Very best movie i ever watch

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

One of those movies where you wish there was a book on which it was based.A man who hosts a weird and personal talk show is summoned by his brother to Atlantic city to take part in a scheme involving a resort. His brother lives cooped up in a small hotel room with an ex-beauty queen/cheerleader and a gullible young woman.There is no story line as such. It's just a character study of the four characters and their relationships and the thugs and conmen they interact with.It is a film of place. It is shot around a harbor like multi racial touristy place with run down hotels and bars. I'm not an American so i don't really get the context (if there is any).How good an actress was Ellen Burstyn. She was effortlessly brilliant in this and ALICE Don't LIVE HERE ANYMORE. Julia Ann Robinson looked adorable as the clueless young woman of whom Burstyn's character is jealous. Nicholson and Dern are rarely ever bad. Dern has the flashy role in this film.The ending came as a surprise. I thought it was a comedy until then. I was wrong. These characters were doomed from the start. It is a film that deserves a few watches. I did not understand some things on first viewing. The film looks great on the criterion blu ray release.(7.5/10)

The casting of a young Jack Nicholson is very much against type and the opening monologue is impressive. Lesser actors would had been blown off course from there.Bruce Dern is also cast against type, playing the loud, showy role as his conman older brother with big dreams and a real estate scam which he ropes Nicholson in, Nicholson being the glass half empty kind of guy is rather negative about it all. Not helped that he is also a depressive.Tagging along with Dern are an older and younger lady who help him hustle and Scatman Crothers plays a type of Mr Big that Dern has seemingly upset.The setting is Atlantic City, before it got knocked down and redeveloped with casinos. In that sense we are seeing a decaying city from the past. The acting is top notch, the story has some surreal elements and part of it is hard to follow. What exactly is going on with the women that Dern has, why did one of them think she was now over the hill and burn all her clothes and the passed the baton to the younger one. It was as if scenes were cut out so you cannot follow the story properly.

Bob Rafelson's followup to Five Easy Pieces. It's a fascinating film that really does not succeed. Jack Nicholson stars as a late night radio personality who receives a call from his estranged brother (Bruce Dern) to bail him out of jail in Atlantic City. After he does so, Dern invites him in on a major real estate deal, buying up a small island in Hawaii. There's not much plot from there. The film progresses into a series of vignettes whose relation is often difficult to determine. Basically, Nicholson, Dern and Dern's two girlfriends, Ellen Burstyn and Julia Anne Robinson, hang around Atlantic City doing weird stuff. Each scene is entertaining enough by itself, but the film doesn't really build, climaxes with a typical 70s bummer and, sort of like Five Easy Pieces, ends on an evocative bit. Here, though, it doesn't have any real meaning. Everything about it seems like a really good movie, but it just doesn't add up to be anything in particular.

It was the 3rd movie that i've watched from Rafelson in his golden 70's era (after Five Easy pieces n Stay Hungry).I found it brilliant. it could be named as "Five Easy Pieces,part ii". all of director's elements are present here:the story of frustrated Americans in 70's, their alienation from their families(i just reminded that poetic sequence in the final of " 5ive Easy Pieces",where jack talks to his handicap father n the symmetric sequence in "Marvin Gardens" is at the beginning when Jack narrates a fiction story about his grandfather).the movie truly criticizes the "American dream" and Rafelson is definitely 1 of the first directors who dared to create the story of this disillusioned generation with poetic n compelling structure.i am afraid that i'll remember "Marvin Gardens" by one sequence n 1 quote: the scene where two brothers arrange a show to elect(!) Miss America. that's a fantastic satire about "opportunism-like" evaluation of American dream.and the quote in near final where Jason (Dern) says: "if everything don't work out for you like magic,then it's all a mirage"...