Vincent.
Deke Slayton.
It’s not trying to say that. You’ve missed the point entirely.
Your real life comparison would only work if say, NASA had a very well publicized policy against Buddhists, and Mr. Slayton kept secret his Buddhist beliefs his whole life whilst earnestly working towards his goal of becoming an astronaut. In fact he only chose to become an astronaut because of NASA’s discriminatory policy; he could have gone to work instead at the Buddhist friendly CIA. NASA is really serious about the anti-Buddhism thing. In fact they give regular lie detector tests about religious beliefs, and they search employee homes for Buddhist paraphernalia daily. And if NASA finds out his secret they will strip Slayton of all his accomplishments, humiliate him, and throw him into jail. The public at large will agree with this treatment and thoroughly hate him for his lies.
Of course in real life, after his heart murmur was detected, Mr. Slayton was made Flight Crew Director at NASA for 11 years, then Chief Astronaut of the Gemini and Apollo missions, then head of Approach and Landing for the Shuttle missions. Oh yeah, they also sent him into space on the Apollo–Soyuz mission.
Surely you can see the huge differences between the situations.
Yes, Ethan Hawke’s character (Vincent) is the hero of the story. I disagree with anyone who says he isn’t or that it is unclear. But the point of the story is that Vincent defies oppression and wins. It is not a story about a person facing hardships and making prudent and logical choices to maximize his chances at happiness in life and serve society to his fullest capacity. That would be boring and dull.
Hasn’t anyone seen “Signs”? I always thought it was the most stupid “Significant” film ever made (and Lord knows M. Knight is a master of dumb “Important” movies). But then I’ve never seen Gattica.
So, the premise is – if you want to see the movie and don’t want me to ruin it, then stop reading it now, cause I’m not going to spoiler-box it, because it already stinks that much – it’s that aliens want to come and conquer earth. A good premise, I would argue, been done many times before.
But M. Knight’s are really dumb aliens. See, they’re deathly allergic to water. Yes, water that falls from the sky and makes up two-thirds the surface area of our fine planet; Earth is the planet they choose to conquer.
Do they choose to land first on some dry part of the earth, the Atacama Desert or Antarctica? No, they choose Bucks County, Pennsylvania when the corn is ripe, having been watered all summer long, and ripe for making weird symbols to alert us to their presence.
I’ve spoken with some who like this stinker. They tell me that it’s really about faith. I hope that 1,000 generations from now, when we have the ability to cross cosmos, to conquer planets outside our system, we remember to bring the brollys, the slickers and the wellies. I know its a long trip, but leave the DVDs of “Signs” – and Gattica, for that matter – behind.
I just saw Eyes Wide Shut for the first time. Does it assault Western culture male-female double standards? Expose the decadence of high society? Shatter the madonna-whore dividing line? Blur the difference between dreams and reality? No. It’s just pretentious melodrama with great tits and an attempt to break the record for showing the most muff and exposed labia in a mainstream non-porn Hollywood movie. Admirable goals, but the main elements are nonsense.
The pot scene was embarrassing. The way Kidman rambles on during the entire movie about her sexual fantasies is cringe inducing.
The main thread of the movie seems to be that Cruise is **SHOCKED ** to learn that women have sexual fantasies regarding men besides their spouses and are tempted to cheat and potentially ruin their family life, in a similar way that men do. This would be a pearl clutching moment in the Victorian era, maybe. Not so much in 1999.
In response to his wife’s confession of having the hots for the naval officer and dreaming about gangbangs, Cruise wants to…cheat on her? Wait, what? That doesn’t make much sense. Or maybe he doesn’t really want to? During every attempt either fate intervenes to prevent it or he gets guilt tripped out of it. I was waiting for the reveal where his wife was cheating on him now or part of the orgy in some way to weakly justify his bizarre behavior. Nope, she just has wetdreams and a healthy libido, and for this he loses his fucking mind.
Hey Cruise, after your wife wakes up from a dream where she’s having a gangbang, how about you…fuck her? I know, crazy idea. Why not buy a naval uniform and have some cheesy roleplaying? Does she have to draw a picture?
It’s as if karma is trying to prove Kidman’s point to Cruise by having every women he meets throughout the movie wanting to jump his bones immediately and with hardly a how do you do. Yet the point, if there is a point, isn’t very convincing because all but 2 of these women are either prostitutes or coerced models. Or prostitute models, as the women who was killed is referred to as a high class hooker. She was the same one who almost overdosed at the start of the movie, so she’s a druggie being strung along for sex too. Every impossibly proportioned woman at the high society orgy was probably paid to be there. So much for women’s sexual liberation, or whatever the hand wringing feminist point was. The only counter-examples are the daughter of his former patient and the underage costume shop girl, but she turns into a hooker as well, with her dad as the pimp! So really, Cruise’s character was right in his argument with his wife. 90% of the offered women don’t think like men at all. Maybe if the decadent cult had the sexes reversed, with the women being in charge and the men nude and made to be sexual objects…but no one would want to see that.
And I still don’t understand their argument. She freaked out when her husband insinuated the only reason the guy wanted to talk with her is for sex. She gets mad at this, despite* just admitting* that he was trying to trick her to go upstairs and fuck. Palm, meet face.
Every conversation is three times longer than it should be.
So Tom, do you like fucking Nicole Kidman?
Do. I. Like…fucking? Nicole Kidman?
