mnkykungfu said:
TM2YC said:
This film goes right up there with Birth of a Nation for me.
Hardly. Nothing else is close to that monstrosity.
mnkykungfu said:
It's also incredibly racist and the use of documentary footage spliced in with new scenes implies a realism that was completely fabricated. This isn't even putting contemporary values on an old film: Vietnam Vets at the time found the film so wildly inaccurate and offensive to the Vietnamese people that they protested outside the Academy Awards. The police could only maintain order after arresting 13 Vets.
I'm well aware of the much discussed controversies around 'The Deer Hunter'. For me, the most troubling one was Cimino (no stranger to insanity, dishonestly and raging ego) claiming the film was inspired by his own Green Beret service in Vietnam, when he'd done no such thing and been no such thing. But I don't see the racism accusation at all. I don't watch other fictional films like 'Apocalypse Now', 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Platoon' and think they're prejudiced against Americans because they depict the US committing atrocities in Vietnam. Sadly that's what happens in war and Vietnam was arguably one of the worst, with well documented war crimes, sadism and torture on both sides. That is depicts a fictional game of Russian Roulette, happening to fictional characters, in a fictional POW camp, overseen by fictional characters is just fictional. It hardly matters if such a game really took place, it's a storytelling device and metaphor in a made up film.
I'm sure a lot of the long standing controversy dating to the time it was first released was partly caused by the other thing I mentioned. By Cimino promoting it as 100% fact based, he was just asking for people to call him out on his bullsh*t. However, the content of the movie is what I base my opinion on and I have no problem with that. IIRC the credits of the film make no claim to being based on reality, unlike 'Salvador' for example.
To cite another example. Cimino again wildly exaggerated the atrocities perpetrated by representatives of the US government (from the President down) during the "Johnson County War" in his follow up 'Heaven's Gate' (a film I kinda love). I've never heard of that film being accused of prejudice because that more obviously wasn't Cimino's intent in that case (because everybody is white American/European). He's just hyping up the drama, stakes and violence, in both films. He seems to like a group of morally ambiguous protagonists, contrasted with unambiguously evil antagonists, nothing more.
Well that's my take anyway. You're certainly not alone in your opinion.
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Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Director: Mike Newell
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 117 minutes
Type: Comedy, Romantic, Drama
Like a lot of people (Brits at least), I probably watched this to death back in the day but it still holds up. It's the zingy humour of screamingly awkward social situations and unintended public faux pas. The opening scene where
Hugh Grant runs around mostly just saying
"F**k" in a creative variety of ways declares how much fun it's going to be. I'd forgotten that it's almost literally
"Four Weddings and a Funeral", apart from one shopping scene it takes place entirely in and around those five occasions, across the lives of a group of friends. IMO, they should have removed that one scene, just so it could have a structural perfection to the plot and premise. The depiction of the two gay characters was ground breaking for 1994. They're the only enduring and monogamous couple in the film. When you've got a massive mainstream audience (probably every man, woman and child in the 90s UK) tearing up over the love between two men, I'm sure it had a positive effect for change. The poem that
John Hannah's character reads out ('Funeral Blues' aka 'Stop all the clocks' by W. H. Auden) is so beautifully performed, surely not a dry eye in the house. In 1994 the UK still had
'Section 28', by 2004 it had Civil Partnerships, supported by all political parties. It also features a deaf character but doesn't make a big fuss about it, he's just one of the gang. The cast is a spectacularly funny and endearing but if I had to nitpick,
Andie MacDowell is merely adequate. The script is by comedy genius
Richard Curtis but it's easy to forget he didn't direct this first hit. I think Director
Mike Newell did an amazing job, equally at ease with the comedy, as with the painful drama, perhaps restraining some of Curtis' more syrupy tendencies.
When looking up the trailer I discovered they'd recently remade it into a mini-series. Sacrilege!
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Mad Max (1979)
Director: George Miller
Country: Australia
Length: 93 minutes
Type: Dystopian, Sci-Fi, Action
My friends and I used to recite lines from
'Mad Max' to each other when we played computer racing games in the 80s/90s e.g.
"I'm a fuel-injected suicide machine!",
"I'm laying down a rubber road right to freedom!" and
"I'm outta the game" etc (we we're more obsessed by this one than the more popular sequel for some reason). Around that time I got to see Max's "Pursuit Special" car prop when it was housed in a museum not far from where I lived. The custom police vehicles in their striking yellow, blue and red MFP livery look fantastic and those scenes of them speeding along, bumper-to-bumper, with the camera nearly touching the road are always thrilling. I still had every frame and line of all the chase scenes burned into my brain, yet had a hazy recollection of the scenes in the middle between Max and his wife... I guess my family VCR had excellent fast-forwarding facilities! I was and still am a big
Judge Dredd fan, so the world of Mad Max was very familiar.
George Miller's "maximum force of the future" was influenced by 2000AD's post-apocalyptic leather-biker "lawman of the future" and the nightmare "cursed earth" wasteland that surrounded him (JD debuted 2-years before MM). Dredd artist
Brendan McCarthy returned the compliment by co-writing 'Mad Max: Fury Road' with Miller years later.
Mel Gibson has done some fine performances in his long career but this first title role wasn't one of them. He does the cold dead-inside Max very well in the 2nd-half but the scenes where he has to be a family man have little chemistry, or emotion. Thankfully most of the rest of the cast are exceptional and take up the slack, like
Steve Bisley as dare-devil motorcycle cop 'Goose',
Roger Ward's Neckerchief-wearing Police-Captain 'Fifi' and
Geoff Parry's morose 'Bubba Zanetti'. Nobody on earth could've played 'The Toecutter' like the late
Hugh Keays-Byrne, it's such an eccentric, memorable and believably insane performance. I love all the lingo like "meat trucks" for ambulances (Similar to the Dredd comic's "meat wagons"), "road rash" (which was used for the name of a 90s bike game), "bronze" for the Cops and "very toey" for fast. The soundtrack by
Brian May (no not that one) is patchy, I love some of it but I've always disliked the cheesy love theme and the singer in the nightclub is terrible. It's surprising how little violence there actually is, being mostly implied through Miller and his team's genius filming/editing, making cuts to the film that feel like car impacts and knife blows. The most famous and shocking example was them simply tossing a child's shoe and ball into the road to imply a horrific vehicular murder. Characters also talk about violence they've witnessed in explicit detail and we are shown the build-up and then aftermath of presumably terrifying scenes. Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to avoid a tough rating from the censors by keeping blood letting to a minimum (and little profanity) but they managed to imply it too well, earning an R-rating in the US, an 18-Cert in the UK and even bans in a couple of countries.
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Do the Right Thing (1989)
Director: Spike Lee
Country: United States
Length: 120 minutes
Type: Drama, Comedy
I've had the
'Do the Right Thing' soundtrack CD for years but oddly had never got round to seeing the film itself. Like
Quentin Tarantino,
Spike Lee is a pretty poor actor but even QT was never vain enough to give himself the co-lead. Luckily you never really mind because Spike surrounds himself with a large and faultless ensemble cast, particularly
Danny Aiello's Pizzeria owner, a complex and superbly acted part. Lee expertly ratchets up the racial tension alongside the rising heat of a Brooklyn neighbourhood but also packs the film full of salty wit. I'm glad I watched the Criterion transfer with the deliberate intense orange grade because it's not there in the other blu-ray transfers I'm seeing screenshots of. It's a crucial element of the film.
It gave us this classic video for
Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmo3HFa2vjg[/video]