Ishtar (1987) review

Songwriting duo Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Clarke (Dustin Hoffman) - who see themselves as the next Simon and Garfunkel - aren't having much success in New York, so their agent books them gig in the Middle East, which is on the brink of a Civil War.  To this day, the title is slang for "disaster" and it's regularly included in lists of the worst movies of all time, but to be honest its reputation is far worse than the end product: narrative-wise it is a mess (since editing down over a hundred hours of footage couldn't have been easy) and it seems to want to be a screwball comedy (it could have been a little zanier) but as far as buddy movies go, Beatty and Hoffman have genuine rapport with each other and there are some very entertaining moments: the blind camel, for example, should have been given second billing.  Anything that calls out The Agency's incessant (and wanton) meddling can't be all that bad ... and audiences in the late eighties had to have known the songs were not supposed to be very good, right?