I was reading an interview with Roger Ebert who said about “Nashville”
“After I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser. It’s that good a movie.”
You might even be able to split them into “Yes, it helped me understand, but the movie is bad” but hopefully, “Great movie that helped me understand people more”
Zorro, The Gay Blade.
No, really.
Start with the point that fuels the whole thing: gay people? They can be just as heroic as their straight counterparts. Because — well, why wouldn’t that be the case? What does one have to do with the other?
Someone is a government official? Well, maybe he’s the bad guy of the piece. Why not? What does one have to do with the other?
Someone is acting uninjured? Maybe they’re injured. Someone is acting like they don’t understand? Maybe they understand perfectly. Someone says they were told something? Maybe they, y’know, weren’t. Someone dressed like a priest is talking about Jesus? So what? What follows?
Conspiracy, a film depicting the Wannsee Conference reproduced from surviving notes, is a sober look at the kind of banal, dispassionate, bureaucratic evil that extinguished six million+ people in the 1940s. If you ever look at monstrous events of great magnitude and wonder how people could be like that, well… Conspiracy helped me understand.
Sullivan’s Travels
I’m not sure why that one spoke to me, perhaps effective use of comedy to make it’s points with a light hand.
I’ve posted here before about the film Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000, written and directed by Rodrigo García). Not my kind of film and I don’t know why I was watching it, but I was struck by a line of dialogue. A woman with an office job tries to befriend an older homeless woman who views her with contempt. The former mentions love, and the latter offers this advice:
Let me tell you about love. You don’t ask, you give.
That made me think differently about certain ego-driven personalities, especially a former girlfriend who pretended to be nice but was just out to get all she could from others.
ETA: I’ve just learned that director Rodrigo García is the son of Gabriel García Márquez (1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, among other distinctions).
Do The Right Thing is the first movie that comes to my mind.
This. Spike’s character throwing the trashcan through the window was shocking to me and was one of the things that began the process (not completed, 30+ years later) of breaking through my bubble of white privilege to try to understand the experience of black people in America.
The Up series. They follow the lives of 14 people who are six years older than me, with a film every seven years. Since I was 22 they have given me a peek at what’s in store for me and my cohort. They are remarkably perceptive and accurate in illuminating the stages of life. When I watch them I feel like I understand not only how people behave but why.
It’s a very good movie, but it makes your skin crawl.
I love Seven-Up and wondering what happens since Michael Apted passed away. I remember renting this when I was 18, over 20 yrs ago… If you liked this, you might like the following documentaries
-Place de la republique (Louis Malle)
-Chronicles of a Summer
-Meetings (Pasolini)
-Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker)
They Live.
Not because it was a documentary or anything, but because of the 40,000 feet perspective wherein people will actively resist exploring a potential truth, and are readily duped in exchange for an easily understood purpose in life. The “Put 'em on!” fight scene was a perfect, and potentially understated, metaphor for fighting willful ignorance. The movie itself is the glasses, and it has helped me understand why people will accept the craziest things as truth.
Which brings me also to Ink.
“They’re all reactions. One thing begets the next. A man has a weakness, he’s flawed. That flaw leads him to guilt. The guilt leads him to shame. The shame he compensates with pride and vanity. And when pride fails, despair takes over and they all lead to his destruction.”
And also to Joe v. The Volcano “If you have a choice between killing yourself and doing something you’re scared of doing, why not take the leap and do the thing you’re scared of doing?” Because people are more afraid of the unknown than they are of misery.
I still don’t have a lot of patience with people, but I think I understand them enough now to feel more pity than revulsion.
I recently saw the movie Senior Year with Rebel Wilson. Not a deep nor meaningful film by any means but some scene in the movie made me think about the implication of everyone being on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media all of the time.
When there’s a push to put your whole life online, for others to view, that is naturally going to drive people to want to be perfect, to seem like the best and most wholesome person ever, and to engage in excessive amounts of virtue signaling. You’re being judged for every thing that you do, continuously. (If I recall correctly, the girl who is accused of this sort of lifestyle most strongly, ends up actually being a genuinely decent person.)
It wasn’t really a core element of the movie, but it does explain the rise of “woke” and “anti-woke”.
I agree with this movie. For a superficially cheesy horror/scifi movie, it made a surprising impression on me.
I saw “They Live” at 17 and yeah, it’s good. I might watch it now just to compare.