Reviews (1)

the best
its the bast muve of the war ... Read more

Reviews (6)

The Best Movie With Macaulay Culkin!!!
When first saw this movie on Abc Familey I knew I was going to like it.This movie also has Ted Danson it.It's about Father & Son Relationship.Macaulay Culkin looks older in this movie than the others he did like Both Home,Uncle Buck & My Girl.He was propbably 13 at that time he made that movie.I loe this movie,I gotta get this movie!!!!

more respect-less profanity
I'm sorry to say that this movie was ruined by today's standard of decency. Its bad enough we can't protect our kids from the world but we really should be able to put in a pg movie and get good laughs not profanity and a complete lack of respect for the Lords house of worship. I was totally appauled with the actions in the church as if using the Lords name in vain was'nt enough. What happened to pg being 1 or 2 bad words and that was it. Todays standards are totally wrong. Years ago that would have been rated R. It would have been a terrific movie but they feel if there isn't a lot of cussing and bad manners no one will enjoy it, well they're dead wrong. Let's clean up the act for our future generation, after all what we put into the future is what we're going to get back. Feed kids garbage and what do you think they will produce?

Great film
I think this is one of the better films Macaulay Culkin did during his child actor career. It was generally poor received by critics, but it's still one of my favorites. Culkin delivers a great performance. This is a must have for any Culkin fan.

fodder
extremely fair family comedy that highlights macaulay culkin's plunge into cheesiness. it's very unfortunate that such a talented child actor had to be forced down the tubes with fare like this and pagemaster. i guess you'll like it if you're a ted danson fan, but that's about it

make it stop!!!
i'm one of the people who still admits to enjoying home alone and i loved cheers but I can tell u something I didn't love. This movie was lame and made me want to cry I couldn't get through the first hour. Really bad plot w/ really bad dialouge = really really bad movie just the case gives me bad memories ... Read more

Reviews (12)

Great family movie
I thought this was a great family movie. While it won't hold the attention of the younger kids, older children will enjoy it. The acting is wonderful, especially the "young lass", what a great part for her. Too bad about the cynical review earlier, but that's what I expect from profession movie critics, they are out to pick apart the film itself, where I am looking for entertainment factor for myself and for my family. As for MY family, we thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

Great Nessie Movie
This movie is great! The speacial effects are great! The acting is great! The story is great! Ted Danson is great! That is all I have to say. I want to talk much more but I'd spoil it. See this movie.

Wonderful Music
Can anyone tell me where to find the soundtrack for this film?

kirsty graham is my cousin, do you know how I can locate her
It is one of my favourite movies of all time.Kirsty is my cousin and I am trying to find her. Can anyone help, without invading her privacy. I realize that is important.

Magnificent Film
This movie was brilliantly filmed and acted.It is a little known gem of the highest quality.It's ashame people can't get past the subject material, because it's a rare film that is this well written, acted or filmed. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Jerry and Tom is not the cartoonish comedy its culturallyloaded title would suggest, but an off-beat buddy picture with a deftdirectorial touch that doesn't quite lift it from its verbose stage origins.Jerry (Sam Rockwell) is a fumbling car-lot gopher in the wrong place at the wrong time. He watches paternal, easygoing coworker Tom (Joe Mantegna)blithely strangle a man to death. He's a used-car salesman by day and ablue-collar hit man by night, and he gets his assignments right from the lot owner (a paunchy, punchy Maury Chaykin). Before long Tom is mentoring Jerry, a real cool customer who gets downright chilling in his sadistic delightin murdering strangers for cash. Veteran character actor Saul Rubinek makeshis directorial debut in this adaptation and expansion of Rick Cleveland's short stage play, eschewing style (though his smooth scene transitions are lovely and inventive) for ensemble performance. His cast (including William H. Macy, Ted Danson, Peter Riegert, and a sly turn by Charles Durning as aretiring pro who may have done both Kennedy and Elvis--"I ain't saying Idid, and I ain't saying I didn't") is uniformly excellent. It's a characterpiece for guys, where the violence is left largely (though not completely)off-screen and the working-class killers spend their hours talking aboutlost loves, family crises, and power tools. --Sean Axmaker ... Read more

Reviews (5)

Not your usual kinda movie
This extra-quirky black comedy works by dint of its unpredictable dialogue and sudden deaths (so to speak--it's the tale of two suburban hit men), as well as some unusual moments--one of the guys, burying a body in the forest, stops to look at a doe, only a few yards away. In addition, the scene transitions are cleverly done, moving back and forth in time and season--summer changes to winter in a few seconds, taking maximum advantage of the film medium to segue based on a few small random items into a milieu that's completely different from the previous one.

