“Mercilessly satiric yet good-natured, this enormously entertaining slam dunk quite possibly is the most resonant Hollywood saga since the days of Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful.”
This summer Tufnell Park Film Club celebrates its 10th anniversary (we know!) and we thought we’d get the party started* with a repeat showing of the very first film we ever screened waaaay back in 2012 (a film which, by happy coincidence, is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary).
Tim Robbins stars as Griffin Mill, a Hollywood executive whose fear that a younger, hotter producer is being groomed to take his place is only exacerbated by the series of anonymous death threats he is receiving from a writer he apparently spurned sometime in the past… Both a noirish thriller and blackly comic satire on all things Hollywood, The Player boasts an entertainingly huge cast of Hollywood greats (as well as the leading cast of Greta Scachti, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Brion James, Cynthia Stevenson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dean Stockwell, Richard E. Grant and Sydney Pollack, there are blink-n-you’ll-miss-em cameos from the likes of Jack Lemon, Buck Henry, Harry Belafonte, Peter Faulk, John Cusack, Elliot Gould, Cher etc etc etc) and was the critical and commercial come-back success that put Robert Altman back on the map after a decade in the wilderness.
*Rest assured, a far more extensive (and interactive!) TPFC 10th Year Anniversary Programme is being planned as I type (more detail to follow soon: watch this space!) .
