Love the Hard Way [DVD] [2001]

Good !

considering the subject of the film this was tough one to pull off which the actors did overall very well.Its a fun film but hits you with a stick of hard reality ; great film about survival when one has had a tough life

Adrien Brody is a fantastic actor.

Love the Hard Way, a homage to the mean streets of New York, is probably worth watching for Adrien Brody's richly nuanced performance as Jack, a petty criminal and small time hood who has a crisis of love. However, the movie as a whole, while beautifully produced and directed, has something of a crisis of identity. Love the Hard Way can't decide whether it wants to be a meditation on the rocky road to true love, or a statement about the exhilarations and risks of becoming caught up in the seedier side of life.Juxtaposing the garbage-strewn streets of Brooklyn with the startling opulence and glamour of New York's ritzier hotels, Love the Hard Way follows Jack - complete with oily snakeskin coat - and his partners in crime, Charlie (Jon Seda a ringer for John Leguzamo), hotel receptionist Jeff (August Diehl), Pam (Liza Jessie Peterson), and Sue (Elizabeth Regan), as they work a prostitution-bust scam on Asian tourists. While Jeff clues them in on the guests, Jack and Charlie, dressed as police, raid hotel rooms catching the unsuspecting guests in the act with Pam and Sue masquerading as prostitutes. In exchange for various monies, the group offers not to press charges.Jack is also a wannabe novelist, writing in a storage bin office in between scams. But this secure, fixed world is shattered, when he meets graduate student Claire (Charlotte Ayanna). Claire, a straight A student, is both transfixed and horrified by Jack's bent ways and unapologetic lifestyle of crime and women. But she loves him regardless, in fact she loves him so much that she's prepared to bed him on a whim and show her breasts to him at the lightest opportunity. While Claire describes her physics homework, Jack charms her with lines like "I'm majoring in pimping and petty blackmail."Jack is rude, anti-establishment, and anti-social, and has grown up on the mean, gritty, urban streets, while Claire is middle-class and comes from a nice New England family. The thematic center of the story is what happens when both these totally dissimilar worlds inevitably collide. Of course, Claire ignores the advice of her best friend and continues to be seduced by Jack, only to be nastily and unceremoniously dumped by him later on. And this is where the story takes an improbable turn: Claire becomes lovelorn and obsessed, but not in a sympathetic way, and her actions are totally incongruent with her character. Rather than brushing the affair off to experience and finding a man more worthy of her, she tries to teach Jack a lesson, but at great cost to both Jack and herself.The essential problem with Love the Hard Way is believability. The viewer is never totally convinced that a nice, respectable, and ambitious girl like Claire would fall for a man like Jack. There's no way she would come back for more after he has stood her up, slept with other women in front of her, and then summarily rejected her. Another problem is the casting of Charlotte Ayanna who is pretty, but kind of boring and she just doesn't look quite right next to Brody. Brody, however, with his puppy-dog eyes, gives a swaggering, brash performance that is absolutely spot-on. He is totally believable as a man who has been emotionally scarred by years of street living, yet underneath hides a sensitive, perceptive soul.Love the Hard Way is supposed to be a passionate story about two people from different worlds who hold the key to each other. They have to go through tortured hell to find common ground and are emotionally exhausted at the end. True love is only found through enormous personal adversity, an adversity that, at times, isn't that convincing. The movie is certainly worth viewing though, and watch out for a sassy and feisty Pam Greer in a small supporting role as a street-wise undercover cop who wises up to Jack's escapades. Mike Leonard March 05.

SHOW—YAのファンで、ビデオは持っていたのですが、DVDは持って無かったので購入しました。

This movie absolutely took my breath away. I was laughing crying and on the edge. Towards the end I thought Claire had died because she had sliced her wrist. And I couldn't help but feel a surge of coldness towards Jack [Adrien Brody] for not admitting how he really felt about Claire. And I couldn't help but laugh and say that's just what you get when he nearly got stabbed to death when he was in jail. He needed to feel the pain Claire felt, when he left her. This movie I have been sending to all my friends and people who I use to date. To show them, that that is not the kind of man you want to be, a hustler. This movie has a powerful lesson to it about love, crime and life. I felt sorry for Jack because his dad Od' when he was 6 and his mom traded him for her habit and he was forced to live in a boy's home. He didn't know about love, or how to even treat girls. The streets is what taught him what he knows. And then there is Claire, the college student who never had sex [until she meets Jack] and she doesn't know what he has been through. Until she emerses herself into his world of pretty much hurt, pain and crime. It's a good movie and has a lot of lessons to it. Lessons like "Just because it started out bad, doesn't mean it has to end bad." and "All it takes is one bad person to mess you up." Claire could have easily stayed away from Jack and focused on her studies and got a better man. I think the chemistry was just there. And she thought she was getting something faster. This movie has numerous lessons to it about life. Lessons I can't possibly name. This movie had me laughing, crying, thinking and pondering all at different times. It was like a big old slap of reality.And this is movie definitely is an example of love: the hard way!!!!!

とにかく安いです。映像にも問題なく、すてきなライブを観ることが出来ました。

Somehow in my late night meanderings through cable television I found this movie, and having loved Brody's performance in "The Pianist" decided to see what it was about. In the years since, every time it has aired I have watched it with the same fascination as at my first viewing.As my title states this movie is brutally beautiful. So brutal at times, and so heartbreaking in other times. I have not seen a movie that has so transfixed me with the complexity of the characters. Under other direction the characters could have been shown as black/white, good/bad: the director brings to it beautiful shades of gray.It could have been easy to hate Jack for what he did to Claire. I would compare their characters as Claire is a fragile flower,delicate, beautiful. I see Jack's fragility in beneath his tough exterior, as he went farther down with Claire, and his outside shell was broken he had the fragillity of a crystal vase.He has destroyed himself with what he has done to her. In this realization I believe Jack at the end somewhat redeems himself in his writing and explanation. While scrubbing The blood from the floor I feel that every drop that was sunk in the floor was a tear in Jack's soul. Being one who prefers to keep her "rosy glasses" on, I would wish that in some way they would find that brutal, beautiful, fragility within their characters and find a way to be together. I don't know why I hadn't ordered the film sooner and deprived myself of the beautiful acting in this film, but no more.

当時、ＢＳで放送されたがビデオが壊れ録画したのを再生できなくて買った。曲順は同じだが、内容が少し当時とは違っているように思えた。でも懐かしく見れて満足。