BREWSTER'S MILLIONS (1985) **1/2 Richard Pryor-lite is still high-octane Hollywood. He wins the big game, gets drunk, hits on chicks, brawls in barrooms, wakes up jail, pleads innocent but gets convicted, gets bailed and moves to New York...all before the opening credits are over. Remake of a remake of a remake of a remake of, but no question of originality or authenticity when Sir Richard (why don't they ever knight the right people) is on the screen. On surface a remake anyway, about every closet socialist's dream: having to spend $30 million recklessly in order to gain $300 million, and thereby collapse the capitalist/collective class system. Below that surface lurk stark and incisive commentaries galore: the bad guy is posing as an environmental lawyer (by his primary allegiance to the firm shall ye know him), there is no better way to waste millions of dollars while gaining and accomplishing nothing than than to engage in the charade of electoral politics, the New York Yankees really are just as big of assholes as they look like but they're good ballplayers, the utility of a stamp is in mailing things, and the electorate is primed for something completely different (it just takes a lot of cash to get their attention). Pryor does it almost entirely on his own. With the exception of John Candy (who immediately spends his first big paycheck on a gold-plated catcher's mask that Johnny Bench supposedly failed to pick up), Jerry Orbach (as the ghost of receding real baseball incarnate), and David White (reprising Larry Tate from Bewitched) the cast is uniformly bland. Richard offers manifest meditations on broken dreams dangled beyond our ability, truely a sobering thought from one so immensely talented, and himself only 44 years old.
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