Morons who won't see good films

The BBQ Pit
81

Why is it considered a crime if a person just want to feel good about seeing a movie? It’s interesting how the OP and others like him tend to cut everything down the middle; low, stupid cotton candy fluff on one side and artsy, ‘worthwhile’, deep meaningful on the other. They always pick the stupidest movies to prove their argument that everyone is a moron.

Again, what is so wrong with pure entertainment? If I enjoy nothing more than watching the beauty of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing, does that make me a moron? There is nothing ‘deep’ or ‘artsy’ or ‘culturally worthwhile’ about the dancing. I’m not about to learn anything or have a religious experience, just a great time.

As for ‘deep’ or ‘meaningful’ art, when it’s done well, that is entertainment as well. If I see a great tragic play, that, I think, is a form of entertainment also. People tend to have a rather narrow of ‘entertainment.’ Why would you go see a Shakespeare tragedy if it wasn’t entertaining in some way? Having such narrow high-minded, explosive reverance for ‘high art’, is sometimes the mark of the philistine.

The people who love depressing movies, for example(and I know more than my share), see them because that is entertainment to them, it’s what stimulates them. Though they will never say it’s just ‘entertainment.’ These people get off on this dark, brooding stuff exactly the same way a teen girl gets off on silly pop music; it’s like so much candy to them, they crave it. I mean, how many times can you watch the same type of boring depressing stuff, it’s almost neurotic.
I like the all the usual movies everyone enjoys, but I also love to see poetry on film. A movie like ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ is, I think, a great poetic tragedy. Or take Satyajit Ray’s ‘Aparijito’, which reaffirmed that clear, honest poetry on film is possible. It’s a movie that made me feel great. A movie can be completely ‘uplifting’ and enjoyable and not be a commercially-driven cornball sapfest. And a great, snappy comedy can make you feel great, too. So what if you’re not enlightened or philosophically perplexed by a movie; I don’t think going to a movie should be a chore, like sunday school or something.

I get pissed off when people lump everything together; all the great movies or movies that ‘look’ like great art versus everythingthing else-stupid comedies, melodramas or musicals. To me, a movie like ‘2001’ is monumentally unimaginitive and silly when compared to something like ‘Go’, with all the kids running around having a great time. Is it shocking if someone thinks that a movie like ‘Go’ has more of a claim to be called art than ‘2001’? Because it’s cold and austere it’s a great philosphical movie? If you’ve ever spent any time reading philosophy or great ideas, you’ll realize how shallow this movie is. To me, it’s just a cool, spooky movie with great photography;
I kind of got off on my own rant here, but I hope some of what I said makes some sense. Not all of it is directed at the OP, but more to that style of thought.

82

The ending was somber, not happy or celebratory. There was both implicit and explicit testament to the people who died, so really what’s at fault is the fact that Spielberg chose to focus on an interesting and true story about some survivors rather than people who died. Elie Weisel did not die at the end of Night, but nobody calls his work cheap entertainment. No, it’s not got a “happy” ending but neither (punctuating with muscular taps on the podium) did Schindler’s List. SAYING it does not make it so. Few people would come to that conclusion. The move did not have a hip hip hooray “Build Me Up Buttercup” ending, it was grave. The survivors did not even cheer that the war was over, it was more like, “great, but hell, what do we do now?”

As for knocking the OP for pitting people who watch dumb movies… read the post. He is not pitting people for watching dumb movies, he’s pitting them for refusing to watch good ones. It’s not the same thing. Perhaps the OP could have avoided the whole digression about crap movies, but the essence is that people WON’T watch good movies.

I would agree, but what’s “good” is obviously debatable. I don’t want to watch some arthouse crap downer because some film geek thinks it’s good for me. I’ve read Shakespeare and Joyce and Kafka and Goethe and so on, I’m plenty well intellectually fed and contemplative, so I don’t need psuedo-intellectual “movies about movies” to make me a better person. I’d rather watch something enjoyable. Like Seabiscuit. I love that little horse.

83

It was told “like an Indiana Jones movie” in that the characters were “movie-ized” to the point that they lacked the depth that you expect human beings to have. Oskar Schindler is portrayed as a mythic Hero, and embellished in ways that are an insult to history. So the man’s factory was producing munitions for the Nazis. To Spielberg, this was a problem that had to be “solved.” So in his movie, Schindler is surreptitiously working against Germany, by ensuring that his factory produces munitions with an extraordinarily high rate of failure. He must be a Hero, it’s not enough for him to be a human being whose sins are redeemed by compassion for other human beings.