The hit men are played by Joe Mantegna, one of the executive producers, and Sam Rockwell, and their boss is Canadian actor Maury Chaykin. All are effective in their darkly funny roles, as are Peter Riegert, William H. Macy, Ted Danson, and Charles Durning as an older hit man who taught Mantegna's Tom everything he knows. Durning's Vic also wants to publish a book about his life, using a "pseudoname"--which does not go over too well with others.

Hit men are not called that for nothing. With a used car lot as a front, these guys get down to business wherever they're needed--northern Wisconsin or central Florida. There's a peculiar, but definitely interesting, mix of the comic and the serious as one of the two guys talks about how his newborn baby won't stop screaming in the middle of the night, making him think about exercising his craft on a family member. Juxtapose this with the same guy repeatedly cursing a chainsaw that refuses to start and you have one heck of a goofy movie that does stuff no other film has done...or maybe, wants to do.

There are really no women in the film, save for a very brief scene with one of the two guy's wives, and she's sleeping. It's a guy film all the way and although it probably could have used more substance, it's very good for what it is.

See it if you want to watch something different, unusual, offbeat, occasionally funny, and occasionally very sharp indeed.

Interesting, but not really a point
The movie was sort of interesting, but it didn't seem to have a point. I also didn't like the constant killings, even though they weren't actually shown. I wouldn't call it horrible, but I don't see a reason why anyone would want to see it. I don't even know why anyone bothered to make the movie.

Wry Black Comedy
One has to have a morbid sense of humor to enjoy this wry black comedy about two used car salesmen who moonlight as contract killers. The comedy is very tongue in cheek as these two miscreants matter-of-factly whack a dozen or so marked men while bickering over trivialities.

The gag is funny at first, but wears thin as we are treated to minor variations on the same theme for an hour and a half. Other than some innovative scene transitions, the direction by veteran TV director Saul Rubinek was nothing special, except I suppose he made good use of a very limited budget. The story was taken from a play by Rick Cleveland, ("The West Wing" TV series) and Rubinek maintained the theatrical feel using simple sets and concentrating mainly on the actors.

Joe Mantegna is an excellent tough-guy character actor and conjures another terrific mobster. He is a hard but practical murderer who takes the task as strictly business and longs to get out of the game. Sam Rockwell is also good as his dim-witted cohort, who begins to like his work a bit too much. Charles Durning gives a droll performance as an over-the-hill hit man who wants to write a book about his targets. There are also cameos by William Macy, Ted Danson and Peter Riegert.

This is a better than average B movie with some acting performances that are worth seeing. I rated it a 6/10. It is funny in a perverse way, and Mantegna's performance is a treat.

A brilliant tale of two ordinary hit men.
This is the movie that brings you into the world of the ordinary hit man -- well not the machine gun tottling Mafioso gunmen we're so used to watching in the big gangster movies. But the ordinary hit man who does his job as a necessary means to a living. The job is fine but there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The art of doing well is to kill with nonchalance. It is a hazardous occupation -- you go on as long as you can but don't know if you'll be a target yourself one day.

There are no fancy trenchcoats or big cigars. The hit men work as used car salesmen, wipe windows in the lot when free and pay for their own movie tickets. They supply their income by knocking off their assigned victims. A respectable year for Tom means usually getting about two to three contracts done. Young Jerry (Sam Rockwell) learns the ropes from Tom (Joe Mantegna) and witnesses his first murder in the front seat of a car. Jerry's induction is every bit as abhorrent as one would typically react to seeing a man killed. But he learns to like what he does and becomes as cold and merciless as his mentor is. In fact Jerry gets to be as ruthless as Tom, to the point that he even takes sadistic pleasure when whacking off his victims. Tom's professional detachment is his strength and hallmark. But this trait unfortunately is never learnt by his protégé and the latter's intractability proves to be his undoing.

