Travolta / Gotti Film release cancelled!

[Dave B.]

I think there are two (2) things going on with that stock. . .

The massive and sudden crash in their stock price is related to a major movie industry company (AMC MOVIE THEATERS) announcing their "subscription plan" where movie goers can pay $19.95 per month and see any three (3) movie they want each week (12 a month). That is why Movie Pass' stock crashed 30% in one day this week.

As you say, it didn't help that Gotti was a miserable bomb and that Movie Pass compounded their horrific miscalculations by investing a low 7 figure number into Gotti's production budget. So Movie Pass is revealed to be in deep trouble as reflected by vanishing market confidence and people dumping their stock.

But wait. . . . . it gets worse, lol.

Movie Pass actually LOSES money on each movie attendance they sponsor.

In other words, Movie Pass has to pay cash out of pocked on each transaction, not earn any profit!

And behind all this the parent company has issued massive numbers of new shares of stock (I think a billion shares in all) so they can KEEP SELLING STOCK IN ORDER TO FINANCE THEIR MASSIVE LOSSES ON THE FACT THAT THEY HAVE TO PAY FOR EACH MOVIE ATTENDEE IN THEIR MARKETING PLAN.

Their theory is that if they can reach critical mass with enough subscribers/clients, they could turn the corner and begin to break even and then go on to realize large margins (profit) and leverage within the industry as a force that can dictate (to some degree) the distribution of movies---because of their ability to bring customers into theaters.

None of that is happening and now the stock has crashed out. It doesn't appear they are long for the world, unless some billionaire or mega-player comes in to save them with a monster cash infusion--and the willingness to suffer massive cash-loss until it "turns around".

The ill-conceived ideas of Movie Pass are epic. They are in the business of bringing movie theater customers in. But suddenly they fancied themselves as a movie studio (financing movie production budgets). That's craaaaaazzzzy. And they obviously had no freaking idea whatsoever that there is such a thing as a horrible movie that bombs, no matter how "brilliant" your marketing schemes are. None of their high-flying formulas work if customers hate the movie.

This is what happens when "bean counters" and self-proclaimed marketing geniuses assume that they are also able to win at the high stakes game of gambling on what movies to invest in. It's a fools game, especially if you can't sit in a screening of Gotti (before investing) and easily realize that the movie is an amateurish nightmare. They hyped themselves into losing biggggggg because they can't tell the difference between a blockbuster and a disaster.

Honestly, virtually everyone outside the movie industry could figure out that GOTTI was going to be a bomb a long, long time ago. Movie Pass is rapidly becoming a joke in the industry, same as Gotti and Travolta.

Like you mentioned... a lot of similarities with the $cn. cult and Hollywood with the willing ignor-ance of reality and obvious signs.

 

[Leland]

I was reading an article about Subscription Based cash flow income was a new model for lots of Companies that rely upon cell phones to do business.

Lots are doing fine.

It looks like Movie Pass and Parent Company have not.

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

.

headline:​

JOHN TRAVOLTA BELIEVED
"GOTTI" WOULD WIN HIM AN OSCAR​

That is the Hollywood version of Scientology's Advance! magazine publishing OT miracles. LOL

excerpt:

After several years in development, and numerous delays, John Travolta's Gotti finally hit theaters this past weekend, and now new details have surfaced that reveal star John Travolta thought this movie would launch him into the Oscar race. Whether that's true or not, it's quite unlikely that Travolta will get any awards traction since the movie was both a critical (0% on Rotten Tomatoes) and commercial failure ($1.7 million opening weekend in 11th place). This report also claims that it was Travolta's Oscar obsession that lead to getting Lionsgate Premiere removed as the distributor, after reports he was pulling the film from its dual release in theaters and on VOD, since Travolta needed a full theatrical release to qualify for the Oscars.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh! That explains why he "made it go right" to buy back the film so he could have a wider release that would qualify him for an Academy Award. And that explains why he did the cringiest/stupidest thing imaginable----premiere that amateurish mess at the world's most prestigious (and elistist/critical) film festival, Cannes.

WTF was he thinking?!!!!!??? He had to have KNOWN that "Gotti" was going to be savaged by critics; yet, his belief in his OT-acting-ness was so supremely unshakable, he was willing to double-down and gamble the whole thing on the delusional notion that (like L. Ron Hubbard) he would "rise above" people jeering and hating the movie.

He did not rise above.

