The films of John Cassavetes are, by and large, sterile actors' exercises. They are not even for all kinds of actors, but mostly for the friends of Cassavetes and amateurs like his family or his wife's family. They are doggedly pretentious and often of enormous duration; unless you are an actor, or a friend or relative of the director, you should find them quintessentially trivial and boring. Cassavetes, who is quite a good actor but a bad director and worse writer, has insisted ever more emphatically over the years that his films are "scripted," though they seem to be taped and transcribed improvisations, possibly re-enacted from such "scripts." At least I hope that this is how it is done; if Cassavetes is telling the truth, and he really writes this trash that postures as plot, characterization, and dialogue, he would be an even bigger simpleton than I take...