I’m cutting the protagonist a bit of slack, for once. (Usually I heave the garrote-wire with all my strength.)
The scene where detective Robert Duvall (bless him, Duvall – one of the greats) visits the gunman’s home, meets his mother, looks around the bedroom, examines a wooden case containing a range of fine drawing compasses … just a touch, here, of lost-hope pathos, glistening tears from a broken dream.
Blah blah. Damn, I hate that film.
Speaking of Robert Duvall, he has played so many good parts, where to start?
Lonesome Dove, that’s where. First-rate work all around – script, cast, production – an outstanding historical drama.
I don’t see him as an antihero figure, they prop him up to be a by the books guy, your average MRA, but reveal some definite sickness, and moving to the end “am I the baddie?”
It’s cartoonish and hasn’t aged as well as better takes on the humanized-but-still-fuck-that-guy tropes. It certainly isn’t a heartwarming story, and I can totally understand why it’s not liked.
A bunch of years ago, the morning after a party somebody decided to put on Barry Lyndon while people sobered up in the morning. At the half way point, when it was time to switch to the second VHS tape (I said it was a bunch of years ago) all of us who has seen the movie before tried to persuade those who hadn’t that it just wasn’t worth it. Because the rest of the movie was just him being mean to his wife.
why does it matter which direction they were going? they were still stopped by one man, who has never been seen again since they took him into custody for it. that’s all i need to know about his bravery.
Crowd against crowd ironically might have been more dangerous. What she did was so awesome that there was really no plausible response. Two angry crowds just makes for a brawl.
Weird, I was thinking about that movie recently, and it really is a piece of crap, but I remember it wasn’t quite as pro-conservative-white-guy as I expected. The “protagonist” turns out to be a loser, they discover he’s been out of work for months but going to ‘pretend work’ every morning like clockwork, and he’s got a restraining order against him from his ex-wife. Then despite shooting a bunch of black gang members he also ends up shooting a white supremacist at an army/navy store, which is a lot more premeditated than the other violence. I’ve always wondered if a lot of conservatives went to the movie excited, and came away confused or annoyed.
It’s just a detail. He wasn’t really “Tank Man in Tiananmen Square,” he was actually Tank Man on East Chang’an Avenue.
On the other hand, I can sympathize with the Western media who spun it that way, given that they were systematically prevented from getting footage of anything closer, or from inside the square.
Yeah, but the shooting-the-white-supremacist thing (after, e.g., fighting the Korean store owner) comes off as such a calculated Hollywood addition to try to inoculate the movie against charges of racism.
i think i sort of refer to Tiennamen as a broader term for the event and crackdown as a whole, not necessarily the actual place. that probably didn’t help.
Maybe. I think the movie is a lot harder to pin down than people give it credit for. I rented “RoboCop” years ago and my sister refused to watch because she thought it was some kind of jingoistic pro-Reagan movie, when it actually has this dark humor, and brutally sarcastic put downs of American business and consumerism. “Falling Down” pulls a lot of obvious Hollywood moves, but it also has a lot of dark humor and pointed critiques of American culture. I cringe at how Michael Douglas’s character gives the Korean shop owner a hard time for not speaking English, but I get some satisfaction when he cuts through the golf course and lectures the two old white guys about how “this should be public park for kids to play in.” If the movie has any kind of overall message it’s “modern life kinda sucks.” I’m tempted to watch it again and keep a running tally of how many racist or pro-conservative scenes it actually has.
Am I the only one who read it almost exactly the opposite way? I felt like the cop was the good guy who maybe wasn’t so great and a sort of antihero in his own right, while Douglas’s character represented a violent entitled asshole who made a series of decisions he could have easily made earlier on in life because that’s who he always was.