So, now he has to blame the SPs for invalidating his Ideal movie.

full article at: LINK

 

[DagwoodGum]

Just as an aside to the deserved onslaught JT's receiving over the "Gotti" fiasco, isn't his wife Kelly just a doll?
Even at this age she projects in such an earthy though angelic way.
This guy is SO fortunate that she has remained steadfast by his side through thick and thin.
I mean actual photos of his kissing men and stories about his bizarre bathhouse behavior and she just stands right next to him with her beaming smile whereby she seems to believe that she can just shine and glow above and through it all with the easy calming grace to somehow wash all the piling dirt crystal clean with her beaming energy.
All the while that I've become less than impressed with him, although I know so very little about her, I've become more impressed with her than ever before.
She is the glory of that union and clearly the better half.
As far fetched as this may sound, I now can pretty much say confidently that much of what I've liked about him as an actor is that he's been channeling her over all these years.
http://video.dailymail.co.uk/video/...726633335/640x360_MP4_8832741266726633335.mp4
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/06/15/04/4D3FEB5400000578-0-image-m-55_1529031900881.jpg

 

[Leland]

Movie Pass parent company is losing $45 million a month...

https://finance.yahoo.com/m/b7cbba1d-7dab-3b16-a12d-77987800c281/ss_amc’s-new-subscription.html

 

[Leland]

https://qz.com/1311521/moviepass-wi...lar-movies-in-july/?utm_source=YPL&yptr=yahoo

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

https://qz.com/1311521/moviepass-wi...lar-movies-in-july/?utm_source=YPL&yptr=yahoo

Thanks. That link had an interesting fact. . .

The news comes as MoviePass’s parent company, Helios and Matheson Analystics, revealed in a filing on today, June 21, that it was spending cash quickly and may need more than $1.2 billion in additional capital to keep MoviePass, and its various ventures, afloat. Helios and Matheson said it burned through $40 million during the month of May, up from a previously reported average of $21.3 million per month from October 2017 through April 2018. It expects to post a cash deficit of $45 million for the month of June, because MoviePass’s subscriber base has been growing faster than expected and the “strong box office results of recently released films.”

Who or what has an extra $1.2 billion dollars just laying around that they would waste on trying to INVEST their way into becoming a big Hollywood player?

Hmmmmmmm.......the only one I can think of stupid and status-starved enough would be the cult of Scientology, lol.

PREDICTION: If Scientology ponies up a few billion dollars to acquire MoviePass and an entire chain of their own movie theaters, this would be the most frequently overheard response by customers inside their shiny Ideal movie theaters: "WTF is going on, no toilet paper?!!!"

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

..

The parallels between ACTOR Travolta's "Oscar Winning" performance in Gotti and OT Travolta's "Miraculous Supernatural Powers" from doing the OT levels is rather eerily identical.

This is because Scientology's core hoax is selling "Ideal Scenes" and ignoring "Existing Scenes".

Scientologists focus mightily on the "Ideal" that Hubbard describes and guarantees. It's beyond glorious.

Scientologists never look at their own "existing scene" to see if any of the miracles and paranormal powers are happening.

In fact it is "out ethics" to use TR-0 and "confront" the painfully obvious fact that none of the superpowers and mega-wealth and ultra-health is happening. EXAMPLE: It's "natter" or "entheta" or "counter-intention" or "suppressive" to use "obnosis" and observe that the fabulous "flourishing & prospering" is happening for the cult---not oneself--and often bankruptcy is the reward for trusting the treacherous lies one is fed with tone 40 grins.

So, Scientologists promote OT MIRACLES in "Advance!" magazine and Travolta promote BLOCKBUSTER MIRACLES and OSCAR WINNING MIRACLES for his movie that the entire world is telling him is a commercial and critical disaster.
Travolta doesn't like that kind of entheta. The entire world is telling him Scientology is a violent, corrupt, criminal hoax---but he believes "Scientology is beautiful!"

It's a fascinating Faustian bargain, faith is. One gives all their reasoning powers, common sense and critical thinking skills away for the transient moments of euphoric delusion that one is going to heaven.

I guess that is the common selling point of religions that has made it go viral time and time again for thousands of years.

One gets the "feeling" that the world is perfectly beautiful, for the simple price of ignoring reality.

Ignorance is bliss? Try telling that to the people whose lives ended in utter RUIN by reason of surrendering themselves to Scientology's toxic gravity. I personally know at least 100 people whose lives ended up inconsolably savaged by allowing Scientology "technology" to be applied to themselves.

