Sometimes what seemed wonderful when we were children, seems ridiculous to adults. Other times the reasons are more confusing: think Rambo III and The Living Daylights making heroes of the jihadist mujahideen because they were fighting the Soviets at the time. Norms are changing, too, for the better: We don’t view the apparent racism of Gone with the Wind with the tolerance we once did, and we don’t celebrate the rape culture that has seeped into American comedies in the same way. 80s. way (at least we say no). Or perhaps the language of cinema has changed, or the special effects that were appropriate at the time distract from our more evolved and elegant eyes. In my experience, looking back with a more critical eye is usually a positive thing. The charge of growth, as Americans and as a culture, demands that we look back with some shame and try to do better. It’s not necessarily that the movies are bad (although some of them are, honestly, absolute shit); Time complicates the legacy of maximum films, but those more than maximum.
Even with the change in attitude, it’s hard to get beyond the essence of this probably captivating old musical: it’s about kidnapping women en masse, taking them back to your hut deep in the woods, and holding them hostage until they fall in love. with you. The abductees already had boyfriends and partners, which is a big component of why they had rejected such a deal in the first place. Lest we misunderstand the intent of the creators of the series and film, a central factor of production titled “Sobbin’ Women” is faithful to the mythological and in all likelihood ancient rape of Sabine women, when the men of ancient Rome made the decision to build their civilization by forcibly capturing and impregnating women from a neighboring region. The song evokes an ancient and extravagant time with the concept that His “booty” (as women are called) can spend a lot of time sobbing, but don’t worry: “Let’s make the sobbing women smile!”
Or, presumably.
Actually, it wasn’t necessary for Blake Edwards’ adaptation of Truman Capote’s tale to indulge in the over-the-top and unquestionably racist characterization of Caucasian actor Mickey Rooney of I. Y. Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s Asian owner. Reminiscent of the world’s most horrific stereotypes. In the era of World War II propaganda, Yunioshi is presented as a shady, clumsy, deer-toothed Orientalist stereotype whose sole aim is comic relief: “comedy” is entirely about the likely intrinsic silliness of the Japanese in general, and funny dentures in particular. the character in the short story wasn’t all that cartoonish and Rooney’s burlesque stunt feels out of place compared to the rest of the film’s sober tone. Even recent critics have noted the character’s dissonance and offensiveness, and I’ve never felt able to watch him without each of his scenes derailing a fun experience in a different way. (If you’re facing similar difficulties, good news: Mickey Rooney forgives you. )
Franco Zeffirelli’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s play is ambitious and problematic, in a sense that has been debated for decades. The sumptuous production dared to put real teenagers in the lead roles, an innovation that doesn’t deserve to be a surprise. . . unless this had rarely been done before (the last edition in 1936 featured actors in their thirties). By placing more emphasis on a budding sexuality, Zeffirelli has taken a harmful path; There’s a lot to be said for a lucid remedy for the issue, but the film’s nudity has been moot for decades. Recently, stars Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting filed a lawsuit, alleging that they were coerced and tricked into appearing nude in the film, allegations that cast a darker cloud over the once-beloved production.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama features middle-aged widower Marlon Brando involved in a very suspicious date with a young Parisian woman played by Maria Schneider. The film’s most memorable scene, involving forced sex and a yetter bar, was once thought to be a bit of a 1970s thing. sexual debauchery, but it has since tarnished his reputation. Schneider denounced the abusive treatment he suffered from Bertolucci and Brando, especially during the filming of this scene.
Animal House, the police force that would spawn an entire era of gripping anti-snob teen comedies (think Revenge of the Nerds, The Police Academy, Porky’s), is hard to revisit. There are funny moments, but also many scenes that highlight the culture. of sexual assault that we still live in. The nicest guy in the movie, Pinto (Tom Hulce), has a serious debate about whether or not to rape a man. ‘t, yet). John Belushi’s Bluto spies on the women of an unsuspecting sorority, while in a truck he stops the film’s only black characters from threatening our protagonists because they need to borrow their white dates.
