Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 is a bit weird. But maybe I should find some more specific adjectives and other words.
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
It was okay to like Dances With Wolves when it first came out, but then that passed and liking it was verboten. Then we went through a period when it was okay to appreciate it with hipster irony, but that's done as well.
So right now you're not allowed to like it, but we're about due for a bout of post-ironic appreciation of it's earnestness. Give it a year or so.
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Dances with Wolves is certainly in a tradition of Whitey Goes and Hangs out With the Savages, and it sure as hell spawned another generation of inferior copycats, but it's got a lot more going on than most of its type, and it's easy to lump it in with its lessers if you haven't watched it in a while, but that would be a mistake.
For one thing, it's about the end of the frontier and the death of the independent Indian. The suicidal desire for a clean death over a long wasting away is a major repeating theme in the movie, it's actually a movie that's really pretty uninterested in Whitey Is Such A Great Indian racial aggrandizing. Costner's character slowly becomes accepted by the natives as part of their society, but he's no great white hunter.
The movie purposefully plays with a lot of Western stylistic elements, but it's very purposefully a western where the Indians finally have agency. They're engaging with him largely because they know he has information they need, and they have their own individual opinions and personalities about him beyond that. There's no scene where he learns their language and suddenly everyone is speaking English, they're speaking Sioux and he slowly learns how to speak Sioux, and it's either subtitled, explained in his own voiceover, or is just through nonverbal communication. It's about trying to move beyond that myth of the Wild West and having whites and natives find common ground, even while recognizing that one of those parties is eventually going to get almost wiped out by the other.
EDIT: And also recognizing that relations weren't so simple as Indians vs Whites. He's hanging out with the Sioux, and meanwhile the Pawnee are cooperating with the US army against them, because they're enemies. Which is the kind of thing that happened all the time, but tends to be forgotten in so many of the westerns that Dances with Wolves is responding to, because that would give the Indian groups agency and pssssshhhhh
Kana on
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Like, just for an example from Dances with Wolves, it takes a typical Western scene - innocent western settler getting scalped by brutal natives - and turns it on its head by keeping the protagonists as the Indians throughout the scene.
Really basically any other western ever made up until then would've just called it marauding bands of savage Indians and called it good. But in DwW it's not that simple, from the native perspective he's trespassing into their lands, and so far their hunting party hasn't found any success. Unfortunately for the victim the leader of the party is just an asshole, the other 3 would be perfectly content to just leave the guy be, but if they can take the settler's rifle then their trip will be a success. So they argue over what to do until asshole simply rides off to go get him and they reluctantly follow.
It's one big reason why Dances With Wolves, despite certainly being lame in some spots, is nowhere near as problematic as most people assume it is. There's tons of scenes of just Indians talking and arguing with other Indians, with Costner nowhere to be seen and the white man as the Other.
Kana on
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Yeah, I wouldn't ever describe the movie as problamatic. It's mostly just not that interesting imo.
Though I would say that particular scene and the movie in general does not even paint the Pawnee as anything but utter evil arseholes.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
edited August 2014
Not for nothing, but I thought the scene at the end with the old conquistador helmet was a cool touch. Although I'll concede if I think about it too long I start to realize it's not really that historically possible, is it?
Well, the Pawnee are definitely the antagonists, and assholes (though with one way bigger asshole than the others)
But even then they're still given individual voices, like in that scene. Which is pretty noteworthy I think, considering how rarely it happens otherwise in westerns (or really any kind of movies featuring "savages").
The biggest problem with DwW is the romance, which isn't problematic either it's just boring and uncompelling. And unfortunately it turns into a decent chunk of the movie! It just feels like at some point a producer or someone realized they were making a movie with the entire plot of, "A dude hangs with out with Sioux for a while" and demanded a movie-friendlier b-plot be added or something.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Like, just for an example from Dances with Wolves, it takes a typical Western scene - innocent western settler getting scalped by brutal natives - and turns it on its head by keeping the protagonists as the Indians throughout the scene.
Really basically any other western ever made up until then would've just called it marauding bands of savage Indians and called it good. But in DwW it's not that simple, from the native perspective he's trespassing into their lands, and so far their hunting party hasn't found any success. Unfortunately for the victim the leader of the party is just an asshole, the other 3 would be perfectly content to just leave the guy be, but if they can take the settler's rifle then their trip will be a success. So they argue over what to do until asshole simply rides off to go get him and they reluctantly follow.
It's one big reason why Dances With Wolves, despite certainly being lame in some spots, is nowhere near as problematic as most people assume it is. There's tons of scenes of just Indians talking and arguing with other Indians, with Costner nowhere to be seen and the white man as the Other.