Real people whose lives were utterly ruined.

That's the hoax within the hoax. Scientology purports to help a person handle their "ruin". In fact, Scientology creates more ruins than can ever be handled, ensuring itself a big share of every parishioner's earnings and assets.

Scientology CREATES ruins, it doesn't handle them.

Travolta, Cruise and other cult celebrities are an essential component of the cult's global rackets and schemes to enslave mankind. Good thing they actually don't have any technology that works or they might have successfully enslaved/ruined many millions more victims than than they already have.

 

[Type4_PTS]

Here's an in depth review of the Gotti movie, one of the better ones I've come across.
The real reasons Gotti has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes
http://www.looper.com/126724/the-real-reasons-gotti-has-a-0-on-rotten-tomatoes/

Here's a small excerpt that deals with some technical issues in the movie:

While many of Gotti's stylistic faults have to do with Connolly's subpar eye for filmmaking, the movie also has a number of mind-boggling technical problems, the sorts of embarrassing and unforced errors that film school curriculums are designed to hammer out of you.

Amateur mistakes in the finished movie include many instances of poor lighting, leaving actors' faces in shadow; other shots are out of focus and blurry. The sound mixing throughout is atrocious, constantly favoring the music and score over crucial bits of dialogue. People mumble to each other in crowded clubs, chat at noisy dinners, and bark obscenities to each other before fights, and all of it ends up getting lost in an unmannered maelstrom of noise.

Even with a modest budget of $10 million, the amateur mistakes on display here are baffling and inexcusable. You can say there's a good movie in here somewhere, sure — it would just need to be made, top to bottom, by completely different people.



Also, on the subject of MoviePass and its competition, the Boston Globe published this yesterday:
Gotta get a ‘Gotti’?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2018/06/21/gotta-get-gotti/Uw8vKI7p9hq870kCC3GmCI/story.html

[bcolor=#ffff99]As is well-known, MoviePass is both a success with moviegoers (3 million subscribers as of this month) and a disaster waiting to happen with Wall Street, which can’t figure out how the company can keep losing $22 million per month and stay alive. MoviePass just announced a plan to introduce “surge-pricing” for more popular films starting in July; parent company Helios Matheson launched a Hail Mary $164 million bond sale this week and promptly saw its stock tank. On top of everything else, the country’s largest exhibition company, AMC, just announced its own subscription ticketing service at $19.99 per month for three movies a week at the chain’s multiplexes.[/bcolor]

[bcolor=#ffff99]As is being widely noted, the AMC plan is proof that the rules of theatrical exhibition are rapidly and radically changing in an era when you can dial up a movie at home anytime you want. In the future, we may all have subscriptions to our preferred movie theater chains or art-house outlets and cherry-pick our desired films and events. If it turns out that MoviePass had it right, what a shame it may get whacked for its pains -- or that it felt it had to play dirty in an effort to stay alive.[/bcolor]

It sounds as though this AMC deal is a good one for anyone who likes going to the movies!

Here's an article published yesterday at THR about AMC's service:
How AMC's New Subscription Program Aims to Beat Rivals Like MoviePass
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/amcs-rival-moviepass-program-dissected-1122016

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

Here's an in depth review of the Gotti movie, one of the better ones I've come across.
The real reasons Gotti has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes
http://www.looper.com/126724/the-real-reasons-gotti-has-a-0-on-rotten-tomatoes/

Here's a small excerpt that deals with some technical issues in the movie:

While many of Gotti's stylistic faults have to do with Connolly's subpar eye for filmmaking, the movie also has a number of mind-boggling technical problems, the sorts of embarrassing and unforced errors that film school curriculums are designed to hammer out of you.

Amateur mistakes in the finished movie include many instances of poor lighting, leaving actors' faces in shadow; other shots are out of focus and blurry. The sound mixing throughout is atrocious, constantly favoring the music and score over crucial bits of dialogue. People mumble to each other in crowded clubs, chat at noisy dinners, and bark obscenities to each other before fights, and all of it ends up getting lost in an unmannered maelstrom of noise.

Even with a modest budget of $10 million, the amateur mistakes on display here are baffling and inexcusable. You can say there's a good movie in here somewhere, sure — it would just need to be made, top to bottom, by completely different people.

A well reasoned critique by someone who apparently has experience with filmmaking, if only a cinephile that respects, loves and understands the craft.

One thing I thought was a "tell" is this.

