Hi, Mom! (1970)

Great Film overall

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Robert De Niro playing a Vietnam vet, living alone in a ratty apartment, who commits a radical act near the end of the film. No, he's not playing Travis Bickle, but Jon Rubin, the Peep Art amateur filmmaker from Greetings. De Niro is brilliant and funny here and shows his skills in improvising.Brian De Palma in his Godard phase here, exhibits also his Hitchcockian tendencies.

Robert De Niro plays a would-be filmmaker in New York City who is given $2000 by a porno producer to make Peep Art--filming the sexual exploits of his neighbors directly out his apartment window--but action is slow, so he gets to know the woman living across from him by pretending they had a date. Another of De Niro's neighbors, a white stage producer, promotes his show, "Be Black Baby", by stirring up the public with on-the-street commentary on what it's like to be black in America. Audacious early effort from writer-director Brian De Palma, a quasi-follow-up to his "Greetings" from 1968, has some very funny revue-style sequences with tricky staging, although the second-act (with white actors in black-face and black actors in white-face) is too hostile and ugly and shuts down the comedy. The two halves of the picture never really jell, anyway, and one begins to miss the easy, naturally comic dialogue from the opening. ** from ****

Hi, Mom! is a black comedy film wherein Robert De Niro reprises his role of Jon Rubin in one of his earlier films,Greetings.Allen Garfield,Jennifer Salt,Lara Parker,Paul Bartel,Charles Durning and Gerrit Graham co-stars with De Niro.Meanwhile,Brian De Palma is at helm in one of his first films.Jon Rubin is a Vietnam War veteran who aspires to become a high class pornographer.He sets up his apartment across from the office of Joe Banner to impress the erotic filmmaker with his talent. Jon finds his efforts to film the amorous adventures hampered by a sequence of bad luck, and eventually takes a job as a actor portraying a policeman. Banner takes Jon under his wing to give the young photographer the benefit of his experience. They contend with production delays when urban guerillas and black militants launch their protest. By today's standards,one would still appreciate this movie especially during the early years of porn.Also,we get to see institutions in the industry in De Niro and De Palma.Overall,it would still appreciated by viewers today due to the "Peeping Tom" theme in the film.

The second bizarre hippy satire from a young Brian DePalma (the first being Greetings), and featuring a remarkably spontaneous Robert DeNiro as a young Viet Nam vet new in the city and looking for work. The film (while noticeably dated), is practically an act of radicalism in itself as DeNiro boyishly tries to seduce his neighbors while simultaneously filming the act from his apartment to turn it into a work of explosive pornography. DePalma is clever here; he manages to transform the neighboring windows into fixed frames reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window. Once a failure, DeNiro performs as a reactionary police officer in an all African American theater troupe's educational TV program, in which blacks offer liberal whites the opportunity to experience African Americanism as they beat and rape them in white-face; this sequence is particularly strange and not all together funny until DeNiro arrives as the cop. And finally, he transforms himself once again into a guerrilla revolutionary, bombing Laundromats and disguising himself as a bourgeois salesman. This final section is probably the most enjoyable and improvised, though it contains none of the creativity of the first section. The film is interesting if for nothing else, because one gets to witness DePalma and DeNiro stylistically severed from their current work. However, the film seems to try to satirize everything in our society, when in fact it comes across as though it has satirized nothing.