Apart from a very entertaining script, what makes the movie an excellent watch is the top-notch performances from the cast, especially Joe Mantegna, Sam Rockwell, Maury Chaykin and Charles Durning. And of course the wonderful cameos by William Macy and Ted Danson. The brutality of the killings is shocking but any darkness in the movie is balanced by the humorous edge throughout. This is about ordinary hit men getting their contracts done. There are no recriminations and regrets. The movie starts and ends on a sardonic note, and it's a pity that its low budget nature probably stymied any commercial success.

Killer deals all over this crazy car lot
This is the first feature film directed by veteran character actor Saul Rubinek. It is a skillfully executed dark comedy about two car salesmen who lead double lives as trigger men for Kovachy Motors, a contract-murder outfit with a record of hits that dates back to the Kennedy assassination.

Jerry & Tom began life as a one-act play by Rick Cleveland in Los Angeles in 1992, where Rubinek first saw it and became instantly intrigued by its possibilities as a feature film. Set in Chicago but shot mostly in Toronto, the film has a delightfully oblique Pinter-esque quality in which the characters otherwise mundane lives are superimposed onto the extraordinary violence of their secondary "careers." According to the filmmaker, their fundamental hypocrisy is intended to mirror the culture and era in which they live: the U.S. under former presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Jerry & Tom is a satirical fable that mocks the eighties, during which considerable lip service was paid to the concept of "family values" against a political backdrop of international violence, intimidation and government thuggery.

Tom, the veteran of the pair, is played charmingly by Mantegna, whose work as one of David Mamet's favourite actors in such films as House of Cards, Homicide and Things Change equipped him superbly for this role. He's a likable family man, the father of three children, and a slick hustler of used automobiles.

Jerry, played by Sam Rockwell (Drunks, Box of Moonlight, Light Sleeper) is Tom's protégé, a literal-minded, not terribly bright punk who is beginning to enjoy his work a little too much for Tom's more refined tastes.

As the movie opens, Jerry and Tom are in the process of executing another victim, a mysterious hooded figure who tells a number of jokes while waiting for the inevitable.

The opening hit quickly establishes the tone and setting of the film, but then it reels back in time about 10 years to when Jerry was just a kid hanging around Kovachy Motors washing cars and answering phones. Kovachy is played with great comic brusqueness by the inimitable Maury Chaykin, and it is one of the great delights of the film that it features cameos by a number of well known and gifted actors, including Charles Durning, Ted Danson, Peter Riegert and William H. Macy.

Durning is particularly excellent as Vic, an old pro who hints at his involvement in a number of very famous deaths. Danson, of Cheers fame and who also starred in the sitcom Ink (of which Rubinek was also a cast member), performed his cameo "for a box of Cuban cigars," according to the director. He plays a lovesick loser who spends his days in a darkened cinema watching and weeping over the last performance of the woman he loves, who seems to have died prematurely in a bizarre film-set accident.

Made for only $3-million (U.S.), Jerry & Tom will delight audiences who enjoy the comically macabre. Although violence and mayhem are obviously a big part of the film, the director is very coy about showing too much. Rubinek is more interested in how the violence affects the characters who commit it rather than the victims. Thus, with every crude act -- whether committed with gun, piano wire or chainsaw -- the film always cuts away to a hit man's face, usually the one watching and "assisting" in the killing.

Rubinek and his superb director of photography, Paul Sarossy (The Sweet Hereafter), have also chosen to use an interesting transition device to reveal the changes in seasons, locales and years so that the scenes shift almost seamlessly with very few edits.

Jerry & Tom is beautifully acted by all and smartly directed. Cleveland's script is spare and syncopated with the peculiar rhythms of David Mamet's crude, street-smart argot. It is a cool, stylish and funny morality tale that audiences with a taste for the wickedly offbeat will find to be a treat. ... Read more

Reviews (6)

Down With Danson!
Pontiac Moon is a movie that you have to see...because it's so terrible! There are so many parts of the movie that don't need to be there...like when Washington (Ted Danson) visits his freak brother I mean whats the point. Anyway, you must rent this movie. It will always be on the shelf at the movie rental store...because this movie STINKS!