-- the director was the wrong guy from day one, with no history of making any gritty films with believable urban gravitas.​

​

-- one of the two writers was an Italian-American actor with no history of writing movies​

​

-- the other writer (Lem Dobbs) was a veteran pro screenwriter whose body of work (although not really calibrated to pen a mob movie) has put together a string of screenplays over time that have scored quite well on Rotten Tomatoes, usually in the 70-90% approval range.​

That last one is the tell I am referring to. . .

The guy writes good movie scripts that work.

But suddenly, for the first time in his career he writes a screenplay that scores ZERO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WTF happened?

This is what I would offer as an educated guess. He didn't suddenly lose the ability to write scripts.

What must have happened is that there were heavy hands controlling the content from above (producers/star) that forced him to write it the way THEY envisioned the movie. Being that there were NO credible producers at the helm and NO studio execs keeping an eye on daily rushes (footage of scenes just shot), there was no quality control whatsoever.

Thus, the amateur auteurs ran it top to bottom.

Being self-proclaimed experts (with nothing to back it up, like experience or knowledge) they crafted EXACTLY THE MOVIE THEY WANTED.

And that is what bombed miserably.

I can virtually guarantee that the 2nd writer will turn out another movie script that will soar back up to that 70-90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

In HubbardSpeak, the stats crashed because they were "held down" by SPs. (Supposed Producers). LOL

.

 

[renegade]

Here's JT's explanation:

 

[DagwoodGum]

Here's JT's explanation:

What I gather from JT's explanation as to what occurred during the making of the Gotti movie lends me to believe that he is prone to over complicating the process of developing a real person's character to the extent that his portrayal can no longer flow freely and naturally like it does when he uses his creative flair instead in creating a character from scratch as he did with Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, just one of many examples.
The Vega portrayal just sprang freely from him with every ounce of his creative integrity which was largely missing in portraying Gotti Sr. under the auspices of the Gotti Family.
In other words he pulled Vincent Vega out of his ass, like Vinny Barbarino, from characters he witnessed growing up in New York/Jersey, but Gotti was built upon hours and hours of actual research into an already existing character as described to him by the family and endless hours of home movie footage.
All become over complications to what would be his normal process in INVENTING a character.
The old saying of "Too many cooks spoil the broth" once again comes into play as JT had too many perspectives to be true to rather than his natural creative process's ebb and flow.

 

[ILove2Lurk]

A well reasoned critique by someone who apparently has experience with filmmaking, if only a cinephile that respects, loves and understands the craft.

Enough critiques. "Somebody has to take the plunge."

I'm nominating HH to pull $7 out of his wallet and go
to a Saturday matinée . . . tomorrow. We need some
first-hand, boots-on-the-ground, movie watching here.

Runtime: 105 minutes. You can squeeze that in.

I'd go, but it's not showing in my little two-horse town
or anywhere near here.

 

[Enthetan]

WTF was he thinking?!!!!!??? He had to have KNOWN that "Gotti" was going to be savaged by critics; yet, his belief in his OT-acting-ness was so supremely unshakable, he was willing to double-down and gamble the whole thing on the delusional notion that (like L. Ron Hubbard) he would "rise above" people jeering and hating the movie.

He did not rise above.

So, now he has to blame the SPs for invalidating his Ideal movie.

full article at: LINK

We see the true End Phenomenon of Scientology here: the ability to "not is" all physical-world evidence that might contradict the delusion that you have been getting fed about the awesomeness of OT abilities. Travolta believed that he had the ability, through being OT, to "make it go right". Right up to the point where he can no longer pretend that reality is just a consideration that an OT can overcome.

His mental crash is going to be very hard. I hope he has a rational person keeping him company. No, that won't happen. He will be surrounded by Scientologists.

 

[Enthetan]

The Vega portrayal just sprang freely from him with every ounce of his creative integrity which was largely missing in portraying Gotti Sr. under the auspices of the Gotti Family.
In other words he pulled Vincent Vega out of his ass, like Vinny Barbarino, from characters he witnessed growing up in New York/Jersey, but Gotti was built upon hours and hours of actual research into an already existing character as described to him by the family and endless hours of home movie footage.
All become over complications to what would be his normal process in INVENTING a character.
The old saying of "Too many cooks spoil the broth" once again comes into play as JT had too many perspectives to be true to rather than his natural creative process's ebb and flow.

I think you got it. Some actors are good at being able to take on a character very different from their own essence. Others become stars by recognizing their essence, and only taking parts where they can play the character by being themselves. Travolta is in the latter category.

