Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores why Elaine May’s Ishtar is so (unfairly) unloved.
It’s often erroneously argued that Elaine May made three masterpieces … and then she made Ishtar.
Even if you haven’t seen the 1987 film, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard that it was one of cinema’s largest, most notorious failures. This is nominally true. That is, if you consider May blasting through $51 million dollars in studio money to make a buddy comedy to be “a bad thing.”
As the video essay below tersely notes, the succinct explanation for Ishtar‘s status as a”failure” is that it was a victim of its time. In the bawdy landscape of the 1980s, May’s earnest sensitivity for flawed heroes came off as outdated, even if it was intentional.
What do you mean the kids aren’t familiar with the 1942 Bob Hope/Bing Crosby joint Road to Morocco? What do you mean audiences weren’t in on the joke of Warren Beatty playing against type?
While Ishtar has yet to enjoy the “stealth remake” reappraisal of something like Showgirls, as critic Charles Bramesco notes, its undeserved status as cinema’s greatest mistake is beginning to crack. And rightfully so: Ishtar is due a fresh set of eyes.
If you haven’t seen Ishtar because “you’ve heard it’s bad,” do yourself a favor and see for yourself.
Watch “The Unloved – Ishtar”
Who made this?
This video essay on why Ishtar has such a notorious reputation (and why it rules) is by Scout Tafoya, a self-described filmmaker, video essayist, musician, author, and critic. Tafoya’s series “The Unloved” is produced in concert with Roger Ebert’s eponymous website. It picks up its namesake’s tradition of paying attention to films that went under-appreciated by contemporary audiences and critics. You can follow Tafoya on Vimeo here. And you can follow them on Twitter here.
More videos like this
- Here’s Dustin Hoffman being cute as hell with Warren Beatty at the latter’s AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony (did you know that they met at a Baskin Robbins? I didn’t!).
- Here is a 1987 interview from reporter and film critic Bobbie Wygant’s YouTube archive, in which Hoffman and Beatty discuss Ishtar. Wygant’s hope that the film would make “a jillion dollars” did not, in fact, come to pass.
- This was too weird not to share. For some unknown reason, eight years ago (as of writing this), someone uploaded a two-hour loop of the Ishtar trailer to YouTube. Here are some choice selections from the comment section: “every single frame has so much going on,” “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating. And it gets everywhere,” and finally, “I jogged to this.”