Um...no. While the majority of mainstream westerns do have problematic portrayals of Native Americans, there is a long standing subgenre of Revisionist Westerns that show more nuanced and complicated relationships between Native Americans and the Settlers. Broken Arrow is one of the first but it continues to pop up in Westerns up until the 70's. Hell Fort Apache which is the first film in Ford's Calvary Trilogy points out that the treatment of Native Americans was poor and makes it abundantly clear some of the abuses the tribes suffered at the hands of white people. But during the 70's you see an explosion of Revisionist Westerns including Little Big Man. While strongly out numbered by more racist portrayals, films with much more nuanced portrayals came out of Hollywood on a regular basis.
Dances With Wolves doesn't break any new ground in that area and it's ends up having a large number of stereotypes employed while diving head long into some weird mysticism. It's not as bad as a lot of other movies but it's still problematic as hell. It tends to get a pass from people based on a lot of assumptions of what Westerns are but the reality is that it's problematic. As the final text is face palmingly bad. It may not be as bad as other white savior films but that's damning with faint praise at best.
From a film perspective Dances With Wolves has some beautiful cinematography. But Ford set the standard for it and in a Western you kind of expect beautiful cinematography. Not to run down Dean Semler's work but it's not a genre where being a good or great DP stands out in the way it would in other places. It's kind of expected that a DP will do something with the amazing landscapes of the West.
At the end of the day, it's over long with pretty shots and isn't as racist or problematic as a lot of other films but doesn't really break new ground.
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
Dances with Wolves is certainly in a tradition of Whitey Goes and Hangs out With the Savages, and it sure as hell spawned another generation of inferior copycats, but it's got a lot more going on than most of its type, and it's easy to lump it in with its lessers if you haven't watched it in a while, but that would be a mistake.
For one thing, it's about the end of the frontier and the death of the independent Indian. The suicidal desire for a clean death over a long wasting away is a major repeating theme in the movie, it's actually a movie that's really pretty uninterested in Whitey Is Such A Great Indian racial aggrandizing. Costner's character slowly becomes accepted by the natives as part of their society, but he's no great white hunter.
The movie purposefully plays with a lot of Western stylistic elements, but it's very purposefully a western where the Indians finally have agency. They're engaging with him largely because they know he has information they need, and they have their own individual opinions and personalities about him beyond that. There's no scene where he learns their language and suddenly everyone is speaking English, they're speaking Sioux and he slowly learns how to speak Sioux, and it's either subtitled, explained in his own voiceover, or is just through nonverbal communication. It's about trying to move beyond that myth of the Wild West and having whites and natives find common ground, even while recognizing that one of those parties is eventually going to get almost wiped out by the other.
EDIT: And also recognizing that relations weren't so simple as Indians vs Whites. He's hanging out with the Sioux, and meanwhile the Pawnee are cooperating with the US army against them, because they're enemies. Which is the kind of thing that happened all the time, but tends to be forgotten in so many of the westerns that Dances with Wolves is responding to, because that would give the Indian groups agency and pssssshhhhh
While you raise some good points, we have not reached the period where it's cool to like DwW yet, like I just very clearly explained. Your opinion is thus invalid.
Post it again in a few months, though, and I will nod appreciativey at your critique.
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Well, the Pawnee are definitely the antagonists, and assholes (though with one way bigger asshole than the others)
But even then they're still given individual voices, like in that scene. Which is pretty noteworthy I think, considering how rarely it happens otherwise in westerns (or really any kind of movies featuring "savages").
The biggest problem with DwW is the romance, which isn't problematic either it's just boring and uncompelling. And unfortunately it turns into a decent chunk of the movie! It just feels like at some point a producer or someone realized they were making a movie with the entire plot of, "A dude hangs with out with Sioux for a while" and demanded a movie-friendlier b-plot be added or something.
But that's the whole issue. The romance is included to add something to a boring and uncompelling film and just ends up being more of the same.
Assault On Precinct 13 is one of the movies in which Carpenter sticks in his favourite line from Once Upon A Time In The West. It's pretty much the last line of the movie.
I liked Avatar better than either Dances with Wolves or Last Samurai
What you're saying is that you like big mechs and VTOLs better than horses or samurai?
I can get behind that.
well that and, the story was better paced than Dances with Wolves
also the Navi are STAND IN FOR NATIVE GROUP and the Japanese are an actual real life people that make Tom Cruise the white savior more problematic (also turning the ham up to 11)
You can certainly project NATIVE GROUP of your choice onto the Navi if you want, but I didn't do that, they're the trolls from world of warcraft to me and carry no significance beyond that, also they have a borg collective thing with their sentient planet
Well, the Pawnee are definitely the antagonists, and assholes (though with one way bigger asshole than the others)
But even then they're still given individual voices, like in that scene. Which is pretty noteworthy I think, considering how rarely it happens otherwise in westerns (or really any kind of movies featuring "savages").