The Amphicar is the REAL star of this flick
Sure, the movie's perfectly enjoyable on its own merits, but owners and admirers of the Amphicar, an amphibious "boat-car" manufactured in the '60s, will especially appreciate having this film in their collections. For them it will be clear that while the Pontiac of the title actually craps out underway, the Amphicar is the truly transcendent vehicle, which in the end redeems all of them. Perhaps they should have called it "Amphicar Moon."

"Pontiac Moon" Can Barely Get Out of Atmosphere
A movie with such talent as Ted Danson (Cheers, Bodyheat) and Mary Steenburgen seems bound for critical and commercial success. But when the actors try to portray a character that is out of their creative range, the movie falls apart. Washington Bellamy (Danson) is a nutty elementary school science teacher, with a shut-in wife (Steenburgen) who hasn't left the house in seven years, and a eleven year old son (Ryan Todd) that has never taken a ride in an automobile. The year was 1969, Bellamy, as was the rest of America, captivated with the voyage of the Apollo XI to the moon. Bellamy calculates that the mileage on his 1949 Pontiac Chief needs only 1776 miles before the mileage on the odometer is the exact same distance to the moon. Bellamy and his son run away without Mrs. Bellamy knowing. He has timed the car trip to reach the Spires of the Moon in Idaho right at the time the lunar module is landing on the moon. But this turns out not to be such an easy trip. They meet trouble on the highway, argue with one another, getting into a brawl at a restaurant, taking along an Indian recluse, and hide from the law.

Danson's acting is sour, trying to hard to act serious. This is the rough post-Cheers, pre-Becker era in his career, taken along this project just to stay in the spotlight as long as he can. Steenburgen is pathetic as a agorophobic, over dramatizing every line. Other than those two, as well as Todd, the movie is filled with unknown actors, accumulating one of the worst acting performances of a cast in a movie, ever. The story overall is good, but the acting just plain and simple ruined it for me. From the backside, I wish Danson would have never taken off that toupee.

a movie treat watching a good story unfold
PONTIAC MOON is a movie treat watching a simply good story unfold. I haven't had a movie catch my interest as much as this one for quite some time. It a film which relies on strong acting and strong script, with a few Greek-Navaho special effects tossed into the scenes now and then. It is a humorous quest with a story of Apollo moonwalk that is counterpoint genius on film; father and son in a 1949 Pontiac whose ignition starts a journey the moment America's Apollo first moon landing blasts off. From that point the counterpoint of Appollo and Pontiac continues until the quest is . . . well, I'll let you see the movie and find out if father and son reach their quest. To be a real quest, of course, the father and son must be detoured--in this case literally, then stranded under a desert starry sky, next stalled at a supper club which features an Americana singing contest--how I enjoyed hearing the vocal of "Kansas City"--then the Pontiac is off the trail for the father to borrow money from a family sheep-rancher relative, they are once more stalled by a cracked engine block, followed by more tense scenes of delay; all this action in a quest to reach the Spires of the Moon, Idaho before the moment of moonwalk touchdown. Together with the emphasis on the quest Danson's wife, Mary Steenburgen, has developed a phobia--she doesn't dare leave her home having holed up there for seven years. She is hyper-careful with an attitude that has put her family into mental recession. Mary has to decide whether she has the courage to follow Danson and son. Her decision leads to some interesting and amusing scenes. Will she seek her husband and arrive as an ex machina to save the day? This movie will teach you the two rules of getting along in life. To repeat, I haven't seen a movie managed as well as PONTIAC MOON for a long time. Ryan Todd, the son, together with Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson gave excellent off-beat performances.

Very Underrated movie
This must be one of the most underrated movies of the nineties. Fabulous story!! I was out of town on business, and I stumbled into the ole Blockbuster, and I thought I would give this un-known movie a try, as Im a big Mary Steenburgen fan. I was so delighted by this funny, serious, and heart touching movie, that I couldn't understand, why I never heard of it? Did it come and go in the movies? Great acting all around, with a lot of unknown actors. My favorite was the car mechanic living out in the desert played by Arthur Senzy, who I saw again in (I also rented) "A Few Good Men".Ted Danson, the Kid, and Eric Schweig were great as was Mary Steenburgen. All in all, a great cast, and a very delightful movie for this weary traveler. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

the best
its the bast muve of the war ... Read more

Description

Two great horrors, "Creepshow" and "Altered States", at one low cost! ... Read more