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American Buffalo
Three Stooges Plan a Heist
by Bruce Cantwell
You'd think that Donny the junk man (Dennis Franz) knew what he was doing. You'd think he put that neighborhood kid Bobby (Sean Nelson) on the tail of that uppity yuppy for a reason. Who does he think he is buying that Buffalo-head nickel off Donny for ninety bucks? More than book value!
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| But you know something. He don't know nothin'! Donny's such a stranger to good fortune that he can only conceive of one reason a guy would come into his shop and plunk down good dough for his junk.
Well not this time, buddy. |
| Donny: There's business and there's friendship, Bobby. There are many things, and when you walk around you hear a lot of things, and what you got to do is keep clear who your friends are, and who treated you like what, or else the rest is garbage, because things are not always what they seem to be. |
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| American Buffalo is David Mamet 's comic valentine to the disenfranchised. As clueless as the characters in Sexual Perversity in Chicago were about women, his American Buffalo ensemble are about human nature in general.
They're not illiterate, far from it. Teach's ( Dustin Hoffman ) transient hotel room is filled with books. But you have to wonder how many are Elmore Leonard novels and conspiracy theories about everything under the sun. |
| David Mamet has made these guys eloquent, the better to analyze how greatly they exaggerate their importance. Listening to them, you'd think that the world was created and all human history set into motion specifically to screw old Don and Teach. |
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Teach: You got to trust your instincts, right or wrong. . .
It Is kickass or kissass, Don, and I'd be lying if I told you any different. |
| Unlike the ill-fated real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross , who are up against the external bogeymen of economic recession and a corporate villain who's out to shave the staff, Don and Teach are largely victims of their own dysfunctional insights.
Mamet examines how tough life can be without trust, but one senses that the shaggy-dog story of a pair of guys who would rather talk about going to a baseball game than actually going is at the heart of this film.
 
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