I wouldn’t say that Schindler’s List is a contemptable piece of trash, but it’s a seriously flawed film. Why rely on cheesy formula? Well, because that’s what Spielberg does. It’s how he tells a story. His approach to Schindler’s List was about the same as his approach to E.T.. Personally, I think it’s a good movie in spite of its flaws, but it falls well short of greatness.

A film like The Pianist succeeds because it requires little suspension of disbelief. Characters are rendered with all the shades you expect from life. The script has immediacy and veracity. It’s not a fucking hagiography. You can empathize with (or revile) the people in the story in the way that you would if they were in front of you, instead of having everything spoon-fed to you.

Next to The Pianist, Schindler’s List is like Holocaustland and Disneyworld.

Maus works for the same reasons, in a strange way. It doesn’t matter that the characters are rendered as cartoon animals. They’re real in a way that Spielberg’s Schindler is not. They’re true. Spiegelman doesn’t start from the position that the reader has to like “the good guys” and hate “the bad guys,” and carefully show you only certain qualities of each. It’s presented in such a matter of fact way, with no guilding of lilies or beshitting of turds. When you read it, you feel like it could be your father telling you these things, first-hand, and you’re reminded that there’s no special reason why it couldn’t. Just chance.
Now, on to The Blair Witch Project:

It’s the cinematic equivalent of Naked Came The Stranger.

That is all.

84

Yes it was, and it wasn’t Ilsa that said so first, it was I.

Spielberg went on record saying things to the effect that because of his own heritage, he needed to make this film as a reminder for a younger generation what went on. That’s all good and fine, but the movie still made me sick, for all his good intentions, and it made me sick for all the wrong reasons.

It’s told like Indiana Jones movies because that’s the only way Spielberg knows how to tell a story. The fairy of Misdirection is working overtime and false scares to pump up false suspense is, in my opinion, not a good way to tell a story about the holocaust. The Shower scene, where we, in the audience, are supposed to gasp because we all know what’s coming, don’t we? Only it doesn’t.
And that’s why the movie is trivializing the holocaust. The way it demonizes the Germans in the camp are also wrong. They weren’t monsters, they were everyday people who went about doing their job, trying to exterminate at least to ‘races’ and all homosexuals. That’s the scary thing. They weren’t psychos, enjoying their work, they were grey bureaucrats. But that is much harder (and obviously beyond Spielberg’s abilities) to show on film. Much easier to show raving maniacs, being evil for the sole sake of evil and laughing while they kill, all in the standard Hollywood formula, where the Hero is flawless and the Villain is a sub-human.

Spielberg is an excellent craftsman and from what I’ve seen of him in interviews, he seems like a generally nice guy. An artist, he is not. Whenever he’s abandoned the summer blockbusters and tried to do art, the movies are giving away a fell of: “Let’s break our backs, trying to win an Oscar.” They don’t convey: “I have a really important thing to tell you guys.” Amistad, Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan - all beautiful films, perfectly done, but ultimately empty.

No one that I know of. That won’t stop me from passing judgement on pretentious crap, posing as a serious movie, dealing with a serious subject and failing miserably.

85

Jinx, buy me a coke!

86

Well, Larry, at least you mount something of case rather than saying “it sucks because it sucks,” and I have to agree especially with the bit about showing the primary Nazi as a monster and thus not revealing how most Nazis were just everyday Hanses doing their hateful work. It could have been a different movie, even a better movie. I still don’t think it’s all bad, nor do I think it is especially pretentious, since I don’t think it pretends to be much more than it is: an historical epic about how some Jews survived the holocaust through the efforts of Oskar Schindler. Schindler was hardly portrayed as all good, but Fiennes certainly gave us all bad to the hilt, BTW. I thought, as a writer and as a former literary quasi-scholar, that the writing of the movie was very tight, with many iconic episodes, and did good job managing the many aspects of the true story (which I also read in book form) in the form of a movie that most people can follow and comprehend (for comparison, see the movie 8 Men Out, which requires every audience member to already know the full historical background of the BlackSox scandal and major players… it’s assumed that every audience member is a total baseball geek like me.) So I’d say that Schindler’s List is certainly flawed, but it is not trivial, nor does it trivialize the Holocaust.