The biggest problem with DwW is the romance, which isn't problematic either it's just boring and uncompelling. And unfortunately it turns into a decent chunk of the movie! It just feels like at some point a producer or someone realized they were making a movie with the entire plot of, "A dude hangs with out with Sioux for a while" and demanded a movie-friendlier b-plot be added or something.
But that's the whole issue. The romance is included to add something to a boring and uncompelling film and just ends up being more of the same.
Well, I like most of the rest of the film.
So therefore you are proven wrong, nyah
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Like, just for an example from Dances with Wolves, it takes a typical Western scene - innocent western settler getting scalped by brutal natives - and turns it on its head by keeping the protagonists as the Indians throughout the scene.
Really basically any other western ever made up until then would've just called it marauding bands of savage Indians and called it good. But in DwW it's not that simple, from the native perspective he's trespassing into their lands, and so far their hunting party hasn't found any success. Unfortunately for the victim the leader of the party is just an asshole, the other 3 would be perfectly content to just leave the guy be, but if they can take the settler's rifle then their trip will be a success. So they argue over what to do until asshole simply rides off to go get him and they reluctantly follow.
It's one big reason why Dances With Wolves, despite certainly being lame in some spots, is nowhere near as problematic as most people assume it is. There's tons of scenes of just Indians talking and arguing with other Indians, with Costner nowhere to be seen and the white man as the Other.
Um...no. While the majority of mainstream westerns do have problematic portrayals of Native Americans, there is a long standing subgenre of Revisionist Westerns that show more nuanced and complicated relationships between Native Americans and the Settlers. Broken Arrow is one of the first but it continues to pop up in Westerns up until the 70's. Hell Fort Apache which is the first film in Ford's Calvary Trilogy points out that the treatment of Native Americans was poor and makes it abundantly clear some of the abuses the tribes suffered at the hands of white people. But during the 70's you see an explosion of Revisionist Westerns including Little Big Man. While strongly out numbered by more racist portrayals, films with much more nuanced portrayals came out of Hollywood on a regular basis.
Dances With Wolves doesn't break any new ground in that area and it's ends up having a large number of stereotypes employed while diving head long into some weird mysticism. It's not as bad as a lot of other movies but it's still problematic as hell. It tends to get a pass from people based on a lot of assumptions of what Westerns are but the reality is that it's problematic. As the final text is face palmingly bad. It may not be as bad as other white savior films but that's damning with faint praise at best.
From a film perspective Dances With Wolves has some beautiful cinematography. But Ford set the standard for it and in a Western you kind of expect beautiful cinematography. Not to run down Dean Semler's work but it's not a genre where being a good or great DP stands out in the way it would in other places. It's kind of expected that a DP will do something with the amazing landscapes of the West.
At the end of the day, it's over long with pretty shots and isn't as racist or problematic as a lot of other films but doesn't really break new ground.
Well, you're right that I oversold my case as far as complex-ish portrayals of Native Americans goes. .... Sort of.
But I think there's a pretty huge gap between the sort of portrayals of someone like Ford, and something like DwW, where we're often actually following the action through a native perspective. Ford may recognize that the way the white man treats the savages is corrupt or wrong or just complex, but they're still inherently foreign in his films, and it still comes down to white men arguing with white men over what to do with the Indian problem. The Searchers certainly recognizes that its main characters' racist opinions of Indians is largely bullshit... but it still doesn't actually have anything to say about the Indians themselves. Ford's movies can be complex, but the natives in them are not, they're forces of nature, a mirror to be held up to John Wayne's cowboy.
And I still completely reject the idea that DwW is a white savior film at all. It totally has similar traits, so it's easy to confuse with one for sure, but our savior figure never actually is able to really save anyone. He ends up just like leaving town and the Sioux all got rounded up and trapped on a reservation a few years later, the end.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 is a bit weird. But maybe I should find some more specific adjectives and other words.
It's kinda a zombie movie only with dangerous urban youth instead of the shambling undead, isn't it?
I remember it as a pretty well done assault/entrench movie though, but I was probably quite young when I saw it.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
edited August 2014
Well, I am probably the only one person who has ever watched a double feature of Erin Brockovich followed by Martyrs. Not a great night for feminism, I guess.
(pictured: the film's two stars, and above them, Albert Finney and Julia Roberts)
Erin Brockovich was disappointing, even though my expectations for it were pretty low. It's a good performance by Roberts, but none of the other actors (including Albert Finney and Aaron Eckhart) are given much to do. The script is overlong and underdramatized, except when it's melodramatically calling Erin out for neglecting her kids and boyfriend while she's busy saving the world. (I feel like this never happens to men in movies. I don't remember the scene in Margin Call where an angry wife is like, "Why are you working so late? Why do you work so much? Your kids miss you!") By underdramatized, I mean that Brockovich's antagonists are poorly defined. She displaces a lot of energy being mad at a corporation, but that corporation's actions are too diffuse (a threat over the phone that never materializes, lawyers who are given very little dialogue, etc). She spends the movie repeatedly earning Finney's respect, but still doesn't seem satisfied. The movie's final forward action (only apparent in retrospect) takes place in a silent montage. The key part of the case is handed to Erin for no real reason. At the end I'm left feeling like her struggles and her rewards are out of sync with one another.