Yes, do you like to fuck her? The Kidman woman? The penis in vagina thing?
Well, of course I do. Who wouldn’t?
What’s your favorite position for fucking her?
What’s my…favorite position…?
I’m getting stabby!
The primary antagonist isn’t the upper class or Cruise’s wildly outdated sexual outlook, it’s that god damned piano key.
I saw it for the first time a few months ago. Then I spent several hours trying to process what I saw. A film with such cool imagery and symbolism had to have a profound meaning, I thought. I researched it and read about it, thought about it, and eventually I gave up. The movie makes no sense. There is no plot, no message, none of the characters act like real humans at any moment. There is a conspiracy theory out there that the film is really an expose of the Illuminati, and that it got Kubrick murdered. As outlandish as it sounds that interpretation makes the most sense as there is no other discernible point to the film. I did read somewhere that it is based on a French novel. Maybe it was just a bad adaptation, but damned if I’m going to waste my time reading it in case it isn’t.
Inherit the Wind hasn’t aged well. Great script, bad, heavy-handed directing.
You seem to be disagreeing with Ellis Dee, who also disagrees with me. But you are at least taking the basic interpretation that I thought was the “normal” one, which I disagree with. So I will attempt to express one final time what I find frustrating about it.
So he lives in this unjust society. It’s unjust because it says “people who are likely to keel over and die at any moment are second class citizens in all ways and are only worthy to be janitors, no matter how brilliant they are”. This is unjust. It’s also monumentally stupid and inefficient, which is part of my objection to the movie. So he decides to fight the system by becoming an astronaut. Which is ironic in that “people who are likely to keel over and die at any moment can not become astronauts” is NOT unjust or stupid, it’s in fact eminently sensible. So of all the possible ways he chooses to fight the injustice of the system, he picks just about the only one that does NOT fight the injustice of the system. And then it’s a huge triumph when he succeeds.
(Oh, and glowacks: I’m 95% sure that there’s a point where he’s talking about how he was conceived in the back of his mom’s 65 Chevy, or something like that… something which definitely puts the action on our earth in our not-hugely-distant future.)
FWIW, this is the interpretation my wife and friends had at the end of Gattaca.
I think you’re looking too deeply into the main character’s motivations. Dude didn’t want to fight the system or right some great social injustice. Dude just wanted to be an astronaut. Thats why he did everything he did. To go up in space.
Nothing beats Anakin-as-Vader screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” at the end of episode 3. It was the perfect ridiculous ending to a ridiculous series.
Since Billy Jack has already been mentioned, I’ll toss out Bless the Beasts and the Children. It seemed very serious when I was about 12.
It’s not really fair to include what an amateur vanity project in a discussion that involves honest-to-God professional cinematic productions.
This is what GATTACA did. It is a movie about prejudice. It is an allegory.
He did not have a heart murmur. He was supposed to be dead by the time he was 30. His heart was racing during the running test like a normal person’s heart would be. The genetically altered heart would not be beating fast.
The doctor clearly states why he helps cover up the fact that Ethan Hawk is an ‘in-valid’. His own son was 'not as good as he was supposed to be when he was ‘made’. Uma Thurman shares this fate. Some people accept that fate, some don’t.
Minorty Report biggest error was using that name. Other than people predicting murders before they happen it has virtually nothing in common with the story by that name.
Actually it is the polar opposite of the story. In the movie, the individual is placed as more important than society. The precogs need to be freed. Tom Cruise should be happy and he isn’t happy running PreCrime.
In both someone tries to destroy PreCrime by framing the main character for an upcoming murder. But in the story, the character figures this out and he goes through with the murder, sacrificing himself but saving PreCrime. He is not more than society. But the movie does the exact opposite.
I just watched It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Man that movie is way too fucking earnest and it is so bad. It is basically One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as an After School Special.
Haven’t seen it awhile, but why do you say that? NOT disagreeing, just want to hear more.
Billy Jack
Dead by 30? From what? You said his heart was beating like a normal person’s would be. A normal person wouldn’t be dead at 30. He’d be dead at 30 because he wasn’t genetically altered? What kind of parents would allow him not be genetically altered in such a society?
The problem was that no one in control of the movie thought anything through. I blame the director. Check his other projects.
The Matrix.
Sure the f/x were pretty and all but the dialogue was so over the top cheesy. Like a bunch of pot heads philosophizing about the meaning of life. “Dude, what if dog really spelled cat? Whoa!”
Soylent Green
What a P.O.S. movie. My friends and I in college drank all the way through it and it was bearable, but we laughed at everything. The only good things to come of that was that on Tuesdays we would walk to the cafeteria and inevitably make jokes about what was being served. According to the movie, Tuesday is Soylent Green Day!!!
When he was born, they ran a genetic test and and they list the probabilities of certain diseases, including heart disease and they give him an expected life span of 30 years.
He is never diagnosed with an actual heart disease.
Another part of the movie that should be made more clear.
Is the situation:
(a) he was born with higher odds than normal of having heart issues, but when he grows up medical tests show that he has no heart issues
or
(b) he was born with higher odds than normal of having heart issues, and when he grows up medical tests confirm that his heart is in fact very fragile
or
(c) he was born with higher odds than normal of having heart issues, and no one has ever bothered to check whether he actually HAS heart issues
?
Each of those three cases puts a fairly different spin on lots of things… is it ever made explicit in the movie which it is?