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

Enough critiques. "Somebody has to take the plunge."

I'm nominating HH to pull $7 out of his wallet and go
to a Saturday matinée . . . tomorrow. We need some
first-hand, boots-on-the-ground, movie watching here.

Runtime: 105 minutes. You can squeeze that in.

I'd go, but it's not showing in my little two-horse town
or anywhere near here.

lol lol lol lol lol lol

I might just "take the plunge"

And the plunger.

Seriously, I have a high tolerance for morbidly depressing art. I am not entirely sure I have a high tolerance for morbidly depressing art that is also amateurishly rendered.

We shall see, I am seriously thinking of going after your reverse psychology put me under its spell. LOL

Really, I might just go. Who knows, maybe tonight, just to get it out of the way so I can enjoy the weekend.

LOL

If i go i predict an EMPTY theater with perhaps two dozen paying just customers. It's hard to guess since they might be going on one of those "FREE" movie tickets.

I'll psychically try to move to the future now and guess there will be 15 people in the theater. Let's see if my OT powers are still working. . . .

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

What I gather from JT's explanation as to what occurred during the making of the Gotti movie lends me to believe that he is prone to over complicating the process of developing a real person's character to the extent that his portrayal can no longer flow freely and naturally like it does when he uses his creative flair instead in creating a character from scratch as he did with Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, just one of many examples.
The Vega portrayal just sprang freely from him with every ounce of his creative integrity which was largely missing in portraying Gotti Sr. under the auspices of the Gotti Family.
In other words he pulled Vincent Vega out of his ass, like Vinny Barbarino, from characters he witnessed growing up in New York/Jersey, but Gotti was built upon hours and hours of actual research into an already existing character as described to him by the family and endless hours of home movie footage.
All become over complications to what would be his normal process in INVENTING a character.
The old saying of "Too many cooks spoil the broth" once again comes into play as JT had too many perspectives to be true to rather than his natural creative process's ebb and flow.

FIFY: "Too many crooks spoil the broth"

You make a good point why Travolta was out of his element in trying to portray mega-mobster John Gotti.

Sorry, John, but I am going to invalidate and evaluate for you here. You should turn off your internet if you don't like hearing what went wrong. . .

--- first of all, if you had bothered to hire a credible DIRECTOR, he would have taken you aside​

from day one of principal photography and worked with you to lose all the tortured grimaces and mean mugging and other irrelevant artifacts that were not actually part of Gotti's persona. If you had understood Gotti better, you would have know that you were faking much of it by SUBSTITUTING facial and physical characatures, rather than character.​

​

-- better yet, you would have taken care of all that in REHEARSALS​

​

-- better still, you would have read for the part and if you couldn't get out of that​

box of making faces and loading up your characterization with 10,000 cringey​

inauthentic "tells", you would have not been cast in the leading role.​

​

-- now on to the acting requirements of such a biographical portrayal of a modern​

bigger-than-life character who has thousands of hours of archived photographs,​

video surveillance and news programming footage. With all that material, it​

becomes very challenging to replicate the real life person. It requires the skill​

called IMPERSONATION, something you have not really done in your career.​

​

-- even if Travolta could not get his IMPERSONATING chops together, at the very​

least he could have given a stylized, nuanced performance that did not rely​

on glaring cartoonish exaggerations. That would require a slightly different​

ability than impersonation. Scientologists call it DUPLICATION. Clearly you​

not good at either.​

​

-- final note, just because you "feel good about" your performance, that does​

not make it convincing or even watchable to your audience.​

Honestly, this was a vanity project from day one, so no director would have ever been hired
who suggested that they fire John Travolta. LOL. In the words of Moe Green (to Michael Corleone), this is what would have happened:

"No, you don't buy fire me out, I buy you out fire you!!"
.​

 

[ILove2Lurk]

guess there will be 15 people in the theater.

If that's the case, should we expect you to do some live blogging from
your theater seat? You know, some explosive uncontrollable mini-rants?

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

posted by HelluvaHoax!
.........I'll psychically try to move to the future now and guess there will be 15 people in the theater. Let's see if my OT powers are still working. . . .

posted by IL2L
If that's the case, should we expect you to do some live blogging from
your theater seat? You know, some explosive uncontrollable mini-rants?

LOL!

Well my psychic powers, while not 100% precise, are nonetheless still a helluvalot better than Gotti's Rotten tomato scores.