At base, over and over, here is what the movie is about: people (men) don't respect Erin because she's a single mother (who dresses poorly or salaciously, curses, shouts, is rude and unprofessional, has no job experience), so she works hard to earn their respect (respect here is symbolized by money, and specifically money from men). The gender politics of this movie depress me.
(Also wasted here: a completely unmemorable score from Thomas Newman and some fairly boring direction from Soderbergh.)
--
Martyrs was depressing in general, although I was with it for the first hour, which is a taut, twisty, emotionally ambiguous story about the long, strange life of physical and emotional trauma. The last 30 minutes goes in a very different (and honestly, much more boring) direction, although the film's final sequence is interesting (if kind of a nonsensical cop-out). It is always a bad idea in movies, I think, to write a story containing a part that is not interesting to watch but which must be experienced in order to understand emotionally a later part (or the story as a whole). Martyrs has a particularly lengthy one that should rightly have been cut in half, if not more so, or at least presented in a manner with more interest and momentum.
All people seem to want to talk about with this genre of film (French extreme horror, or extreme horror in general) is the shock value and whether it is too much, not enough, bearable, unbearable, pornographic and gratuitous, justified, etc.; but to me all of those notions must be contextualized within the question of whether or not the film is good, the story valuable. If the appropriate meaning is conveyed, no method is too extreme; if the film is pointless, all methods are. Ultimately Martyrs does not have enough to it to make the film worthwhile. It feels like a decent short film expanded too far and into territory darker than its narrative earns.
All people seem to want to talk about with this genre of film (French extreme horror, or extreme horror in general) is the shock value and whether it is too much, not enough, bearable, unbearable, pornographic and gratuitous, justified, etc.; but to me all of those notions must be contextualized within the question of whether or not the film is good, the story valuable.
I take it you've seen A Serbian Film? It quite obviously grew out of the same line of thinking.
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I haven't seen A Serbian Film, no. Is it worth seeing?
I think I am generally willing to watch these movies because (unlike some people, I guess?) I don't really have a line on what is "too far" for a movie (at least, it's very far out and probably on an axis more related to gross things than just violence) and so I'm open to a good movie, whatever the content. But that doesn't mean I'm not expecting a good movie--I might buy into something because it's fucked up in a very original way, but I don't really care about playing the shock value game specifically. I think the same impulse that makes me want to watch The Human Centipede makes me want to watch Guy Maddin movies--I just want to see something new, mostly regardless of whether or not that thing is transgressive.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I don't remember the scene in Margin Call where an angry wife is like, "Why are you working so late? Why do you work so much? Your kids miss you!")
Because if there was, the gender politics of that scene would have been even worse.
I guess. I just think that the entire construction of the issue women in movies face in terms of making a difficult choice between their job and their families is a sexist false dichotomy that male characters are rarely tasked with navigating, especially when most of the movie is about their professional lives. (I can think of a few examples; JFK comes to mind, and it's just as shrill there.) Maybe it's just bad screenwriting, with the author using a nag character of either gender to try and get the protagonist to question the value of his or her plot pursuit. But since that plot pursuit is usually the point of the movie, we're never ever on the side of the nag, who is trying to stop the fun. (I don't think anybody wants a JFK conspiracy movie where Costner quits looking for the truth halfway through so he can raise his kids for the rest of the movie.)
Erin Brockovich was disappointing, even though my expectations for it were pretty low. It's a good performance by Roberts, but none of the other actors (including Albert Finney and Aaron Eckhart) are given much to do. The script is overlong and underdramatized, except when it's melodramatically calling Erin out for neglecting her kids and boyfriend while she's busy saving the world. (I feel like this never happens to men in movies. I don't remember the scene in Margin Call where an angry wife is like, "Why are you working so late? Why do you work so much? Your kids miss you!")
It's pretty much a common trope in detective stories though isn't it, a sign of when they've reached rock bottom or that the case has gotten to them too much that their wife leaves with the kids. I can't think of a version where this is portrayed as a positive, though admittedly I'm pretty sure there's a few where winning their family back is entwined with defeating the bad guy who's subsequently taken them prisoner - so I guess the problems are really just punted down to a later part of the movie.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Like, just for an example from Dances with Wolves, it takes a typical Western scene - innocent western settler getting scalped by brutal natives - and turns it on its head by keeping the protagonists as the Indians throughout the scene.