The 1970s, a great time for American cinema as a whole, also spawned a subgenre of films that have become increasingly uncomfortable in today’s eyes. This was Woody Allen’s global one, in which a movie like Manhattan, about a guy in his forties dating a 17-year-old boy, seemed reasonable, at least to all the other men going through midlife crises and fantasizing about their own sexual relevance. Blue Lagoon is a little different, as the two lead actors (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) are at least age-appropriate, but its story of sexual awakening on an island seems overly lewd, as if we intend to cherish their youth. innocence as we admire their supple bodies, most of them naked. Shields herself recently spoke out about her discomfort with the film’s marketing and approach, which unduly emphasized her youth (she was 14 at the time).
I love Arthur (and his wonderful all-time theme music), but it’s hard not to place the film’s casual attitude toward tacky alcoholism around 2023. Dudley Moore plays the main character as the venerable and lovable ard, a type of character that can be traced back to Shakespeare. Falstaff, therefore, is not as if the customs of the ’80s were to blame. Still, Arthur drives and has a good time when he’s not a little sad, and the recipe for the plot for him is love. of a smart woman (a phenomenal Liza Minelli) rather than a vacation on the road to recovery.
Like much of John Hughes’ ’80s production, Sixteen Candles mixes absolutely captivating and fun elements with plot themes that date back almost immediately. Obviously, Long Duk Dong, Gedde Watanabe’s Chinese exchange student, is a rare example of a wandering color user. in one of the writer-director’s films, and he’s a head-to-toe Asian stereotype, with each of his entrances accompanied by the sound of a fucking gong. At least Hughes hired an Asian-American actor to play the character, even though he didn’t distinguish between the Chinese Dong and the Japanese-American Watanabe. Less open, but equally unsettling, is the film’s relationship with consent: Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) pursues Sam (Molly Ringwald), quietly indifferent, to the point that she gives him a pair of her underwear in exchange for being left alone. He then swaps those drawers with another man to buy time alone with his subconscious Caroline (Haviland Morris). We don’t know exactly what happens next, but it’s really concerning.
Even though it’s the youngest of the original Indiana Jones trilogy, Temple of Doom still has enough adventurous and exhilarating spirit (and that memorable functionality through Ke Huy Quan) to introduce it overall. The challenge comes from the portrayal of Hindus and Indian culture in general. In attempting to recreate the spirit of the adventure soap operas of the 1930s, the film unfortunately carries with it a large part of the racist baggage associated with it. The Indian characters are all victims who must be rescued through Indy, or insidious organs. Extract cultists/sorcerers. All of this is based too much on stereotypes; What was debatable at the time of its launch turns out to be worse 40 years later.
A sometimes charming children’s sci-fi comedy, about a robot built for war who makes the decision he’d rather hang out with Ally Sheedy and Steve Gutenberg (there’s a big message about personal identity and “autonomy”) that blurs. Silly comedian’s relief. Companion character Ben Jabituya, played by white actor Fisher Stevens with a brown face and sporting an exaggerated Apu accessory from The Simpsons along with annoying malapropisms. Worse? The character takes on the lead role in the sequel.
The access point to what has become the Rambo series, First Blood, geared towards handling Vietnam-era post-traumatic tension, while the latter sent Rambo after forgotten POWs. Number 3 sends him to Afghanistan to rescue an old friend and, in doing so, he definitely takes sides in the protracted standoff between the Soviet Union and the Afghan mujahideen rebels, breaking up the Soviet forces with a gun and a rocket launcher. And it generates a record number of deaths (literally!Guinness named it the most violent film ever made in 1990. )It’s not just a fantasy: Support for Afghan militant teams has been a centerpiece of U. S. anti-Soviet plans for more than a decade; in a sense, it’s Stallone who is bringing to life a dry government policy for young people that portrays U. S. imperialism through toys, comics, and video games based on the film.
