There she is, Selma Blair! Dontcha just love her? She has what people who don't have it call 'class'. Maybe she was a preppie once. Well, she is good for a thinkie white collar role, as she looks like she has some brains and when she is looking like she is thinking she probably is, and that's pretty unusual with starlets. I guess she and Stockard Channing could make a good mother and daughter pair one of these days, a study of the Boston Brahmins perhaps. Now there's a subject for Harvey Kahn to get his eager little teeth into. And he really delivers as director here, with this extraordinarily complex and interesting thriller set slightly in the future. It is a meditation on corporate greed, oil smuggling, international tension, Arab states, house-of-cards companies which are about to collapse, rather like the real world at the moment. It is more relevant now than it was when it was made. Christian Slater is the male lead, and he has come a long way since 'The Name of the Rose' (1986) when he was a naive little novice monk with big innocent eyes. In fact, Slater is now a bit of a rough customer, or rough diamond, or whatever kind of rough you like. But rough, really rough. I don't see his attraction at all. He looks like he is always scheming on how to rob his grandmother of a nickel. Robert Loggia is wonderfully menacing and convincing as a big-time corporate manipulator who kills people when they interfere with his illicit profits. So watch out! He may do that at home! This is a most ingenious and intricate story, just like what really goes on in Wall Street, as we all now know. If you want to know why we have had to bail out all those investment banks, watch this.
Review of The Deal