Really basically any other western ever made up until then would've just called it marauding bands of savage Indians and called it good. But in DwW it's not that simple, from the native perspective he's trespassing into their lands, and so far their hunting party hasn't found any success. Unfortunately for the victim the leader of the party is just an asshole, the other 3 would be perfectly content to just leave the guy be, but if they can take the settler's rifle then their trip will be a success. So they argue over what to do until asshole simply rides off to go get him and they reluctantly follow.
It's one big reason why Dances With Wolves, despite certainly being lame in some spots, is nowhere near as problematic as most people assume it is. There's tons of scenes of just Indians talking and arguing with other Indians, with Costner nowhere to be seen and the white man as the Other.
Um...no. While the majority of mainstream westerns do have problematic portrayals of Native Americans, there is a long standing subgenre of Revisionist Westerns that show more nuanced and complicated relationships between Native Americans and the Settlers. Broken Arrow is one of the first but it continues to pop up in Westerns up until the 70's. Hell Fort Apache which is the first film in Ford's Calvary Trilogy points out that the treatment of Native Americans was poor and makes it abundantly clear some of the abuses the tribes suffered at the hands of white people. But during the 70's you see an explosion of Revisionist Westerns including Little Big Man. While strongly out numbered by more racist portrayals, films with much more nuanced portrayals came out of Hollywood on a regular basis.
Dances With Wolves doesn't break any new ground in that area and it's ends up having a large number of stereotypes employed while diving head long into some weird mysticism. It's not as bad as a lot of other movies but it's still problematic as hell. It tends to get a pass from people based on a lot of assumptions of what Westerns are but the reality is that it's problematic. As the final text is face palmingly bad. It may not be as bad as other white savior films but that's damning with faint praise at best.
From a film perspective Dances With Wolves has some beautiful cinematography. But Ford set the standard for it and in a Western you kind of expect beautiful cinematography. Not to run down Dean Semler's work but it's not a genre where being a good or great DP stands out in the way it would in other places. It's kind of expected that a DP will do something with the amazing landscapes of the West.
At the end of the day, it's over long with pretty shots and isn't as racist or problematic as a lot of other films but doesn't really break new ground.
Well, you're right that I oversold my case as far as complex-ish portrayals of Native Americans goes. .... Sort of.
But I think there's a pretty huge gap between the sort of portrayals of someone like Ford, and something like DwW, where we're often actually following the action through a native perspective. Ford may recognize that the way the white man treats the savages is corrupt or wrong or just complex, but they're still inherently foreign in his films, and it still comes down to white men arguing with white men over what to do with the Indian problem. The Searchers certainly recognizes that its main characters' racist opinions of Indians is largely bullshit... but it still doesn't actually have anything to say about the Indians themselves. Ford's movies can be complex, but the natives in them are not, they're forces of nature, a mirror to be held up to John Wayne's cowboy.
And I still completely reject the idea that DwW is a white savior film at all. It totally has similar traits, so it's easy to confuse with one for sure, but our savior figure never actually is able to really save anyone. He ends up just like leaving town and the Sioux all got rounded up and trapped on a reservation a few years later, the end.
I used Ford as an example because he's one of the best known directors in the genre. But the only of his movies that qualifies as a Revisionist Western is his final Western Cheyenne Autumn and arguably Sergent Ruthledge. I was simply using him as an example of nuanced portrayal. But looking within the Revisionist Westerns, most of the ones that deal with relations between White Settlers and Indians do have far more nuanced portrayals of Native Americans. Broken Arrow being one of the earliest examples of a Revisionist Western has a far more complicated Native American characters and less use of stereotypes then Dances With Wolves and it was made in the 50's. Then you have the wave of Westerns in the 70's where the myth of the West is being held up and shaken hard to find some more real truths.
I think John Trudell summed up the film best. “It’s a story about a white guy. And Indians are just the T and A.”
Yeah men are not immune from the "You're at your job too much your family needs you!" This is popular among any tv or movie dealing with a male in law enforcement or the military.
Hell most movies based on a career of either sex usually has that stupid "I gave up my personal life for this job." scene.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
This thread just reminded me of High Tension. Went into it knowing nothing and really liked what it did, for a horror movie. Pretty sure these forums were why I even tried it in the first place
Hated high tension, any movie that specifically lies to you (and doesn't do so using an unreliable narrator like say Fight Club) the audience to hide its "SHOCKING TWIST!" is complete bullshit.
Preacher on
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Just read Eberts review and he hated it. Im thinking I was drinking when I watched it now because I don't remember the plot hole being as big as he described.
I haven't seen A Serbian Film, no. Is it worth seeing?
