I feel so dispirited about Taylor Hackford‘s Love Ranch that I haven’t been able to write anything about it. This is primarily because the bluntly phrased dialogue — the most irritating aspect because of its colloquial boilerplate tone, particularly as spoken by Joe Pesci‘s Joe Conforte-ish character — was written by Mark Jacobson, a New York magazine contributor whom I know slightly and have admired for many years.

All I can figure is that (a) Jacobson was asked to dumb it down by Hackford because the latter felt it “right” that the characters speak this way, and Jacobson did so in order to get paid, (b) he gave the dialogue an uneducated Nevada goombah flavor as a perverse exercise of some kind or (c) his dialogue was of a higher pedigree but Hackford urged the actors (especially Pesci) to slop it down and say it the way they felt it.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has summarized some of the reviews thus far.