The Color of Money (1986)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Former pool hustler "Fast Eddie" Felson decides he wants to return to the game by taking a pupil. He meets talented but green Vincent Lauria and proposes a partnership. As they tour pool halls, Eddie teaches Vincent the tricks of scamming, but he eventually grows frustrated with Vincent's showboat antics, leading to an argument and a falling-out. Eddie takes up playing again and soon crosses paths with Vincent as an opponent.
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What critics compared The Color of Money to
He doesn't get jazzed up, the way Scorsese does when he's showing off, as in those ridiculous close-ups of balls zooming around a pool table in "The Color of Money."
At times, Whiplash suggests a dark riff on an early Tom Cruise movie, with Teller in the Cruise role of the obsessed hotshot committed to being the best in the world, and Simmons as the hardass mentor (think Robert Duvall in Days Of Thunder , Paul Newman in The Color Of Money , or Tom Skerritt in Top Gun ) who pushes his protégés to heights they never imagined possible.
Sure, but only in the way that Scorsese’s Raging Bull or The Color Of Money are sports movies.
Too often, animated films go for big-name actors instead of actors who are right for their parts, but "Surf's Up" has a great cast, including Jeff Bridges as a bitter surfing legend who takes Cody under his wing in a story that resembles "The Color of Money" and Zooey Deschanel, who brings her loopy appeal to the role of a love interest for Cody.
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Tom Cruise gets lampooned not only via "Top Gun," but also with quick glances at "Cocktail" and "The Color of Money."
Most people consider The Color of Money's Best Actor statuette to be a "Career Award" (as was the case with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman ), but when one considers the competition (Dexter Gordon in 'Round Midnight, William Hurt in Children of a Lesser God, Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa , and James Woods in Salvador), it's not an outrageous win.
You even find them in what might otherwise be straightforward commercial genre projects—"Cape Fear," " The Departed " and " The Color of Money " spring to mind—in which Scorsese seems to be using theology to frame his story and characters in ways that he understands, maybe as a way of personalizing a story that's not all that personal otherwise.
Whether it is one of the avowed classics like “Mean Streets,” “Raging Bull” or “Goodfellas,” an offbeat personal project such as “The Age of Innocence” or “Kundun” or even an overt commercial consideration like “The Color of Money,” “Cape Fear” or “Shutter Island” that he occasionally finds himself working on, he approaches each one with such passion and energy, both in matters of cinema technique and in working with actors, that they still manage to feel fresh and vital no matter how many times one watches them.
With The Color of Money, though, Scorsese just bottomed out completely; even looking ahead to the wildly erratic career he'd have in later decades, there's nothing he made so achingly generic and impersonal as this - Gangs of New York may be a fucking awful movie, but it is a Scorsese movie through and through.
Whether it's hotel security surveillance in "Casino" or the game of 9-ball in "The Color of Money," he somehow transcends the activity as soon as he starts dissecting it onscreen.
Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus has completed six films with Scorsese, "After Hours," "The Color of Money," "The Last Temptation of Christ," "GoodFellas" and "The Age of Innocence," along with "Gangs of New York."
Some of his more ambitious features -- including New York, New York (1977), The King of Comedy (1982), The Color of Money (1986), and Casino (1995) -- might even be said to be duels between adult and adolescent impulses.
One is reminded that the actor starred in a legacy sequel the same year Top Gun came out, playing the hotshot protégé in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.
In 1986, the same year he played Maverick, the ace naval aviator at the center of Tony Scott’s Top Gun—a career-defining role if ever there were one—Tom Cruise also starred in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, a 25-years-later sequel to Robert Rossen’s antihero classic The Hustler (1961).
Paul Newman won his one and only Oscar opposite Cruise in The Color of Money (1986).
For director Joseph Kosinski, his big break as a feature director was 2010’s “TRON: Legacy”; for star Tom Cruise, it was a film he did the same year as the original “Top Gun,” Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money.”
And, yet, for much of the running-time of the newly released sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick”, I found myself thinking of another very different 1986 Tom Cruise film: Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money”.
Widely considered a rare miss for director Martin Scorsese, The Color of Money sees the pool hustler take a hotshot pupil, then eventually tire of his immature antics.
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While flirting with the darkness in features such as "Backdraft" and "Parenthood" (don't kid yourself, some severe psychological events unfold in that wonderful picture), "Ransom" introduced a maturity to Howard's directorial career, burrowing into a bleak tale of loss and improvised revenge, working from a screenplay co-written by Richard Price ("Sea of Love," "The Color of Money").