Only in so far as I think it might make you re-evaluate your stance on shock value in service to story. Because the core idea of ASF is not that bad. Its protagonist serves as a metaphor for an entire country and how it was "seduced" and driven to commit atrocities in the name of a higher purpose, and how that eventually dehumanised and destroyed him/it. But the shock imagery and action is so obnoxious and aggressive that it drowns out any but the most primitive levels of the story.
I haven't seen A Serbian Film, no. Is it worth seeing?
I tend to recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on this particular film for the case-by-case litmus test of whether it's worth viewing. That'll let you know right away if you might want to pass on it.
I don't remember the scene in Margin Call where an angry wife is like, "Why are you working so late? Why do you work so much? Your kids miss you!")
Because if there was, the gender politics of that scene would have been even worse.
I guess. I just think that the entire construction of the issue women in movies face in terms of making a difficult choice between their job and their families is a sexist false dichotomy that male characters are rarely tasked with navigating, especially when most of the movie is about their professional lives. (I can think of a few examples; JFK comes to mind, and it's just as shrill there.) Maybe it's just bad screenwriting, with the author using a nag character of either gender to try and get the protagonist to question the value of his or her plot pursuit. But since that plot pursuit is usually the point of the movie, we're never ever on the side of the nag, who is trying to stop the fun. (I don't think anybody wants a JFK conspiracy movie where Costner quits looking for the truth halfway through so he can raise his kids for the rest of the movie.)
I would actually argue that when it's about a female protagonist it's probably a better reflection of real life sexist structures "shaming" women for not thinking of their families first and foremost. Whereas men are given more leeway to choose their profession/quest over their family. It's the reason why you can make a cloying family film where the husband learns to value his family more than his job, and why if you were to gender-swap the protagonist, she would be considered a selfish wife/bad mother by some (large?) parts of the audience.
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Go get your fucking shinebox, Costner.
So right now you're not allowed to like it, but we're about due for a bout of post-ironic appreciation of it's earnestness. Give it a year or so.
then is Avatar Dances with Wolves' erotic fanfiction?
Short answer, yes, longer answer its actually more like Last Samurai erotic fanfiction.
I'm trying to remember versions, but isn't that the one where a baby gets murdered?
pleasepaypreacher.net
For one thing, it's about the end of the frontier and the death of the independent Indian. The suicidal desire for a clean death over a long wasting away is a major repeating theme in the movie, it's actually a movie that's really pretty uninterested in Whitey Is Such A Great Indian racial aggrandizing. Costner's character slowly becomes accepted by the natives as part of their society, but he's no great white hunter.
The movie purposefully plays with a lot of Western stylistic elements, but it's very purposefully a western where the Indians finally have agency. They're engaging with him largely because they know he has information they need, and they have their own individual opinions and personalities about him beyond that. There's no scene where he learns their language and suddenly everyone is speaking English, they're speaking Sioux and he slowly learns how to speak Sioux, and it's either subtitled, explained in his own voiceover, or is just through nonverbal communication. It's about trying to move beyond that myth of the Wild West and having whites and natives find common ground, even while recognizing that one of those parties is eventually going to get almost wiped out by the other.
EDIT: And also recognizing that relations weren't so simple as Indians vs Whites. He's hanging out with the Sioux, and meanwhile the Pawnee are cooperating with the US army against them, because they're enemies. Which is the kind of thing that happened all the time, but tends to be forgotten in so many of the westerns that Dances with Wolves is responding to, because that would give the Indian groups agency and pssssshhhhh
Really basically any other western ever made up until then would've just called it marauding bands of savage Indians and called it good. But in DwW it's not that simple, from the native perspective he's trespassing into their lands, and so far their hunting party hasn't found any success. Unfortunately for the victim the leader of the party is just an asshole, the other 3 would be perfectly content to just leave the guy be, but if they can take the settler's rifle then their trip will be a success. So they argue over what to do until asshole simply rides off to go get him and they reluctantly follow.
It's one big reason why Dances With Wolves, despite certainly being lame in some spots, is nowhere near as problematic as most people assume it is. There's tons of scenes of just Indians talking and arguing with other Indians, with Costner nowhere to be seen and the white man as the Other.
Though I would say that particular scene and the movie in general does not even paint the Pawnee as anything but utter evil arseholes.
But even then they're still given individual voices, like in that scene. Which is pretty noteworthy I think, considering how rarely it happens otherwise in westerns (or really any kind of movies featuring "savages").
The biggest problem with DwW is the romance, which isn't problematic either it's just boring and uncompelling. And unfortunately it turns into a decent chunk of the movie! It just feels like at some point a producer or someone realized they were making a movie with the entire plot of, "A dude hangs with out with Sioux for a while" and demanded a movie-friendlier b-plot be added or something.
