Get Shorty (1995)

The plot is complex and has several different elements, all of which are finally linked through Chili Palmer. Palmer is the character who is followed from beginning to end, and the two worlds of interest to him--loan-sharking and movies--come together when he agrees to help a friend in Las Vegas by collecting a debt from a Hollywood movie producer. The gangsters and the movie producers all want the same two things--money and power--and they merely go about getting them in a slightly different way.

The character of Chili Palmer deserves special attention because he is so key to the structure and effective working out of the film. He is a gangster who seems to be quite good at his job when he has to be--when an angry rival bursts into his office, he immediately wounds him across the scalp, without turning a hair. At the same time, he is not the mindless thug that we associate with this

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t for survivors to identify, and we see the man's wife find his hat. There is narration over these images, but in truth the images alone tell the whole story in an economical and comic fashion. Sonnenfeld does this again when Chili is in Las Vegas talking to a casino owner about the same man, and we see some of his antics that got him tossed out by the management. Chili is quickly making his way across the country to Hollywood, a place we already know he aspires to because he loves old movies--he said early that he wanted his boss to buy a local theater so he could run it and show old Cagney movies. Interestingly, Chili himself has a certain image of his own profession drawn from movies and never sees or feels any problem with the difference between the movies and life. Sonnenfeld introduces several sets of characters one after the other, and when he returns to them from time to time, they each seem to have their own story going, a story only peripherally related to any central idea by the fact that Chili is somehow involved in each of their tales. We meet the Hollywood producer who makes horror movies and the woman who stars in many of his pictures. The producer begins as a target of Chili's to recover a debt, but he soon
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Approximate Word count = 1773
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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