Audience Member
Our protagonist , as beautiful and sensuous as a poetic muse is mired in love triangle, she loves her husband but his high flyer obsession to run a company as a legacy of his late father has consequences ; his childhood friend, Cage, who plays a painter named Johnny Collins returns after several years and takes little time to seduce Zandalee, Married to Reinhold's character Thierry Martin.
The adulterous affair for Zandalee gets so toxic that she is has no qualms to the debauchery of her lover's challenge :
"with your husband in the next room 46:00 "
Zandalee goes to church to try to get some heavenly help on her burdened life even there she is tempted to devil's lust.
The toxic relationship takes the life of Zandalee's husband and finally she finds no other option but to get herself killed by a shooter who intended to shoot her lover.
Though it is a movie with minimum horror yet it is intensely coloured with abnormal psychology from start to fin, it is actually not for general audience.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
Full Review
Audience Member
I am obsessed with this film. I've been viewing it off and on since 1991, and I keep discovering added dimensions. I especially like watching the early work of superstars. The casting was remarkable with Cage, Reinhold, Buscemi, Tomei, Pantoliano, and Lindfors. I liked Anderson's work, too. It was contained in public and carnal in private, the way Southern women are taught to behave.
Perhaps the most important thing about the film to me is how accurately it captures not only the zeitgeist of the French Quarter, but the mentality of a certain social class in New Orleans where suicide is a legitimate way to cope with disappointment in life.
I was married to a failed artist like Johnny, Nic Cage's character, and he was just as narcissistic and selfish as Johnny who didn't give it a second thought that he felt entitled to take Zandalee's and Thierry's lives. The worst kind of vampire: clueless.
When I watched it yesterday, I realized for the first time that Zandalee's hesitation before she threw herself in front of the bullet had been deliberated. She wasn't trying to save Johnny. She was taking advantage of the quick death the bullet provided. It was not an emotional decision. She didn't love Johnny any more than he loved her. As Gurdjieff would say, to her he was a toothpick as to him she was a handkerchief.
I hated Johnny for so many reasons, but mainly for destroying the Martins's one fragile chance to repair their marriage albeit Thierry would still need therapy to work out his issues. He was way too weak and fatalistic, never acknowledging that he chose to take his father's place at work and actually had options. That lifestyle seems so feudal to me. Yet I've known so many scions of New Orleans's social set to do exactly that. Usually they become lawyers.
As for me, marrying that portrait painter was a good thing, despite his eternal appropriation of all my assets, because he made me leave New Orleans for Los Angeles where no one cared where I went to high school nor what my daddy did for a living. New Orleans is a suffocating culture best enjoyed if you are not born into it. Now that I have returned after thirty years away, I can appreciate it the way tourists do. Vive les bon temps rouler!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/26/23
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Audience Member
2.5/5.0 stars - Grade: C
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Following up on Wild At Heart, Cage appeared in the God-awful movie Zandalee, in which Nic dons a goatee and a Louisiana accent and does romantic battle with Judge Rheinhold, who last worked with Nic in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Both actors sport some fine have porn 'staches.
High points in the movie: Steve Buscemi as a jailbird with a heart of gold.
Low points: Everything else.
Nic, playing Johnny Collins, wears all black and a mullet. He's the worst kind of tortured artist, the kind that has to talk about how tortured they are to everybody around them.
Judge Rheinhold is Thierry Martin, the head of a family-owned communications business. His wife is Zandalee, a skinny boutique owner bored with responsible Judgester, who starts banging Nic's tortured artist self, an affair that culminates in the weirdly passive death of The Judge in the bayou following some homoerotic/man on man sexualized violence.
Johnny Collins, who also sidelines as a drug addict and mule, gets in debt to the wrong people; Zandalee, who is detached from her emotions in pretty much the entire movie, sacrifices herself to save his life. At the end, everybody is dead or unhappy.
One audience member on Rotten Tomatoes sums up the film like this:
"A boring movie about a woman named Zandalee-what kind of fucking name is that? who has an affair with her husband's friend. Terrible acting and no type of plot. Maybe there is one hot sex scene but that's about it."
Thanks Jennifer Torres! That pretty much captures the film.
Based on the pretentious dialogue, the slow pacing, the meaningless plot, the apparent hatred of all three main characters, and the setting (New Orleans, decay, etc) this is intended to be a serious art film. The director, Sam Pillsbury, worked on the excellent and underrated 1985 sci-fi film The Quiet Earth (and later went on to film Free Willy 3 before quitting film to start a vinyard in Arizona that he sold to the lead singer from the band Tool-true story) but he channeled none of the fine work from Quiet Earth into this ball of self-loathing and misery.
Nobody is particularly great in the film-although the actors are all too skilled to turn in terrible performances-but I got the feeling none of them bought into the story completely, and it shows. There's a lack of chemistry. Nic's character is super-intense and so Nic stares and lot and breaks things and doesn't smile. I just wanted to slap him. Nic has a very hard time fully embracing roles that do not include some aspect of self-mockery. The twat he plays in this film couldn't reflect upon his own image in a mirror, and Nic ends up playing him as a very superficial character, all destructive id with no hint of something deeper.
One of the worst Cage films. A film that desperately wants to be something it is not, and suffers twice as much for failing.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A terribly shallow film featuring everything a B movie needs.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/01/23
Full Review
camille l
Les décors de Zandalee sont plutôt soignés, la musique du groupe Pray for Rain est franchement remarquable et les acteurs sont très bons. Une fois tout ceci dit, il est dur de trouver une autre qualité à Zandalee, qui se trouve être un thriiller érotique particulièrement ennuyeux, aux rebondissements complètement idiots et finalement très proche d'une version R-Rated des Feux de l'Amour. On passe d'appartement en appartement avec un sens du rythme inexistant, avec des dialogues atterrants. Cependant, voir Nicolas Cage et Judge Reinhold danser sans musique et Cage (toujours lui) se couvrir de peinture noire sans raison est toujours hilarant. Ce n'était malheureusement probablement pas le but recherché.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
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