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mobocracy's Replies
Keitel has long been rumored to be a heavy coke user.
Keitel's a great actor and you have to ask why Scorsese never gave him a major lead role in any film, despite a history with him that goes back to Scorsese's first film in 1967. He's notoriously absent from Goodfellas and Casino and several other Scorsese films where he could have had significant supporting roles. His only other major leading role that got a huge amount of positive press was Jane Campion's the Piano, though he has appeared regularly as a supporting player, but too often in "pay the rent" kind of pictures.
Whether he actually got coked up in Bad Lieutenant or not is debatable. My guess is probably not, because his career was finally hitting on all cylinders after nearly a decade in the wilderness (and Italy).
It's kind of up to the viewer, though, to connect the dots between those actions and the underlying cause of the civil war. Sure, airstrikes on civilians, unconstitutional third terms, and dismantling Federal law enforcement are likely to validate a civil war, but they're also more or less predictable actions during a civil war.
And its not like a normal President just woke up one day and decided to carpet bomb Pittsburgh or disband the FBI and a civil war resulted. It happened because of some other underlying political conflict which was never discussed or revealed in the film.
I'd argue that the order of events was more like disbanding the FBI, claiming a third term, and then bombing civilian populations as part of civil war. But the kickoff is some kind of political conflict the film doesn't reveal.
I did the math, and Henry II took the throne at about 28, which would have made Madame du Poitiers 56. He held the throne until he was 40, which meant du Poitiers would have been 68.
IIRC, the line was "almost double his age" but that's a bit of an exaggeration. Wikipedia says she was 35 when they got involved in 1534. He ascended the throne in 1547, which would have made her 48, and 60 when he died in 1559.
Henry I banished her from court at least for a time in the mid-1540s but the show seems to gloss over this, and she wasn't really put out to pasture until Henry II died in 1559.
I think these multinational productions sort of suffer from problems due to a lot of cooks in the kitchen with varying cultural influences. As well as the scheming to make a finished product with multi-national appeal so it can run in 3 countries as an original production and pay for its prestige production costs.
The too many characters problem probably results from wanting to have "enough" cast members from the production countries to help satisfy/generate audience interest as well as maybe strings attached to production money meant to promote local/national film industry or possibly even local labor rules.
I didn't mind the sprawling cast or the plot, and I sort of expect a Sam Spade story to end with a twist that makes some of the assumptions moot at the end. I mean, the Maltese Falcon showed that much of what went on was kind of a lot of energy into a McGuffin.
My bigger problem is that I just didn't love Clive Owen as Spade. Physically he's great, but whatever accent Owen was pulling off wasn't a compelling American accent and too often he seemed to slip into his native accent. Owen's unique diction is part of what sells his characters, but here there just wasn't enough American to make it work.
I think the ending could have been valid, but the movie did zero world building so we have just no idea what’s going on outside the bubble.
This was my biggest frustration with this film.
I just didn’t believe this one farm bubble was the ONLY inhabited space on Mars. Surely there are other bubbles? Maybe larger ones, subterranean bases or cities?
Like if this farm had that volume of stuff/mass, there was a shitload more of it on Mars. This wasn’t the only Mars settlement and Remmy’s family were nothing special new colonists.
I’d also question how far this dome was from other settled areas of Mars. It wouldn’t make sense to setup a dome for one random farm family super far from other settlements and sources of supplies.
I think you can kind of lump them together in as a general category of films that were sort of about "rural panic", where modern people go to rural areas and find hostile locals engaged in hostile, primitive violence. Even some Satanism films like "Race with the Devil" play into this a little.
I think Southern Comfort makes it more about a Vietnam metaphor, but still its got an urban vs. rural aspect for sure.
The bigger problem is for the National Guard which has to explain away how they lost so many soldiers.
If this kind of thing happened in real life they wouldn't have gotten so lost and big search parties would have been sent out to find them. And the "cajuns" wouldn't have tried to kill them either, for fear that the search parties to follow would be large and well armed.
The real disappointment was that it was a pretty good modern detective noir even if it was all kind of stolen from Raymond Chandler and Chinatown.
The noir part was interesting enough that I could maybe watch another season but I don’t know how Sugar Hunts The Other Alien is really going to satisfy.
Most civil wars represent a "boiling over" of hostilities that took years, decades or even longer to reach. I don't think its necessarily a stretch for any civil war to result in a lot of brutality.
What I found less compelling was the willingness of large parts of the country to give up the luxuries and conveniences they'd still have if they weren't fighting a civil war. Modern authoritarian governments have found that decent employment and ample consumer goods largely drains away insurrectionist impulses. You might be willing to put a Trump sticker or even flag on your SuperDuty, but are you willing to give up your SuperDuty, air conditioning, etc. to fight in Trump's revolution?
