The Salton Sea

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Mar 16, 2019 There are movies, and there are films. This is a film, which kept my interest despite my habitual daydreaming during movies.

Han W Oct 15, 2018 The salton sea is a strange film. Not that good to be considered a cult but not that bad to be completely obscure as the film is today. Val Kilmer plays a trumpeter/ drug mule in this atmospheric film which involves most of the tropes one associates with drug movies- bad cops, revenge, murder of family. It is well lit and the screenplay is pretty alright but the film doesn't turn into a Tarantinoesque material one can relish. Something tells me this would have been a better TV movie. Still, worth a watch, especially if you like Val Kilmer who is quite good here. (A Tarantino lite feature film). See more

Han L Sep 25, 2018 Val Kilmer plays a trumpeter/ drug mule in this atmospheric film which involves most of the tropes one associates with drug movies- bad cops, revenge, murder of family. It is well lit and the screenplay is pretty alright but the film doesn't turn into a Tarantinoesque material one can relish. Something tells me this would have been a better TV movie. Still, worth a watch, especially if you like Val Kilmer who is quite good here.(Watch it for Kilmer). See more

Rey R Jul 12, 2018 The salton sea is a strange film. Not that good to be considered a cult but not that bad to be completely obscure as the film is today. Val Kilmer plays a trumpeter/ drug mule in this atmospheric film which involves most of the tropes one associates with drug movies- bad cops, revenge, murder of family. It is well lit and the screenplay is pretty alright but the film doesn't turn into a Tarantinoesque material one can relish. Something tells me this would have been a better TV movie. Still, worth a watch, especially if you like Val Kilmer who is quite good here. See more

George M Mar 16, 2017 Reasonable film but I think i've watched it twice but didn't remember any of it from the first time but that's probably down to my mental state more than the film See more

Theodore L Jan 24, 2017 Danny Parker (Val Kilmer), is posing as a speed freak addicted to methamphetamine, who hangs out with his friend Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard) and other lose people while indulging in drugs. He also moonlights as an informant for two corrupt cops, Gus Morgan (Doug Hutchison) and Al Garcetti (Anthony LaPaglia). He is trying to set up a large meth score with notorious drug dealer Pooh Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), an eccentric psychopath who lost his nose to excessive snorting of "Gak" (meth), while also attempting to set up a sting operation for Morgan and Garcetti. When he returns home, Danny sheds his clothes and his personality, and basks in his past life as trumpet player Tom Van Allen. He reveals to an abused neighbor named Colette (Deborah Kara Unger) that he was once happily married, only to watch as his wife was gunned down by masked thieves during a stopover at the Salton Sea. Danny Parker/Tom Van Allen is the masked thieves on the trail, but he is playing a dangerous game with his alter egos... Film critic Roger Ebert liked the film and the characters but gave it a mixed review: The Salton Sea is all pieces and no coherent whole. Maybe life on meth is like that. The plot does finally explain itself, like a dislocated shoulder popping back into place, but then the plot is off the shelf; only the characters and details set the movie aside from its stablemates. I liked it because it was so endlessly, grotesquely, inventive: Watching it, I pictured Tarantino throwing a stick into a swamp, and the movie swimming out through the muck, retrieving it, and bringing it back with its tail wagging. The New York Times film critic Stephen Holden believed the film to be derivative, and wrote: The Salton Sea, directed by D. J. Caruso from a screenplay by Tony Gayton (who also wrote the recent Murder by Numbers), blatantly recycles moods and images from other recent films and compacts them into a formula of its own. From Heat it borrows a noirish twilighted despair; from Pulp Fiction, a fondness for grotesque caricature; from Requiem for a Dream, a contortedly druggy ambience; and from Fight Club a surrealist bravado and choked-back super-macho cool. All that borrowing lends The Salton Sea style to burn but little personality of its own. "The Salton Sea" is a neo-noir crime thriller that has this unique touch and vibe all over the production. As the late and great Roger Ebert wrote there´s something incoherent and unbalanced within the film as well, but there´s also something philosophically mesmerizing in the cinematography. Misery, drugs, love, death, revenge, redemption and truly odd characters takes you for a journey into the shady world of L.A. and its surroundings. The otherwise very bleak film has some quite weird funny scenes as well that really adds to the wholeness. Val Kilmer is in pretty good form as the low-key Danny Parker/Tom Van Allen, Peter Sarsgaard is great as Jimmy, but it´s Vincent D'Onofrio who is truly scary and convincing as the notorious insane drug dealer Pooh Bear. D'Onofrio goes full on in this role. "The Salton Sea" is for sure a very strong feature film debut for director D.J. Caruso. See more

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The Salton Sea

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