Is it though spoke-? I really like Remains of the Day, but it has always struck me (the movie, not the book which I’ve never had the chance to read), as more reflective of Mr. Stevens’s particular narcissistic obsession with the importance of being the butler in a great house than with any kind of analysis of of the (dying) class system qua system. Stevens is so narrowly focused on his tiny self-inflated window that world history (and love) pass over his worm’s eye without so much as registering. But that is his choice or, perhaps, his fate: the system doesn’t have to make it that way as Emma Thompson character makes clear.
Class was an issue throughout the film. Stevens was embarrassed by his father’s unabashedly “common” personality which betrayed Mr. Stevens’ own efforts to present himself as a man of quality. Mr. Stevens was made an object of ridicule by a smug gentleman who questioned whether commoners were fit to vote. Christopher Reeve’s character in turn ridiculed “gentlemen diplomats” as being unfit for the task. Class was an issue at the pub where Mr. Stevens pretended to be a of the genteel class, and then was called on the deception by the gentleman who had given him a ride. The gentleman of Stevens’ house was exposed as an anti-Semite, while the commoner Emma Thompson showed compassion for the Jewish girls, which struck me as a condemnation of the class system in itself. (What does it mean to be a “gentleman” when a commoner is more genteel?)
IMO, it’s just that ridicule of the class system was presented with more subtlety in The Remains of the Day than in Gosford Park. Which, for my money, makes The Remains of the Day a (much) better film.
I enjoyed Gosford Park, but had to rent it and turn on the subtitles to have any idea what people were saying. Not because of the accents, but because of the sound recording. Maybe the copy we got was a bad one, but it was like listening to people talking under the sea.
Oh, I do realize, spoke- that class was an issue throughout Remains of the Day–but always filtered through Stevens’s (pathetic) obsession.
Yes, the Edward Fox aristocrat (Lord Darlington) is a total Nazi and yes Emma Thompson wants to help the Jewish girls. But this is a rather blunt condemnation of the British class system–(if that’s even what it is). After all, Winston Churchill was as much of an aristocrat as Lord Darlington and he was neither a Nazi sympathizer nor–at least overtly–an anti-Semite. There is no evidence that any great preponderance of the British aristocracy were Nazi sympathizers–nor, for that matter, that any great preponderance of the British working classes sympathized with the Jews elsewhere in Europe and would have helped them if they could. That’s just not the way the class system overlapped with Nazism and anti-semitism.
The drama of the movie as I see it is that Stevens is so caught up in his narrow world that he doesn’t even notice that Lord Darlington–the particular aristocrat whom he’s devoted his life to serving–is a Nazi sympathizer; all he cares about it is getting the seating right. And that’s his characterization.
The difference between the movies is this IMO. Remains of the Day uses the class system (effectively, to be sure) as the backdrop for the analysis of a rather pathetic protagonist who, somewhat tragically, submits himself, almost lovingly, to delusive idealization of a dying class system.
Gosford Park, by contrast, isn’t about any single character and his or her flaws but about the nuances of the system writ large. It’s so much about those nuances that the movie sometimes seems like an ethnography rather than a classic narrative in which main characters grow or don’t grow or fail or whatever.
And I think that’s why Freudian Slit suggested that it might not appeal to everyone; because of this almost anthropological investment in documenting class.
But they are both really good movies with great performances
Wow, I thought I was the only one on the entire SDMB that hated Pulp Fiction. I have to add, though, that I can’t really understand why critics like it so much. Ok, it was different, but there’s no end of really different movies that critics dismiss. I remember when it was reviewed by Roger Ebert on his old show, and he went on and on about how great it was ,then showed the “Big Mac” discussion in the car, and raved about how great that scene was, while I’m going, “Huh?” I watched the movie and saw that scene in context and I still went, “Huh?” It’s just a tedious and totally boring discussion/argument about something that doesn’t matter and is boring in itself, giving it at least two levels of boring.
My answer to the OP, though, would have to be “Twelve Monkeys”. I guess maybe if you’ve never read any Science Fiction in your life, never even thought about time travel or ever heard of The Grandfather Paradox, then maybe that movie could be interesting to you. But otherwise, it was just a long, long setup for the single most predictable ending in movie history. I kept watching, assuming that the ending would be some actual surprise because, well, the way the movie was beating me over the head repeatedly with the blatantly obvious idea that what he was remembering from his childhood would turn out to be caused by his adult self just could not be where this movie is going, given all the raves it got.
But I was wrong. It went exactly to the most predictable ending, right down the line, even to Bruce not being able to stop it. Heck, the old 60’s TV series “Time Tunnel” dealt with time travel in a more interesting and original way than this garbage bag of a movie, and that series was plenty dumb. But “Twelve Monkeys” was dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, and more dumb.
Gosford Park
My Dinner With Andre (Can I get mine to go?)
As Good As It Gets (surely not)
The Usual Suspect (Didn’t surprise me.)
Tootsie (not funny)
Gladiator (made-for-TV quality)
A Beautiful Mind
Several of these are pretty good movies. But much better movies didn’t get nominated for awards because of these critics’ darlings.
This is exactly how I felt as I left the theater, but in the decade and a half since its release I’ve come to appreciate it for what it is instead of what I expected it to be.
While watching it the first time I resented being clubbed over the head with a foreshadowing sledgehammer. But in retrospect, that’s the point. Bruce Willis’ character had that same inevitable foreknowledge that the flashbacks gave us, the audience. How do you deal with the certainty of knowing the future?
I now think much more highly of it than I did after first seeing it. I think I was just too full of myself and my staggering intellect to appreciate what it was. The classic doper disease of “oh I saw that coming a mile away so it must suck or at least be completely beneath me.”
That’s a very interesting list. I had no clue **12 Angry Men **was so respected today. I wonder why? It’s a really good flick, but why that one of all the many good older films?
I saw Siskel and Ebert interviewed once, and they were asked pretty much this question - why do critics give such rave reviews to movies that no one else much likes? They said that it boils down to the fact that they see a lot of movies. Sometimes they see three or four a day, sometimes more. Most people, even movie buffs, might see three or four a week, tops. So certain themes, techniques, plotlines, and so forth, that civilians might recognize as common, they see to the point of loathing. When someone does something different, something new and fresh, it’s like manna in the desert to them, whereas to someone who only sees one or two movies a month (i.e., most of the public), it’s either confusing or no big deal.
The Royal Tenebaums was advertised as the funniest comedy of the year.
It was a load of wank without any funny.
Gosford Park was good but I was expecting a Poirot-style murder mystery so I felt a bit cheated; if I’d had better expectations then I’d have maybe appreciated it more.
Gladiator, on the other hand, I loved when I first saw it and still enjoy it.
I don’t think it did. Here’s Roger Ebert’s 1980 review, which opens by calling the movie “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.” He gives it a rare ZERO star rating.
