One of the issues with Mississippi Burning is that, again, the film is shown through the eyes of (very idealized) white protagonists. This even happens today with films like The Help and The Right Side and has been the standard since Hepburn and Tracy debated whether to allow their daughter to date Sidney Portier (The horror! Of course, he portrayed a Harvard grad in medicine, the sort of white or black guy I pray my daughter dates.) in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Most people I know, including the people in the theater with me, seemed to feel this way about The Passion of the Christ. I, for some reason, was expecting a lot worse. I thought it just looked like a very well-produced passion play, while I was expecting an absolute gorefest with stuff hanging out and stuff.
That said, my family did buy the DVD, and it is still the only movie we own that we’ve never watched. So, apparently, it did affect me somewhat. Still, I can’t think of a movie that fits the OP for me. The ones that could fit, like pretty much any scary movie, are ones I know ahead of time I won’t like, so I don’t watch them.
I think you watched a very different film to me. Neither Hackman nor Dafoe are idealised as both their faults are writ large enough for all to see.
All other white people in the film are dammed through violence and bigotry or inaction. No-one comes out clean.
Anyway, these are just opinions so I’ll end the hijack here.
It would be requiem for a dream for me, more precisely toward the ending.
The way electroshock therapy was conducted was upsetting me because I don’t think it was done like that in real life, plus the discordant music was keeping me on edge.
And then, when it came to the girls kinda forced to do this sex stuff with the double dildo and the particular words a guy says to order it, the look of tiredness on the face of the girl, I just lose it and had to walk out off the room and go outside for a walk. It destroyed for hours humanity for me.
Well, that’s not the issue. The issue is that the story is about the black civil rights struggle but the film (and many other films from Hollywood dealing with it) tells the story through white protagonists.
Well I fundamentally disagree. Not every film needs to box-tick in that way.
I watched “downfall” and “conspiracy” recently and though they both cover the workings of the Nazi Party during the second world neither of them told the story of those on the receiving end of the atrocities, they weren’t balanced in that way, nor completely accurate and didn’t need to be.
In this case, two of the victims were white, the protagonists were white, those covering it up were white, those trying to solve the crime were white, so it really shouldn’t be so remarkable that this is told from a white perspective.
Oh, and though this is interesting, I really am ending the hijack here this time.
If we are talking *irritating *movies, one I remember vividly was House of Sand and Fog. In the opening scene I foresaw what was going to happen, only not quite as horribly and completely as it actually played out. The audience was clearly supposed to at least initially identify and sympathize with the hapless druggie who eventually managed to ruin the lives of so many, simply because she was young, nice-looking, well-meaning, and middle-class, and be suspicious of the pushy Muslim foreigner. So there was going to be a plot twist! Ugh.
Since I loathed the female protagonist from the get-go, my annoyance deepened to a surprising amount of anger by the end. Still pisses me off when I think about it.
While I don’t disagree, Ulfreida, you were supposed to sympathize with a naive young woman who, through a bureaucratic snafu, ended up having the house her father built taken from her and sold to someone else.
It’s true that there were steps that could have been taken to stop that before it happened, and that she’s very, very flawed. But imagine how it would feel if it happened to you. Consider:
- You receive notification that your house is going to be sold for the back taxes due on it, but
- Your father built the house you live in, and it’s really the only thing left to remember him by since he’s dead.
- The back taxes are for a totally different house, which no one in your family has any connection to. The street names are similar, and a clerical error lists your address instead of the correct one.
- The cops deliver the notice to vacate, and you consult an attorney about it. While you and your atty try to get the paperwork corrected,
- Your house is sold to an individual who feels like it’s not HIS fault that the error occurred. He crossed every T and dotted every I that he was supposed to, and has no legal obligation to rescind his purchase of the house. Whether there’s a moral obligation is a different conversation.
Yeah, Kathy’s not real likable in the movie (the book, as almost always, is much better about getting inside her head to understand her motivations and actions). And she made some stupid choices. But a clerical error has her evicted from her house. It threw her for a loop, and I can’t say that I don’t sympathize with her to an extent.
Big Fish. It makes me bawl like a baby. Apparently, I have unresolved issues with my father.
Yes, and if there was a trend in American film of Holocaust-themed movies being consistently told from Germany’s perspective and rarely from the victims themselves, this analogy would work. But there isn’t and it doesn’t. And Downfall wasn’t a story about the Holocaust anyway, it was a story about the last days of Hitler.
I’m sure if I read the book I would be treated to a much more nuanced view, but Dubus is too bleak for me. In fact had I’d known he’d written the book the film was based on, I might have avoided it. As I remember the film, Kathy is not merely the innocent victim of a clerical error, but has neglected to read her mail for some astonishing period of time because she was in a drug-induced haze.
Maybe I have an unusual sensitivity to the collateral damage of drug addiction.
I’ve been away-and-distracted, for a few days. Just – I’m great at getting obsessed over things which the world in general seems to think very fanciful and silly.
I wrote: "In real life, I have encountered a very few female railway enthusiasts; but it’s generally reckoned that in that hobby, the gender ratio is about 10,000 : 1 ! "
Off-topic from films / movies; but, a story comes to mind from summer 1967, when regular use of steam locomotives on Britain’s railways was very near its end. That summer, weekend holiday passenger traffic between Yorkshire and the Scottish border was very heavy, often requiring extra long-distance trains to be run – such trains were normally hauled by diesel locos, but steam locos had to be brought in to handle some of the extras. The railway management’s rules were that save in the rarest cases, non-railway personnel were not allowed in the cabs / on the footplates of locomotives, diesel or steam – requests were routinely turned down.
The tale is told of an attractive young lady railfan at that place and time, who successfully employed on steam-loco crews, inducements not available to males wishing to obtain favours from straight males, to persuade them to illegally allow her to travel with them on the footplate of their steam loco, over at least part of the scenic 100-odd miles involved. “Unauthorised persons on the loco” was, officially, strictly prohibited, but in fact not strenuously enforced – all concerned would in all likelihood, get away with it. I have no doubt that in pursuit of the same end, male railfans used money, and often successfully.
Fiercely wrenching things sort-of back on-topic – one feels that a raunchy film might be made about the above-described exploits of the lady, in the mad last months of British everyday steam…
Anyone mentioned Sophie’s Choice.
Yeah, she was heavily into drugs. And the accumulated mail was what I was referring to when I mentioned steps that could have been taken beforehand to keep the situation from happening. She’s certainly not blameless. But it WAS a clerical error that started the whole ball rolling.
That said, I should probably be more critical of Kathy. I’m an EMT, and I get to see the results of drug addiction first hand (hijack: I’m still riding high - no pun intended - from saving a 22 year old girl who od’d on heroin the other day. she’s only alive because of circumstance. She’d never tried it before. She was at a friend’s house. When she dropped, a friend-of-a-friend that had never met her started compressions right away, and someone else called 911 immediately. She was purple and pulseless when we got there. She was talking in complete sentences by the time we got to the hospital. Score one for the good guys).
My wife (well, we’re separated at the moment) has been drug-free for almost 2 years. And she got into some REALLY bad shit before she got clean. Her piece of shit brother-in-law (her sister’s husband) is a crackhead. They went out one night to get some (I was at work), and when they arrived at the house, they were met by two guys. Bobby, the B-I-L, put the crack in his pocket, told her SHE was the payment, and left. She called me, frantic, and I showed up with a couple of off-duty cops that I have a good working relationship with. We went right from there to the hospital, and she’s been clean since.