Sorry, I had a hard time coming up with a title that fit - there are some movies or books or shows or whatever that you watch with a completely different viewpoint than the creator intended. (I don’t mean the stuff where your perspective changes with age - Little House on the Prairie and My Friend Flicka are much more interesting, sadder books as an adult, because now it’s all about the parents’ stories and what the fuck is wrong with Pa anyway? Get a job, loser! But I think the authors there were essentially writing two stories on purpose.)
Like, I finally got around to seeing Full Metal Jacket, which I found a profoundly uneven movie that should have just been the first half, but whatever. I don’t think Kubrick expected me to find the drill instructor a sympathetic character, but all through the scenes on a strangely not-very-South-Carolina Parris Island (I thought it looked all wrong and lo! it’s Britain, urgh) all I could think about is what a shitty job that guy has to do - maybe he joined up for, say, Korea, and since then he’s been training a peacetime Corps until we get into Vietnam and suddenly they give him these kids for a couple of weeks and it’s his job to give them anything he can to keep them from dying in a damned meat grinder. And do they appreciate it? Nooo, they shoot him in his underwear in a bathroom. What do you think he thinks about at night? Probably about how those little kids in the next room who still have puppyfat in their faces are about to die with their guts hanging out in some rice paddy on the other side of the world in two weeks. And they’re never even going to thank him. It really pissed me off, honestly.
So what meanings have you taken from things that aren’t what the author intended? It’s more interesting if it’s a quality work in the first place.
I KNOW this is not what you’re wanting, but I can’t help thinking about it.
In my teens it was not uncommon for several of us to go to a horror movie and at the scariest and creepiest points just break out laughing. It ruined it for everybody. However, my son (in his teens) and I went to see Poltergeist at a neighborhood theater and wound up doing the same sort of thing. It was a bonding moment!
I mentioned this in the Anna Karenina thread – you’re supposed to sympathize with Anna in that book (she’s this beautiful, vibrant woman married to this stuffy old man who stifles her, so she has an affair with a dashing young man and feels alive for the first time blah blah blah), but I didn’t give a damn about Anna and instead loved her husband and son.
Another case like this: in The Forsyte Saga, you’re supposed to sympathize with Irene (who was modeled after Galsworthy’s own wife), also married to (hey, what a coincidence) a stuffy man who stifles her, so she has an affair with a dashing young man (the Galsworthy stand-in) and feels alive for the first time blah blah blah…and again, I don’t care about Irene, I care about her husband Soames.
90% of this is due to my absolute loathing of adultery. In stories where the tables are turned and you’re supposed to sympathize with the cheating husband (like Dr. Zhivago), I side with the wife.
Okay, I’m more serious than not with this one: I always rooted for Wile E. Coyote.
And somewhere along the way I developed some sympathy for all the Disney villains. And after a while I began to wonder if that was some sort of hidden message!
I’ve mentioned this before, but The Breakfast Club sucks if you’re a nerd. Everyone else gets a love interest, the nerd gets the privilege of getting to do everyone else’s homework for them.
And Zsofia, I’m not so sure that Kubrick didn’t intend for the DI to be an object of sympathy. Yeah, you can certainly see that his privates hate his guts, but it’s also very clear that he’s doing one Hell of a job of teaching them and getting them in shape. That business of making Joker responsible for Pyle’s success or failure? Sure, it got Pyle into shape, but he was also grooming Joker to become a leader. If Ermey’s character wasn’t meant to be sympathetic, it would have been a lot easier to make him incompetent than to show him as competent as he was.
I don’t know. It seems to be a pretty immature war movie, IMHO. It didn’t have any, you know, surprises. Kind of boring, kind of juvenile, very by the numbers. The only standout in it at all is R. Lee Ermy’s performance.
It’s A Wonderful Life-If you kick 'em in the teeth often enough, they think they’ve triumphed when they barely break even just once. Potter pretty much owns the town, he makes off with the bank’s funds, the “heroes” panic, but manage to repay the funds at the last possible minute, Potters gets paid off again…happy ending??
Did you see it when it was new, or is this strictly a retrospective view?
I’m not exactly a connoisseur of war movies (though I count a couple in my top-whatever list), but I know a lot of people thought it was revelatory and groundbreaking twenty-three years ago. Almost everything that’s held up against it was made since, and influenced by it one way or another.
I just saw it. It came out the same year as Platoon, right? I remember that as a much more mature film, although I haven’t seen it in some time. Not to mention that Vietnam War literature had, by the 80’s, been there and done that so many times that there was a paved road with traffic lights to This War is Pointless And Also Let’s Talk About Ourselves As Observers-ville. There’s actually a McDonald’s and two Waffle Houses on the road there at The Military Is Dehumanizing Town.
ETA - that’s assuming you think the second half of the film is saying anything, mind you - it’s so disjointed and there are so many scenes that seem like they started out with a good idea but never went anywhere with it that I really have to wonder why people think it’s such a great film. R. Lee Ermey, I guess.
If we’re going with movie or book, I’m going to go with Law Abiding Citizen, which I saw last year. Gerard Butler’s character was drunk with blood lust and killed himself in the end, versus Jaymie Foxx’s character who played by book. I THINK it was supposed to be an indictment of vigilante justice and why it’s wrong. But it didn’t work. I just watched the Punisher and ‘300’, and had a strong urge to take the law into my own hands.
Actually it seems Platoon came out in 1986, Full Metal Jacket in 1987. My more military-minded buddies at the time loved them both, somehow, and I guess it’s really the tandem that set the context for several movies to follow.
I agree with you that the written literature was (as usual, I suppose) way ahead of films, and Ermey (who was a Vietnam-era Marine drill instructor, fifteen years younger than in the movie) is the most memorable part of the latter.
Watching Disney’s Tinkerbell (with my 4 year old), the message always seems to be “You are born to be a certain thing, don’t bother trying anything else, because you’ll continually fail, eventually you’ll come around are realize that the thing you were born to do is the only thing you’re any good at and all you did was waste your time trying the other things.”
I’ve mention this before and was corrected later in the thread. I have to assume I’m missing something because it just doesn’t seem like a great plot for little kids, but that’s what I always get out of it.
A lot of children’s media seems to do that sort of thing - the boyfriend and I were stuck in a doctor’s office once watching a Clifford episode where there’s a new three-legged dog in town,and somebody has to explain to some of the dogs that it isn’t contagious or anything so you don’t have to treat him differently. Meaning, of course, that if somebody has a contagious disease, discriminate away!
My problem with this movie is that I genuinely think George’s life sucked. (Why yes, I do have chronic depression, exacerbated by my position in my family as the youngest and designated bailer-outer of the others.) I always root for him to jump off the bridge. Nobody will really appreciate him until he’s gone, then they’ll be sorry!
If it was sold as a “Look, life SUCKS balls and the bad guy usually wins, but if you try really hard, and you sacrifice everything you ever cared about, maybe, maybe, on Christmas, you can be happy for a few seconds” movie, then I might feel differently. But I’m certain Capra didn’t intend it that way and the vast majority of people who watch it take the title at face-value–it is a wonderful life.