Um...no. While the majority of mainstream westerns do have problematic portrayals of Native Americans, there is a long standing subgenre of Revisionist Westerns that show more nuanced and complicated relationships between Native Americans and the Settlers. Broken Arrow is one of the first but it continues to pop up in Westerns up until the 70's. Hell Fort Apache which is the first film in Ford's Calvary Trilogy points out that the treatment of Native Americans was poor and makes it abundantly clear some of the abuses the tribes suffered at the hands of white people. But during the 70's you see an explosion of Revisionist Westerns including Little Big Man. While strongly out numbered by more racist portrayals, films with much more nuanced portrayals came out of Hollywood on a regular basis.
Dances With Wolves doesn't break any new ground in that area and it's ends up having a large number of stereotypes employed while diving head long into some weird mysticism. It's not as bad as a lot of other movies but it's still problematic as hell. It tends to get a pass from people based on a lot of assumptions of what Westerns are but the reality is that it's problematic. As the final text is face palmingly bad. It may not be as bad as other white savior films but that's damning with faint praise at best.
From a film perspective Dances With Wolves has some beautiful cinematography. But Ford set the standard for it and in a Western you kind of expect beautiful cinematography. Not to run down Dean Semler's work but it's not a genre where being a good or great DP stands out in the way it would in other places. It's kind of expected that a DP will do something with the amazing landscapes of the West.
At the end of the day, it's over long with pretty shots and isn't as racist or problematic as a lot of other films but doesn't really break new ground.
While you raise some good points, we have not reached the period where it's cool to like DwW yet, like I just very clearly explained. Your opinion is thus invalid.
Post it again in a few months, though, and I will nod appreciativey at your critique.
What you're saying is that you like big mechs and VTOLs better than horses or samurai?
I can get behind that.
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Island. Being on fire.
But that's the whole issue. The romance is included to add something to a boring and uncompelling film and just ends up being more of the same.
"I'll tell you, but only at the moment of dying."
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well that and, the story was better paced than Dances with Wolves
also the Navi are STAND IN FOR NATIVE GROUP and the Japanese are an actual real life people that make Tom Cruise the white savior more problematic (also turning the ham up to 11)
You can certainly project NATIVE GROUP of your choice onto the Navi if you want, but I didn't do that, they're the trolls from world of warcraft to me and carry no significance beyond that, also they have a borg collective thing with their sentient planet
Well, I like most of the rest of the film.
So therefore you are proven wrong, nyah
Well, you're right that I oversold my case as far as complex-ish portrayals of Native Americans goes. .... Sort of.
But I think there's a pretty huge gap between the sort of portrayals of someone like Ford, and something like DwW, where we're often actually following the action through a native perspective. Ford may recognize that the way the white man treats the savages is corrupt or wrong or just complex, but they're still inherently foreign in his films, and it still comes down to white men arguing with white men over what to do with the Indian problem. The Searchers certainly recognizes that its main characters' racist opinions of Indians is largely bullshit... but it still doesn't actually have anything to say about the Indians themselves. Ford's movies can be complex, but the natives in them are not, they're forces of nature, a mirror to be held up to John Wayne's cowboy.
And I still completely reject the idea that DwW is a white savior film at all. It totally has similar traits, so it's easy to confuse with one for sure, but our savior figure never actually is able to really save anyone. He ends up just like leaving town and the Sioux all got rounded up and trapped on a reservation a few years later, the end.
I remember it as a pretty well done assault/entrench movie though, but I was probably quite young when I saw it.
(pictured: the film's two stars, and above them, Albert Finney and Julia Roberts)
Erin Brockovich was disappointing, even though my expectations for it were pretty low. It's a good performance by Roberts, but none of the other actors (including Albert Finney and Aaron Eckhart) are given much to do. The script is overlong and underdramatized, except when it's melodramatically calling Erin out for neglecting her kids and boyfriend while she's busy saving the world. (I feel like this never happens to men in movies. I don't remember the scene in Margin Call where an angry wife is like, "Why are you working so late? Why do you work so much? Your kids miss you!") By underdramatized, I mean that Brockovich's antagonists are poorly defined. She displaces a lot of energy being mad at a corporation, but that corporation's actions are too diffuse (a threat over the phone that never materializes, lawyers who are given very little dialogue, etc). She spends the movie repeatedly earning Finney's respect, but still doesn't seem satisfied. The movie's final forward action (only apparent in retrospect) takes place in a silent montage. The key part of the case is handed to Erin for no real reason. At the end I'm left feeling like her struggles and her rewards are out of sync with one another.
At base, over and over, here is what the movie is about: people (men) don't respect Erin because she's a single mother (who dresses poorly or salaciously, curses, shouts, is rude and unprofessional, has no job experience), so she works hard to earn their respect (respect here is symbolized by money, and specifically money from men). The gender politics of this movie depress me.
