Thehibikiew Not even bad in a good way

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Winifred The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

blanche-2 "Silver City" is a John Sayles film from 2004 and stars Chris Cooper, Danny Huston, Maria Bello, Darryl Hannah, Richard Dreyfuss, and Mary Kay Place.Chris Cooper plays village idiot Dicky Pillager, a member of a political family. He's been put up for governor because he's malleable. While filming an ad for his campaign, during which he's fishing, he hooks onto a dead body. A journalist, Chuck Raven (Dreyfuss) hires an investigator (Huston) to identify the body and learn whether or not he has any connection to the politician.Set in Colorado, this is a pretty good movie that somehow failed to hold my interest. Others here complained about the end; I kind of liked the last half hour. Danny Huston is very good as the frustrated detective, and Darryl Hannah does a good job playing an eccentric.Nothing too surprising in this film, it's the usual political corruption, the needs of the few are more important than the needs of the many kind of film, but it has some strong scenes and some good acting.

Rodrigo Amaro If "Silver City" has powerful attributes that makes you desperately see this film it's because of an talented ensemble casting of actors, and a quite instigating story written, edited and directed by the great John Sayles. But the movie delivers and fulfills our wishes? Half way through to some, a disappointment to others. To me, it wasn't appealing enough like "City of Hope", another ensemble of actors directed by Sayles. With a peculiar and sometimes not much visual sense of humor, Sayles presents a satire on irresponsible but populist politics during their election campaign. The candidate in question is Richard Pilager (Chris Cooper), running for governor of Colorado, a man who never knows how to stay silent when he should since he never knows what's he talking about, often advised by his campaign manager Chuck (Richard Dreyfuss) what to do and when. During the filming of one of those promos Pilager fishes a dead man's body and the story goes on after finding who was the man, on investigations conducted by Danny (Danny Huston), an former reporter involved in a scandal, now working as a investigator for Chuck. Illegal immigrants; exploration of lands and profit versus lack of security of poor workers; Pilager family scandals; the construction of a place named Silver City; strange connection among powerful people; these and more are part of the complex and half interesting web of "Silver City".The major problem with satires is to find the right way to do it, the perfect balance between comedy and drama, and more challenging than that is to make a big social denounce that is so funny to make you laugh and feel some desperation in seeing how things are so dramatical, so frightening. "Wag the Dog" and "Doctor Strangelove" are perfect examples of how satire must be made, they're funny and at the same time they make relevant, shocking statements of the current historical moment the artists lived. Sayles almost hits the spot. Making an comparison with one of the movie's characters, an archer (Daryl Hannah), the director throws the arrow, hits the target but not in the right point, in the heart. His ambition is an critic to the likes of George W. Bush, politicians who act like dumb in order to get sympathy for the crowd; man who are manipulated by the real powerful ones in charge of everything while he's just the face for the disaster; he's the one people blame. OK, we get that from scene one but if you have to make a satire on this you gotta push harder, make something fierce enough to shake some structures, make fun of everyone linked with this character, but the movie never does that. The very few mocked in this are Pilager and people of his campaign; the other character were treated like serious liberals that have one or two funny moments. And where's the tension (built from the fishing scene) we needed when everything Danny was investigating led to dangerous secrets but nothing substantial or deadly happened? If you're a Sayles fan you must remember all the thrilling parts of "Matewan" when we couldn't control our hearts, always thinking that the something is going to explode between the coal miners and their bosses. Tension was in the air! The same thing was supposed to occur here but it went too much soft, it wanted to be very light and funny. It goes well in making fun of people without being hysterical, it never goes for the stereotypes and that's great to see.While the script is too talky, quite confusing, little tedious to make you sleepy, the acting cannot be blamed, all first rate performances with good and strong by Cooper (always excellent), Dreyfuss, Huston (really great playing the "hero"), Maria Bello, David Clennon, Tim Roth, Thora Birch, Miguel Ferrer, James Gammon, Mary Kay Place, Sal Lopez, Billy Zane, Michael Murphy and Kris Kristofferson. I advise you to watch if you enjoy all those actors and enjoy dialog driven films. It's a good film that goes to show an contradictory way some powerful people tend to make things, revealing truths on one side but covering it with thousands of lies under the rug on another side. It's a nice way to see why we can't trust in politics and the people who make it. 7/10