87

Hogwash. You’re just swallowing the Hanna Arendt “banality of evil” line. but while some Nazis were gray bureaucrats, others were indeed psychos. Ilsa Koch and Josef Mengele, anyone? If you read first-person accounts of the holocaust, you’ll find that perverts and sadists had free rein to indulge their appetites on the concentration camp inmates. What you miss is that Amon Goethe was a real person, and the crimes depicted in the film actually happened.

You really didn’t understand that movie, did you? Oskar Schindler was nowhere depicted as flawless; he was a Party member out to make a quick buck from slave labor, he was an adulterer, and he was a failure in business and in life. All of that was shown in the film. The people in the film existed–if you watched the movie, you might have noticed that at the end each actor appears accompanied by the person he or she portrayed.

I’m sorry you feel that Spielberg was too harsh on the Nazis, but given that they murdered millions of innocent people, maybe drawing them as decent human beings is doing a disservice to the truth.

88

Moreover, I would wager that if Spielberg had released the film under a psedonnym, you folks would be praising this new director to the skies for his intense protrayal of the holocaust. But because it’s Spielberg, you automatically call the film “Hollywood crap.”

You might consider getting measured for a black turtleneck yourselves.

89

Can you imagine a world where all movies (hell, books, TV, music, etc) were all meaningful and perfect in execution?

BORING! It wouldn’t be long before people run screaming out of a theater begging for Ernest Goes Bananas or some such mindless drivel.

Like it or not, Hollywood is a business. Movie studios want to make money. They will continue to put out whatever will make money. Hopefully, lots of money. True, they’d all like to have shelves full of Oscars® and other awards, but they’d rather have the money.

If they can make enough movies that make enough money, they might take a chance and put out something with artistic integrity. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.

It’s all subjective anyway.

90

Oh, bullshit. I like Spielberg plenty. Catch Me If You Can is a great movie. I’m one of the few people I know that has no complaints at all with AI. The thing is, these are films that can be enjoyed without needing to believe them. The problem with Schindler’s List is that, even if you intellectually know that what you’re looking at happened, Spielberg puts it across in a way that makes it seem unreal, and literally unbelievable. It’s not enough for Goeth to randomly shoot at inmates, he has to do it from his bedroom window, waking up his sleeping girlfriend. Spielberg feels compelled to keep saying, “Turn up the psychotic glare a little, Ralph. Makeup, can we get a little glycerine on his face? Evil! More Evil!”

Nobody’s asking for a movie that portrays the Nazi’s as “decent human beings.” Just realistically evil. That doesn’t mean compromising on the enormity of the atrocities, it just means showing them in a way that seems true, instead of a clumsy pantomime.

Cookie-cutter characterizations are fine if you just want to be entertained, but when you use them in something that purports to be documentary, they serve to make the subject more remote.

So you’d be fine with retelling of the murder of Kitty Genovese in which the apartment-dwellers are shown simultaneously putting their fingers in their ears while yelling “LA LA LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA!”? Or would you want something that seemed a little more true-to-life?

91

Oh, gobear please. Projecting much? Reading too much into things? I suppose I should feel offended by your attempt to piss me off with

but I’ll write that down as you being emotional.
You see, gobear, the scary thing about what happened in Germany is not that the psychos and sadists had free rein, the scary thing was that so many who weren’t sadists and psychopats, at least not in a clinical sense, were accomplices.

BTW, I think your numbers are a bit off.

As for Hanna Arendt, I’ve never even heard of her, I make my own opinions.
The fact is, that many atrocities happened around the world, even in countries on the winning side. It was an era of medical experiments, forced sterilisations, lobotomies, phrenology and what have you. The naziz took it to the next level and beyond and did it wholesale, something that musn’t be forgotten.
But more importantly, we need to look into why and how that could happen, because the Germans aren’t genetically different or emotionally void, just from being born in that country. Many people in the US and the rest of Europe liked what they saw the nazis do. Anti semitism was, and still is, abundant.

Schindler’s List took one tiny slice out of something very complex and difficult. The result was trying to do things that I don’t think it achieved. At any rate, judging it to be profound or important and holding it up as an example of good film making is just shallow, seeing that it was just fluff in a darker dress.