(Also wasted here: a completely unmemorable score from Thomas Newman and some fairly boring direction from Soderbergh.)
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Martyrs was depressing in general, although I was with it for the first hour, which is a taut, twisty, emotionally ambiguous story about the long, strange life of physical and emotional trauma. The last 30 minutes goes in a very different (and honestly, much more boring) direction, although the film's final sequence is interesting (if kind of a nonsensical cop-out). It is always a bad idea in movies, I think, to write a story containing a part that is not interesting to watch but which must be experienced in order to understand emotionally a later part (or the story as a whole). Martyrs has a particularly lengthy one that should rightly have been cut in half, if not more so, or at least presented in a manner with more interest and momentum.
All people seem to want to talk about with this genre of film (French extreme horror, or extreme horror in general) is the shock value and whether it is too much, not enough, bearable, unbearable, pornographic and gratuitous, justified, etc.; but to me all of those notions must be contextualized within the question of whether or not the film is good, the story valuable. If the appropriate meaning is conveyed, no method is too extreme; if the film is pointless, all methods are. Ultimately Martyrs does not have enough to it to make the film worthwhile. It feels like a decent short film expanded too far and into territory darker than its narrative earns.
Because if there was, the gender politics of that scene would have been even worse.
I take it you've seen A Serbian Film? It quite obviously grew out of the same line of thinking.
I think I am generally willing to watch these movies because (unlike some people, I guess?) I don't really have a line on what is "too far" for a movie (at least, it's very far out and probably on an axis more related to gross things than just violence) and so I'm open to a good movie, whatever the content. But that doesn't mean I'm not expecting a good movie--I might buy into something because it's fucked up in a very original way, but I don't really care about playing the shock value game specifically. I think the same impulse that makes me want to watch The Human Centipede makes me want to watch Guy Maddin movies--I just want to see something new, mostly regardless of whether or not that thing is transgressive.
I guess. I just think that the entire construction of the issue women in movies face in terms of making a difficult choice between their job and their families is a sexist false dichotomy that male characters are rarely tasked with navigating, especially when most of the movie is about their professional lives. (I can think of a few examples; JFK comes to mind, and it's just as shrill there.) Maybe it's just bad screenwriting, with the author using a nag character of either gender to try and get the protagonist to question the value of his or her plot pursuit. But since that plot pursuit is usually the point of the movie, we're never ever on the side of the nag, who is trying to stop the fun. (I don't think anybody wants a JFK conspiracy movie where Costner quits looking for the truth halfway through so he can raise his kids for the rest of the movie.)
It's pretty much a common trope in detective stories though isn't it, a sign of when they've reached rock bottom or that the case has gotten to them too much that their wife leaves with the kids. I can't think of a version where this is portrayed as a positive, though admittedly I'm pretty sure there's a few where winning their family back is entwined with defeating the bad guy who's subsequently taken them prisoner - so I guess the problems are really just punted down to a later part of the movie.
I used Ford as an example because he's one of the best known directors in the genre. But the only of his movies that qualifies as a Revisionist Western is his final Western Cheyenne Autumn and arguably Sergent Ruthledge. I was simply using him as an example of nuanced portrayal. But looking within the Revisionist Westerns, most of the ones that deal with relations between White Settlers and Indians do have far more nuanced portrayals of Native Americans. Broken Arrow being one of the earliest examples of a Revisionist Western has a far more complicated Native American characters and less use of stereotypes then Dances With Wolves and it was made in the 50's. Then you have the wave of Westerns in the 70's where the myth of the West is being held up and shaken hard to find some more real truths.
I think John Trudell summed up the film best. “It’s a story about a white guy. And Indians are just the T and A.”
Hell most movies based on a career of either sex usually has that stupid "I gave up my personal life for this job." scene.
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Only in so far as I think it might make you re-evaluate your stance on shock value in service to story. Because the core idea of ASF is not that bad. Its protagonist serves as a metaphor for an entire country and how it was "seduced" and driven to commit atrocities in the name of a higher purpose, and how that eventually dehumanised and destroyed him/it. But the shock imagery and action is so obnoxious and aggressive that it drowns out any but the most primitive levels of the story.
I tend to recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on this particular film for the case-by-case litmus test of whether it's worth viewing. That'll let you know right away if you might want to pass on it.
Same reaction I had to Sound of Music.
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I would actually argue that when it's about a female protagonist it's probably a better reflection of real life sexist structures "shaming" women for not thinking of their families first and foremost. Whereas men are given more leeway to choose their profession/quest over their family. It's the reason why you can make a cloying family film where the husband learns to value his family more than his job, and why if you were to gender-swap the protagonist, she would be considered a selfish wife/bad mother by some (large?) parts of the audience.