MBunge This is one of those films that get made because a rich Hollywood liberal wants to yell at the rest of the country for not believing what the rich Hollywood liberal believes. Apparently, writing a letter to the editor just isn't good enough for them. N o, they have to waste huge amounts of money and a lot of people's time making shoddy pieces of propaganda like Silver City. The only thing that anyone ever learns from these political movies is that rich Hollywood liberals have their heads firmly placed in an anatomically impossible position.Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) is the vacant son of a politically powerful family in Colorado. Dickie is running for governor and is leading in the polls, but then a dead body turns up while he's filming a campaign commercial. Dickie's Machiavellian campaign manager (Richard Dreyfuss) hires a private eye named Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) in response. Not to investigate the sudden appearance of a corpse, but simply as a messenger to certain enemies of the Pilager campaign. Danny's simply supposed to let these enemies - a right-wing talk show host, a former mine safety inspector and Dickie's embarrassing sister - know that they're being watched. Danny, however, used to be an investigative reporter and decides to find out where the dead man came from and how he ended up dead. That leads him on a circuitous route through the worlds of real estate, illegal immigration, political dynasties, corporate influence peddling, environmentalism and old girlfriends until Danny discovers the truth and the audience discovers that writer/director John Sayles really didn't think this story through.Silver City has to be one of the worst written movies ever made by a professional filmmaker. This thing is jammed to the gills with almost every sort of lazy, boring, cheap and hackneyed scripting that would get you an "F" in any decent screen writing class. To start with, Sayles takes the maxim of "show, don't tell" and shoots it out of a cannon into a pit of ravenous badgers. Most of the movie is nothing but one character after another telling us stuff and telling us stuff and telling us stuff. It's like someone filmed the live performance of a Ken Burns documentary, except none of the subject matter is interesting and none of the dialog is well phrased. When people in this film talk to each other, they're not really talking to each other. They're making speeches that Sayles thinks the audience needs to hear. None of the characters have any depth. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad and the good guys are cartoonishly good. Poor Maria Bello plays a role so skimpy and clichéd that her name in the script should have literally been Token Girlfriend. Then there's the fact that a third of the time Sayles seems to be writing a toothless political satire, a third of the time he seems to be writing a lame homage to Chinatown and the rest of the time he seems to be writing an afterschool special on the horrors of illegal immigration.The acting is…well, the script these performers have to work with is so awful it's hard to tell if they're doing a good job or not. For example, Danny Huston is either giving a terrible performance or he's giving a really good performance of a horribly-conceived character. I think Danny O'Brien is supposed to be a beaten down man who covers up the fact that he still really cares about things by acting like a cynical and irreverent smart ass. When we see flashes of the real O'Brien, Huston makes those moments genuine and affecting, but 95 percent of the time we only see the smart ass facade and Huston does it in a very fake and forced manner such that I can't tell if it's poor acting or if that's the affect he's going for. Huston may be deliberately doing the smart ass thing in a phony way because it is just an act that O'Brien puts on for the rest of the world but since that act is about all we ever see of O'Brien, it's impossible to tell.Chris Cooper does do an outstanding job playing Dickie Pilager as an amalgamation of everything liberals hated about George W. Bush in 2004. He could have been savagely hilarious in a black comedy about the Bush Administration, but in this film it's like Cooper is doing a one-man show with no punch line. Richard Dreyfuss also appears to be having fun as the amoral campaign manager, yet it's as though Sayles got distracted by a shiny object and forgot these two guys were actually in his movie.There are a lot of bad filmmakers out there, people with little talent and no clue who make movies you wouldn't show to the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Even those folks would be hard pressed to make anything as iniquitous as Silver City. When you've got to crack open the thesaurus to find a new term of disparagement for a movie, you know it's got to suck hard.

Cosmoeticadotcom Lost in the glare of Michael Moore's 2004 pseudo-documentary Fahrenheit 911 was independent filmmaker John Sayles' far more incisive filmic take on politics called Silver City. While Moore's film was a frontal assault on the George W. Bush administration, Sayles' film was less a jab at Right Wing politics, although it clearly was, and more an assault on the sliminess of politics in general. I was surprised at how good the film was, considering all the negative reviews it got from critics. Is it a great film, in league with Sayles' best? No. But it's light years beyond typical Hollywood fare- especially bigger budgeted films like the Clinton era's Wag The Dog.The film it most resembles is Roman Polanski's Chinatown, although set in contemporary Colorado, and this film having a lighter feel- in terms of the cinematography and humor…. t's a shame that this film was swamped by so many other screechy films, such as Fahrenheit 911 and Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ, for it deserved it, despite its bad ending. The best thing about Sayles is that he is unpredictable- save that he writes and directs stellar adult dramas, and given his last several films, that aspect of his work seems to be in no danger of diminishing.