So the dozens (at least!) of court challenges alleging corruption that were thrown out for lack of evidence were part of some conspiracy? The massive settlements to voting machine makers over baseless claims of corruption?
There was no corruption. Your guy lost.
I had a lot of questions about how journalism was supposed to be working in this film. As a trade and organized business, it's kind of on thin ice these days. How does being a professional journalist work during an American civil war? I kind of get the idea that the internet and communications networks would be marginal and there's probably not much distribution of newspapers or magazines, not to mention active censorship.
Who's paying them? Where does their content *go*? Who owns that SUV they drive? There was no structure, no editor or publisher.
I kind of wonder if the whole journalism thing would have been better if the journalists had been foreign -- the old guy, British, the young guy maybe German or Italian and Dunst French. The rookie girl, an American.
You're not wrong, it wasn't a good film, but I was entertained for the duration.
I thought it was all kind of thin gruel. Either the writing was just lame or they tried too hard to divorce it from current events, but who were these journalists? Random freelancers as society crumbles? Who do they work for or sell their work too? What the hell is journalism during a civil war?
I think the characters came off surprisingly thin, despite Dunst's fairly good acting.
It's something of a fair criticism to suggest that her breakout roles as an young ingenue didn't leave her a big path forward as she aged. Casting the young girl ingenue is easy in Hollywood, there's a new crop every year. Nothing about her past roles suggests what kind of character she should portray or who she is.
And like it or not, I suspect she's rejected movies which would have been a good fit for a 30-something woman because they were too sexual or required a lot of nudity. Hollywood tends to be exploitive in this department and I can see why she wouldn't want to pursue them, but rejecting 30-someting female roles because of sex or nudity ends up closing the door on a lot of narratives which are good fits for women in that age bracket.
She was briefly hospitalized for depression, and I kind of question whether her emotional temperament hasn't rubbed off on the kinds of roles she's able to get. She doesn't really seem to project a lot of joy.
I tend to agree with this, and I think most people who accuse it of bias are just projecting their own politics onto it. Which is in a way a credit to the ambiguous backdrop Garland created.
I think it would have been better, though, if Lee had been given more of a backstory if the meat of the film is largely her and the young photographer as mother/daughter like figures.
It'd grow tiresome as a long road movie with not much more than random encounters with weird people and random militia/fighters and side journeys. I think you'd also wind up exposing the underlying politics behind the civil war, which would rob it of its documentary realism if the issues were made-up/in-universe only issues OR make it too dependent on present day events.
This film did a fair job of suggesting what a civil war would look like on the ground without actually detailing what its in-universe politics are or too overtly basing them on current events, but I think it does so at a cost to much of a cohesive narrative. I don't think this could be sustained in a series.
If you asked people who were historians or political scientists what would likely cause an American civil war in the present era it would end up being things related to present day political divisions, barring some external conflict or natural disaster. It's not going to be about the designated hitter in baseball, Taco Bell vs. Chipotle, Ford vs. Chevy.
This makes it easy to project your own contemporary political conflicts into this movie, even though the movie doesn't do anything at all to explain the nature of the conflict or how Texas and California wind up in a dominant alliance against the Federal government.
I'm guessing that it doesn't work with that level of refinement, and the best you can do is conceptualize a world where it worked out with Daniella, which means the problem of disposing of Jason1.
I'm curious how Jason1 exited the box in the same timeline as Jason2. It seems like (as of EP4) that you have to manually open the box to exit into a timeline.
Wouldn't it even make more sense to imagine some kind of apocalyptic world and dump Jason1 there? Having him return to the Jason2 origin timeline means Jason1 will likely figure out the box and could undermine Jason2's scheme.
Is that travel rule part of the book or was it spelled out in the most recent episode?
I think you can probably get creative with "uncertainty" and create some principal that suggests that the box comes into existence in timelines where it will exist or that the act of traveling to a timeline causes the box to exist in that timeline. I mean it's fiction and you can't build a box to travel the multiverse, so you can kind of bend the rules.
I don't think a book to series adaptation is always a bad idea, but realistically a single season (8-10 episodes) ought to be enough for a single book. Some books are fine as a single movie, but usually there's some necessary streamlining and omissions to fit it into 2 hours.
The problem is that streamers struggle to resist the urge to drag things out -- stretch a book into more than one season, or tinker with the pacing if the book doesn't really have enough material to make 8 hours. At the end of the day, these end up being business decisions, not artistic decisions.