dedication to his creed, an attribute he shares with startlingly few white characters in the annals of American cinema taking into account that three quarters of the country distinguishes itself as "Christian." Though Hardcore's coarse imagery does have the force to disturb, it's because we're inherently receptive to their spiritual plaguing of Van Dorn. The images are always so interesting, and I think, more than the vigilant, realistic cinematography, it's George C. Scott himself. Character metamorphosis is what gratifies our most basic interests in stories, and in Hardcore, Scott's Jake DeVries goes through one of the great ones.Sometimes, just seeing the man we once saw emerge from a hard-line Five Point church pew in the Midwest with his horn-rimmed glasses, conservative suit and town car walking down the loitering central of southern California's bawdiest streets in a loud button-down, sunglasses and a black eye is enough aesthetic visual pleasure, more than the symmetry of a composition or the atmospheric color tints and sharp changes in camera speeds during the gripping, symbolically brilliant climax.