1. EmaT.

   10

   Great film, so faithful to the book, Salma Hayek steals the movie, already a strong contender for next year's oscars. Her best performance yet.

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2. KenG.

   5

   The irony here is that Towne is well know as a highly talented scriptwriter, yet the biggest problem with this movie is that much of it was terribly written. Basically, every single scene between Farrell and Hayek, for the first 2/3rds of movie should have been thrown out and rewritten. It does improve over last 3rd when Farrell and Hayek come across in their scenes together as real people, instead of just mouthpieces for the writer's idea of hardboiled dialogue. But by this time it is too little, too late. Because movie squanders so much in movie's first 2/3rd's, it also never really explores what is was like to have an interracial romance in 1930's L.A. (Which, I gather, it wanted to to). Medina is very good, though.… Expand

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3. GeorgeR.

   2

   Narrowing the grand -- though no less lonely -- scope of the book, to the hero’s relationship with a local waitress is the first and most resounding mistake of this film. It’s here where Arturo Bandini, the aspiring novelist of the story, does battle with his various emotional, physical and professional terrors. Through furious fits of projection -- the kind only a twenty-year old can command and barely get away with -- Arturo oddly endears himself to women, all of whom seem to be seeking the same thing from him: a show of strength - perhaps the very thing that will transform him into the great writer he hopes to be. The thing that succeeded so well in the book -- and is absent from the movie -- is the accumulation of Arturo’s many fits of longing, frustration, and romantic inexperience. When we meet Arturo we know only that he hails from Colorado - that is all. But through the singular way that he aspires for greatness and goes about it so fearfully, we can assume that home was a place void of intimacy. The way Arturo recreates that world around him again in Los Angeles and then attempts to break from it, is the struggle of this writer’s early life. Unfortunately, however, these are the projections of a generous moviegoer, and not the accomplishments of the scatter-shot film. Because the movie focuses too intensely on what is one of many disheartening encounters in the book it becomes more about how one lonely couple finds each other and triumphs to join the pantheon of great love stories; a particular betrayal of tone, especially when it attempts to conclude the way many of those tearjerkers do. “Ask the Dust” is not a tearjerker. It is a dirty story of youthful desire, desperation and destitution, emotional and otherwise (one that inspired the likes of beat writer Charles Bukowski, who wrote the preface to the reissue of the 1939 novel). Besides their miscasting for age, forty-year old Salma Hayek and thirty-year old Colin Farrell hardly conjure any of the relative gritty adjectives. For a story about overcoming fears of intimacy, it seems ironic that Robert Towne should lose whatever early connection he had to the material, believing instead that any semblance of the book -- and the beatnik street cred it offered -- would suffice. It doesn’t. If you want to see a great modern adaptation of a book from the same period, roughly covering the same mix of loneliness and reckless desire, rent the filmed version of Nathanael West’s “Day of the Locust”, a movie that, incidentally, puts Donald Sutherland to better use. Or read the book “Ask the Dust” and try to forget any movie posters you might have seen. Any movie a reader might imagine can only be better.… Expand

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