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Get Shorty (1995)

The film Get Shorty (1995) mixes elements from different genres to create a movie about movies and about moviemaking. The central metaphor is that making movies is like being a gangster, and the world of the gangster and the world of the movie producer are shown to be very close in style and tone. The two worlds are brought together in this film through the central character of Chili Palmer, the gangster who likes movies. The film draws on expectations the audience has about what happens in crime films while twisting many of those expectations to produce a different sort of experience.

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 type of work, and indeed he himself says that he was not that into being a gangster. He views it as a job, and he is a man who believes a job has to be done right. He is able to do his job right because he is dispassionate while at the same time being a good judge of character and a man able to make use of what he sees in others to get them to do what he wants. As a result, he also manages to fit into whatever social setting he encounters in a way that mos...

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Get Shorty (1995). (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:11, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693162.html