Weeeell, Rumson was doing a little bit more than that. He was suggesting that having Sydney sleep over with him in the White House made Andrew Shepard a bad parent and by extension a bad president, he characterized Sydney as un-American because she attended a protest and happened to be in the same photograph as a burning flag, and he intimated that she traded sex for grades in college. Rumson absolutely was smearing Sydney for daring to exercise her First Amendment rights, in part, and Shepard was absolutely right to call Rumson out on all of that shit, and I have been known on occasion to play that section of the DVD and wish that we’d had a Democratic president in the recent past who’d had the balls to make that kind of statement in the face of Republican smear campaigns, and that we’d had an American electorate smart enough not to fall for Republican smear campaigns.
Damn, you hate it so much you can’t even bring yourself to get the name right.
At the risk of being whooshed, the Crossroads in question was most likely not the Ralph Macchio movie but the Britney Spears vehicle of the same name.
Clearly we can not discuss this film, because I can name at least three things wrong with this statement without even trying. He, qute frankly, was doing everything he shouldn’t have and if you don’t see that, then there is a cultural chasm that I don’t think either one of us will cross willingly. I think we should simply agree to disagree on this one.
Actually, they did forshadow it a little. In Empire, Yoda says “There is another”. And they did give Leia a connection to him during the escape from Bespin.
The “Leia=sister” thing shoehorns nicely into that.
Just to be clear, I’ve seen neither the Britney version nor the Ralph (what a fitting first name) Macchio version – I was merely commenting on Macchio’s lack of acting ability. (IOW, it wasn’t me who brought Ralph up – I was just commenting.)
The movie I can’t stop ranting about? Thelma and Louise . I’d initially been told it was some sort of feminist statement. It wasn’t–it was women making stupid decisions and then even stupider ones and never taking responsibility for their actions, because of course everything is the fault of society or white males or whatever. The movie isn’t about feminist empowerment so much as it is about becoming a criminal because, hey, you’re the victim.
But I’m willing to concede that if I hadn’t seen the movie with the idea that it was an important feminist manifesto I might not have been so disappointed in it.
It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I distinctly remember hating the movie Air Heads. The premise from what I remember was that this stupid band of idiots wants publicity so they forcefully take over a radio station and demand at gunpoint for them to play their songs. The worst part is that this uncouth band of youngsters are supposed to be the protagonists, and the evil radio station workers with their collared shirts and hair cuts are the villains. I really hate that sort of plot device, where people just doing their jobs are the BAD GUYS.
Count me as an ally. I despised the Ugly American characters held up as sympathetic. “Look! He’s rich and bored and lies to his wife! Look! She’s young and bored and isn’t looking for a job! Feel their self-inflicted pain! Love them as they insult the culture that welcomes them!”
Never has a hotel been so desperately in need of a daikaiju to stomp it.
The thing that cracks me up is that any fiction teacher, any critique group, any editor, will tell you that that sort of ending is gutless and unimaginative. It’s saying, “I can’t decide what happens. I’ll let you decide!” Personally, I think folks just put up with it from Sofia Coppola because they hope it’ll distract her from an acting career.
I’ll be pedestrian to say Grease. The fact that the leads are wwayy too old to be believable as high school students (especially Stockard Channing and bargain basement Bonaduce Jeff Conaway) or that it’s aged about as well as the Bay City Rollers doesn’t bother me and I know it’s based on a stage play that’s darker and more satirical, but even so- Olivia Newton John’s transformation into a slut at the end still irks me 25 years after I first saw it. As a misfit in school myself I waited the whole movie thinking “the other kids will come around” and nope, she had to join them. Argh.
Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil pissed me off because a great “surreal slice of life” plotless book was just mangled as if Eastwood didn’t have the slightest idea why it was popular to begin with. By turning it into a murder mystery (which it couldn’t have been less of in the original), working in the senseless sideplot for Baby Eastwood, way overutilizing Lady Chablis (she’s testifying at Jim Williams’s trial? WHAT?! and the ER scene… WHAT AGAIN?) and having some of the worst southern accents evah to sauntah across a movie show scrain (Spacey’s was alright at least, but for the others in the cast- did you just not listen to any of the native Savannah folk who were there on the set?) it just ruined the whole book.
Bowling for Columbine (which I have seen) pissed me off because I just did not understand what the point of chasing Dick Clark was (the man has investments all over the country, I really don’t fault him for what happened at a store he owned in a mall that he’d probably forgotten he ever owned an interest in to begin with) and while I am opposed to gun nuttery in general (I’m a moderate- I believe in private gun ownership with sensible regulations) and think Heston is a self-impressed tool, I thought that Moore’s interviewing of him was absolutely classless. This may go back to the Southern middle class thing, but YOU’RE IN THE MAN’S HOUSE! HE’S GRACIOUSLY INVITED YOU IN! You repay his willingness to be on camera by leaving a picture of a dead girl at his gates? If you want to debate him in an open forum fine, and I even think it is dishonest to say “I am the NRA” and then slink away from the effects of their lobby for deregulation, but time & place- his house as an invited guest is neither.
And that cartoon (which also infuriated Parker & Stone from South Park as they were concerned, appearing as it did after the interview with Stone (who told Moore’s people in advance that he had nothing substantive to add to a discussion of Columbine as he graduated years before the shootings and didn’t know anybody involved or their families) people would assume it was produced by the South Park team, and it was even billed as such in some reviews (by critics who made the assumption, not by Moore). The content of the cartoon was idiocy (you just said that the Puritans were all a bunch of cowards— people who got into a tiny boat, said goodbye to their loved ones knowing that it could well be the last time they’d ever seen them, having read reports of the Lost Colony and the disasters in the early years of Jamestown they still braved weeks at sea and hurricanes and the like to live in a wilderness that they knew was brimming over with disease and hostile natives [I know I know, they were bastards to the natives, but I’m saying- they were brave enough to live surrounded and outnumbered by people they thought of as savages] to wrench a living from a soil they knew nothing about- these people may have been imperialist, patronizing, intolerant, hypocritical, genocidal even, but cowardly they absolutely were not, and while I have no love for the NRA I think that implying the KKK and NRA had the same beginning was a sh!tty thing to do as well.)
Fahrenheit 911 I didn’t hate as much though it had traces of the same dishonesty and truth stretching, but Columbine was just pure tee narcissistic lying fatass Moore. And while I loved Roger & Me the first time I saw it, reading about it later pissed me off when I realized how much stuff he’d distorted or flat out lied about.
Except the supers are the only ones WITH talents, and they’re fighting to keep it that way. I haven’t seen the commentary, but if the real message is what you say it is then they did a pretty shit job of showing it.
I have similar problems with Thelma and Louise. It seems very anti-feminist to me. It seems to suggest that empowerment leads to a place where the only choice you have left is suicide. Again, this is why I like Verhoeven’s feminism: the tough broads make the rules, PLUS they win.
I’m confused what you think the premise of the Faces of Death films are. They claim to be all “death on film!” scenes, but that’s not entirely what’s going on. (I can’t find a scene-by-scene description of the original that I’d read once, which actually underwhelmed me.)
To paraphrase : “It’s a documentary about how a guy eats fast food - and unusually high quantities of it, at that - for every meal every day, over a prolonged period - and gains a bunch of weight and negatively impacts his health.”
And we’re what, surprised? If I start eating 15 billion calories a day of icecream, I expect weight gain and negative health impact.
It’s like filming a documentary called ‘Fork in the Socket’ - “When I jam this purdy piece of metal in this hole… OW! That smarts!”