Shampoo (1975)
Directed by Hal Ashby
On Election Day, 1968, irresponsible hairdresser and ladies' man George Roundy is too busy cutting hair and dealing with his girlfriends and mistress Felicia Karpf, whose husband Lester is having an affair with his ex-girlfriend Jackie.
16 connections found
View:
16 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Shampoo to
Delivering a waterbed to a fancy address, they encounter Jon Peters (a hilariously committed Bradley Cooper), the real-life celebrity hairstylist and legendary womanizer who is said to have been the inspiration for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo .
* – Probably not coincidentally, George Roundy, the playboy hairdresser played by Warren Beatty in Shampoo, was partially modeled after Jon Peters.
Gary and Alana eventually start a waterbed business and deliver one to a volatile, lascivious Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), the movie producer, boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, and suspected inspiration for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo .
The film’s ultimate example of this is the brilliant set piece involving Gary and Alana delivering a waterbed to Hollywood producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper, playing the real-life womanizer who inspired Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo), who also happened to be Barbra Streisand’s boyfriend at the time.
Some of those stories are told here, few of them more arresting than the one starring a hilarious, unnerving Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, the prolific producer and serial womanizer (and frequent sexual-harassment defendant) whose early career as a hairdresser was one of the inspirations for Ashby’s great 1975 comedy, “Shampoo.”
But the more obvious influences are works from auteurs Hal Ashby (“Shampoo”) and Robert Altman (“Short Cuts,” “The Player”), as Anderson once again demonstrates his genius for pitch-perfect ensemble casting and an uncanny ability to weave multiple ongoing storylines into a cohesive, exhilarating, astonishingly authentic big-picture story.
A slow, self-important exercise in aimless and dispirited debauchery reminiscent of Mark Kanievska’s failed movie version of Less Than Zero, The Informers squanders a solid cast (including Kim Basinger, Billy Bob Thornton, Rhys Ifans, Mickey Rourke and a criminally underutilized Winona Ryder) aiming at something akin to the moral grandeur of Hal Ashby’s masterpiece of LA ennui Shampoo.
He eventually insinuates himself into a salon run by a beautiful Palestinian named Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), where he sets about Warren Beattying his way through the clientele, a la Shampoo.
Imagine Warren Beatty in "Shampoo" by way of a Jewish Rambo.
In a tip of the hat, or whatever, to Warren Beatty's swingin' hairstylist in Shampoo, Sandler plays a breathtakingly flexible Israeli counter-terrorist agent who's had his fill of fighting Palestinians and longs to retire to a chic Manhattan salon.
Sandler plays the title character as an over-the-top cross between Paul Bunyan, Rambo, and Warren Beatty in Shampoo.
June 5, 2008 - If James Bond was an Israeli commando who secretly aspired to be Warren Beatty in Shampoo then he would be Adam Sandler's title character in the new comedy You Don't Mess With the Zohan .
Most of it is a riposte to and parody of Beatty’s “Shampoo”, about a womanizing hairdresser and the 1968 RFK campaign.
Forty or so years ago in " Shampoo " (1975), Warren Beatty's Don Juan hairdresser was made into a figure of yearning sympathy.
Advertisement
It also feels the city’s cinematic history: when he arrives on a motorcycle, ambling from machine towards a family home that can never be his, Paul (Mark Ruffalo) could be Warren Beatty in Shampoo.
But "Spread," wherein Kutcher has the role of his young life as the pleasure-giving toy of well-off women in the Hollywood Hills, comes closer to the sudsy sexuality of Beatty's "Shampoo" than any movie in, well, 34 years.
The movie uses the Nixon-Agnew election the same way Warren Beatty and Robert Towne did in Shampoo—as a barbed backdrop to personal calamity.
Warren Beatty once defended his film Shampoo by asserting that even promiscuous people can fall in love.
Advertisement
Reiner, who took over directing duties from the movie's writer in a sort of production coup (very Castro), seems to be trying to give his romantic comedy a degree of resonance, the way, for instance, that in 1975 Hal Ashby's ''Shampoo" turned a connection between a Warren Beatty sex romp and the 1968 presidential election into a comedy for the ages.
Towne’s Oscar-nominated screenwriting successes ("The Last Detail," "Shampoo" and "Greystroke: The Legend of Tarzan") and his Oscar win for "Chinatown" have led to a healthy career writing Hollywood blockbusters like the "Mission Impossible" movies.
Fante's spirit is the sloshed, romantic vagabond's, pre-Kerouac in its ruefulness and, to the writer of The Last Detail and Shampoo now mainly punching up Tom Cruise vehicles, an irresistible vessel for his own unfashionably moony themes.