There were exactly 13 customers in that theater. (87% correct on my prediction of "15"). Perhaps the moment I made the prediction two more were planning to go but later changed their mind. Come on people, that's good enough of a miracle guess to get published in Advance! magazine, right? LOL

.H

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

.

Okay. . .

I went to see GOTTI.

First impressions:

-- from the very first moment, I thought: "Jesus! Somebody needs a drop a dime on whoever did the music, and send them to the pen for five-to-ten----it was that atrociously inappropriate!!! I could go on a long rant on that alone. They had NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what genre film they were making (mob) and the songs were wildly out of synch with what was on screen. A high school film class could have done a lot better, seriously!
​

-- editing of film was psychotic. Whoever did the editing did not understand the grammar of film editing. It made no sense. It violated the rules of storytelling and resulted in NO EMOTIONAL TENSION AND NO BUILDING DRAMA AND NOBODY IN THE THEATER GIVING A DAMN ABOUT ANY OF THE CHARACTERS.​

-- There was no story, no act structure, no story ARC (arc as in geometry), no inciting incidents, no crisis, no character development, no climax, nothing. It was just a lot of "ACTING SCENES" like acting students would have thrown up for class. There was no connective narrative line between the scenes, it was simply a number of incidents that the producers/director thought were "cool" or that they kinda thought were somehow similar to Good Fellas, Mean Streets or any other mob movie. But there was no life in any scene, just acting. Awful.​

​

-- A few times JT caught the wave of the character and in those few precious moments, he was not flamboyantly "acting" and it was nice. Not great, but nice.​

​

-- The casting of the film was absolutely terrible. I think I counted maybe 1 or 2 people at most in the film who even LOOKED like Italian mobsters. I don't know how anyone can do that bad of a job of casting. If I remember it was shot in Canada, so what did they do? Cast some Canadians that don't look ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY like Italian Americans look, dress and act?! It is 10,000 light years off and really annoying that nobody stopped the casting sessions and said: "WAIT!!!!!!! None of these people look like Gotti's crew or the other families or the neighborhood people looked. They don't even look Italian! They don't dress like NY Italians dress. And they don't talk like NY Italians talk. Get me some freakin' I-talionsss!!!"​

​

-- There was only ONE (1) character that sounded like a real Italian American from the boroughs that would have been mobbed up (the friend of John Jr. that beat up some people in a bar, one of whom died). That kid sounded like the real thing (I lived in NYC, I know). He was only on screen talking maybe 20 or 30 seconds, but he was the only person in the entire movie that knew how to talk in that idiosyncratic way. Travolta's accent was sometimes okay, but he was normally speaking it like a foreign language student who is reading the accent phonetically.​

​

-- Travolta and all the other cast were unable to deliver any of rage and passion of mobsters. Instead Travolta substituted faces and audio modulation. He simply cannot put together anything even resembling MENACE, and that is what is at the core of Gotti's character whether he was grinning or screaming in real life. Always a viscerally threatening menace behind whatever he was saying/doing. Travolta was terrible in this respect, so he was unable to capture the true nature of the character. Menace isn't making a mean face. Menace isn't yelling and pretending to be angry. It's .... menace and you can feel it (whether hot or cole menace) and it's unsettling and unmistakable.​

​

-- The film doesn't go anywhere.​

​

-- Strangely the film glorifies John Gotti at the end. Probably a requisite of John Gotti Jr. making the deal to assign the rights to his book/story.​

​

-- the co-starring actor that played John Jr. was physically completely wrong. He was way too young looking (by a decade or two). He wasn't physically imposing like the real John Jr. He didn't have the stress and confusion and angst and resentment and anger required. Instead, the actor playing him looked like he was a 20 year old kid at a Brooklyn disco trying to hit on chicks with Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Really, really bad casting!​

​

-- None of Gotti's crew (not even one of them) looked like mobsters. One of them was so comically bad (the actor that played mafia thug Ruggiero) it was absurd. He looked like he should have been cast in a THREE STOOGES remake, but not the original "Curly" but the later replacement ("Curly Joe"), lol​

-- mostly the film was a vehicle for Travolta to strut his stuff and act his heart out. It wasn't a movie story, so much as it was a showcase for a "movie star's" Oscar desires grafted onto an amateurish feature film.​

​

FILM GRADE: D minus. Not given an "F" out of respect for the costuming and effort to make a movie. Same reason you clap loudly for little kids in a grammar school play.