Sorry, this movie sucks

Simply Perfect

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The pianist/loan shark collector at the center of writer-director James Toback's "Fingers" is a quirky, volatile character, one with a defensive edge and a hair-trigger temper. Yet, by the end of the film, he's in far worse shape than he was at the beginning, making him not so much a crestfallen anti-hero as simply a bad example. Harvey Keitel is marvelous in the lead--tense and coiled, yet magnetic--and he's allowed room by the director to give his character some boyish shading (when he's playing his beloved vintage pop tunes on his cassette recorder in public). But the character has no life outside of his duties for his father, his attraction to a teasing sculptress and his dark, personal world of music. He has no friends, he fights with everyone he comes into contact with, he argues with his doctor doing a prostate exam and his virtuosity at the piano does not pay him back in kind. Some see this, Toback's directorial debut, as a portrait of a character in hell, but by not writing a full, rounded life for this man, it's a movie traveling a dead-end street. It seems extremely lazy and monotonous from a narrative standpoint, although the picture (filmed in wintry New York City, with its brown buildings and bare tress) certainly looks good. Personal taste will have to decide its ultimate impact. ** from ****

Martin Scorsese' "Taxi Driver" is often touted as the great film to go into the mind of a disturbed and violent new yorker on the verge of psychosis. I believed that until i saw James Toback's "fingers".Honestly fingers does what taxi driver tried to do, but in a much much better fashion ! Fingers is far more textured than taxi driver. The characters are more 3 dimensional and its a far more acute representation of a man on the edge. Harvey Keitels interpretation of such a character makes de niros interpretation of travis bickle look shallow, insipid and flat. In terms of cinematography Fingers looks better, is edited better, is shot better and the acting is much more believable. fingers just has a lot more 'substance' to it - that great abstract thing that great films have.Unbelievable that this film scores only a 6.6 at this website. I voted it a 9/10.

This early movie of actor Harvey Keitel is still rather unknown and was always overshadowed by the successful Keitel and de Niro movies like Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver". With Scorsese and di Niro being absent in this production, it was Keitel's time for a leading part.He plays the schizophrenic character "Fingers", a brutal repo man who is dreaming of a classical piano player career in a distant future beyond violence. He falls in love with an ignorant woman, tries to convince his father and mentor of his musical talents, but also has to take any dirty job to survive. Finally he takes his famous "last job" and tries to get a large amount of money from a brutal Mafia youngster, but has to face his biggest enemy - and his last big showdown."Fingers" is a rather calm movie which leaves enough place for Keitel to show the different personalities of "Fingers". There are dirty back roads, a bloody showdown and the tristesse of other sad New York stories, but not the glam and the roaring action of the Scorsese movies. And there are always evidences of hope and love which are finally crushed by the wheels of reality... Watch out for "Fingers", one of Harvey Keitel's best performances ever.

Why do we want to spend the hour and a half that it takes to watch this movie in the company of a character so loathsome that we would do anything to avoid him if we met him in real life? Jimmy Fingers is arrogant, self-obsessed, sexually violent and just plain creepy. O.K., there are moments in which we get to see that he has a better side, when he comforts a destitute women who is crying in a doorway, or when he sticks by his small time hoodlum father, in spite of the fact that he is even more repellent than Fingers himself. There is so much in this movie to make you squirm from the no-holds barred, bloody violence and a painful proctological exam to the scenes in which Fingers annoys everyone in earshot by playing loud doo-wop music on his portable tape player and threatening violence towards anyone who objects. With its fine acting and totally unpredictable story-line, this film is undeniable entertaining, but it's appeal is a rather masochistic one.