John Voight was brilliant but Robert De Niro should have won the oscar!!
John Voight-COMING HOME<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Robert De Niro-THE DEER HUNTER
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The deer hunter was a whacked out horror movie fantasy. It was really over the top stupid, but Americans were innocent then and did not know what to dismiss in terms of movie imagery. we bought anything.
The deer hunter was a whacked out horror movie fantasy. It was really over the top stupid, but Americans were innocent then and did not know what to dismiss in terms of movie imagery. we bought anything.
Elaborate, please. I'd just hate to send a guy to the gallows without hearing a defense of some kind.
And it would appear that the OP is referring solely to the performances of the lead actors, and not the films themselves.
In that sense, she's right. Voight did a commendable job with Coming Home, but to even think that his work surpasses De Niro's is side-splitting.
"...if that was off, I'd be whoopin' your ass up and down this street." ~ an irate Tarantino share
SeanJoyce, kick rocks b&tch. Voight was robbed for Midnight Cowboy back in 69' because John Wayne needed to be awarded an Oscar for being nominated several times before. It's called politics.
shareBut why did we 'buy' it then? Film was an aging medium in 1978, and we had seen many 'bags of tricks' that film-makers used for various effects by then. There is nothing particularly 'stupid' about The Deer Hunter, unless you are maybe referring to the controversial 'russian roullette' sequence. By Cimino's own admission, it was merely a dramatic device, meant to put the heroes in a dire situation, and then have them use clever strategy to get themselves out of it alive.
shareFilm was an aging medium in the 60's ... there are lots of good, maybe even
the best movies from the 20's and 30's.
People did not know anything about Vietnam in 1978. They barely know anything
about it today, but about this time M.A.S.H. came out and a new brand of gritty
show war like it is movies came out ... it was new, flashy ... SHINY as the pejorative
way of saying that is today.
I look at movie like models of cars. A lot of people watch a movie and completely
suspend their disbelief, because that is what we think we are supposed to do and
that is what we have been trained to do. I am super-hard and critical about movies
because most of them are just like other movies with with fins or square headlights
added on. This is how they make movies.
I think the whole movie was a dramatic device to get people to think they are seeing
some secret about men and war ... and I think it was BS. Oh, also about this time
Apocalypse Now came out ... I think, same era anyway. Same with that, though
I have a soft spot for that movie. This was an era of movies as distinguished
from say The Green Beret with John Wayne.
It was just a different new style.
On what basis are you saying that people knew nothing about Vietnam? Wasn't the war itself brought home to american's living rooms, via the nightly news?
shareThere is so much to this war going back to French Colonial times, and America stabbing China in the back, but most of the Viet Nam war Americans know nothing of at all, and quite a bit that no one knows that has still been classified. People saw American boys being killed and turning into cold-blooded murderers ... over 50,000 fatalities, and millions of Viet Namese. We are not a different country simply because we have better TV with smoother propaganda.
shareBut we knew enough about OUR involvement in the war so that feature films about that conflict were hardly an 'off-limits' subject. Keep in mind that most war films are fictitious, with the real war serving as an identifiable backdrop.
shareAll war films are fictitious, unless they are documentaries. This one though added all these psychological BS layers onto it for some kind of gritty fake depth. Personally, I thought it sucked because it was pretentious and took itself too seriously, whereas "Apocalypse Now!" was also pretentious, but it was a kind of not quite so bad ... and more interesting.
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