Saying I didn’t understand the movie and lumping that in with pre-conceived notions about what I know and not know about films and why I react the way I do to them, is insulting. It’s not like SL was a very profound film. In fact, as with most of what Spielberg does, any seven year old can get it. The way he directs and produces movies is also very transparent. The only things I can think of that steps outside that formula is Duel, Sugerland Express and the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

Oh, and I stopped wearing black turtle necks 20 years ago. They do nothing for my complexion.

92

I detract the line about numbers being off. For some reason, I read it as “hundreds of millions”. Getting to tired and it seems I do need glasses. Damn.

93

I don’t know if it’s art, but <i>Go</i> is a better movie than 2001. 2001 is exactly the kind of film geek movie I hate. It’s all about these “big ideas” that make the audience members feel smart. There are good scenes… the stuff with HAL is good, classic stuff… but the whole foetus-planet-blinking-eye thing ruins it.

94

Germany’s eugenics programs were modeled after “progressive” programs in Canada.

Programs that started in the '20s and continued for two decades after the war, because everybody knew that nice, polite, Canadians weren’t the sort to carry out monstrously inhumane acts like that. It wasn’t a move in the direction of genocide, either. All them poor aboriginal folks were “feeble-minded.” We have to paperwork to prove it. :frowning:

95

I would like to continue this conversation, but I’m off to see the Ben Kinglsey movie, “The House of Sand and Fog.” I hope there’s at least once dance number in it, and maybe a pratfall or two. Most of all, I hope it makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

96

[QUOTE=The Gaspode]
Oh, gobear please.

I was not attempting to piss you off nor am I being emotional. I said very clearly what I meant. I see no reason to use discretion or attmept to paint the Nazis as anything other than monsters becuase that is what they were.

Agreed, but that’s not what you said. You said " They weren’t monsters, they were everyday people who went about doing their job," and I disagree.

Ahem, I live in Virginia–ever heard of Carrie Buck? American eugenicists who sterilized the poor and disenfranchised in order to eliminate “the propogation of the unfit” helped inspire Nazi racial science. Read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Edwin Black’s War against the Weak to learn about American attempts to create our own master race.

I won’t argue that it’s profound, but it is important and it is good film making. And how you can call a film that show in harrowing detail the scouring of the Warsaw ghetto “fluff” is beyond me.

You demonstrated that you don’t understand the movie by making erroneous statements about how Schindler was portrayed. The film was not about a flawless hero; that you said so demonstrates your failure to “get” the film.

Even though you didn’t mention it, I’ll spot you the crying scene at the end. There’s no evidence that it happened and it was too melodramatic.

I really doubt that a seven-year-old would even begin to comprehend SL. Spielberg is not a visionary; he’s no Kurosawa or Fellini, but neither is he a hack who made up the story as you would have it.

97

Oh, horribly tasteless and bad joke follows.

Schindler’s List: Recommended by nine out of ten ;j !

98

The thing about monsters is that don’t broadcast “MONSTER!”

See this guy? I live with a woman who lived in his house for three years. By all accounts, he seemed like just as nice a man as you could hope to meet. That is, when he wasn’t brutally assaulting women and raping children.

Comic-book style evil Nazis worked great in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They got in the way of Schindler’s List, though.

99

I agree that pedophiles and rapists can hide behind a pleasant appearance. But the Nazis did broadcast “MONSTER!” Grey or black uniforms, carrying guns, the whole goosestepping and “JUDEN VERBOTEN!” kinda gave the game away.

Spielberg didn’t use comic-book style Nazis. He did depict them as wholly evil, because there is no other way to describe people who calmly arrest, imprison, gas, and incinerate men, women, and children to eradicate their ethnicity from the face of the earth.

100

Excuse me, I’ve been lurking about this thread hoping to find some movies that have been mentioned in the course of this discussion that I might find worth watching myself.

Happily I found two or three English language films that have been mentioned that I’ll check out and view. Hardly five per cent, but to be fair I did disregard the foreign films that some of you posters recomended. The foreign films that I have seen lately are indeed pretentious and not worth the investment in time in order to find that rare gem of silver screen genius that originates from overseas.

That said, that is not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say is that we all don’t watch movies to be entertained. We watch movies to learn. The pleasure that we recieve from the watching them is proportional to the amount of our learning. No more, no less. Different people learn different things from watching different movies.

That is what I wanted to say.