In the 1980s, there was no greater risk than the Soviet Union, so anyone who opposed the USSR was automatically one of the smart ones. It’s complicated, of course, but many of those Afghan militants have become the core of what has become the Taliban, so that detail didn’t age very well. In the film’s favor, it eschews some of the Islamophobic tropes of American cinema, but is rather a testament to America’s habit of providing firmness to a specific faction in a region without contemplating the long-term consequences there or here.
Driving Miss Daisy will be among the well-loved and well-meaning Oscar winners who captivated Academy members by addressing racial issues by highlighting the reports and perspectives of white Americans. Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman give very good performances, and everything has an undeniable charm, but that’s the most important thing. It’s cute, with a slap: “Can’t we all get along?”Assume racial harmony. Do the Right Thing, an undeniable crop with a much more complex and nuanced story to tell, was released the same year and wasn’t even nominated.
From Driving Miss Daisy, we move a year later to 1990s Dances with Wolves, another well-intentioned but clumsy attempt through a white filmmaker to address race relations. It destroys history and adds challenging depictions of Native Americans: the Sioux. The characters are largely in the “good savage” mode, while the Pawnee characters are exclusively villains. The biggest challenge is the tired narrative of the white savior, in which a Caucasian character is not only our advisor to the Native American world, but also the hero of the tale. Because, as Hitane tells us, the whites were definitely on the side of the natives of North America.
Chasing Amy feels like a movie that might have worked if there had been weird voices behind the scenes. Holden’s (Ben Affleck) search story for Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), known as a lesbian, may have simply been an exploration of sexuality. Fluidity or bisexuality, however, is more like a straightforward man’s fantasy: spend enough time with the attractive lesbian and eventually get her. It’s usually well-intentioned and very close to work, but concentrating on a straightforward man’s preference for an unattainable woman means he ends up sounding a lot less revolutionary than he thinks.
For some reason, this dazzling mystery starring Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts and directed by Richard Donner, in which it turns out that the paranoid loner’s ramblings about a vast global web of deception turn out to be precisely accurate, hits the bullseye. . 6, half of the pandemic, was anti-vaxxers. Strange. (Also, Mel Gibson, phew. )
Don’t spend a lot of time on crazy effects. . . Times change, criteria change, and the things that seem wonderful to us now may have been great back then. Not so much with Spawn, a movie that incredibly mixes dark superhero action with very stupid nonsense. . . and combine it all with CGI that seemed silly even then. Spawn’s scale in Hell, in particular, has plans that aren’t much more wonderful than those in the video games of the time. The adaptation does a much more wonderful task with the source material.
On the surface, a cute movie starring the ever-charming Drew Barrymore as a 25-year-old editor who takes on an undercover assignment as a straight-A student at school and discovers he’s getting warmed up by Professor Michael Vartan. The two begin a flirtatious date that (thankfully) leads nowhere until Barrymore’s character is revealed. . . At that moment, the instructor is deeply disappointed by his lies. And maybe she’s not a real teenager? Without ever crossing the line, the film is full of terrifying subtexts. That’s right, the best guy in school you find sexy rarely happens to be older secretly, so probably don’t flirt with him.
We may spend all day talking about American Beauty’s downfall, from the beloved Best Picture winner to a film that has been largely forgotten, if not blatantly mocked. This is partly a bit unfair: the boredom of the suburbs in the 1990s was more in tune with the times than it is today, and there were other (mostly white) people who had actually come to think that life was too solid and boring, and that the lure of conformity was the biggest threat. After 9/11, the Iraq war, and Donald Trump, those fears are a bit overblown.
But there are more explicit reasons why American Beauty doesn’t work so well: the first is that of Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper), a violent conservative who happens to be a staunch homosexual and who is so mad about contradiction that he resorts to murder. Even the film’s gay editor and director can’t shake off this old trope. But there’s a lot more to Kevin Spacey’s main character than that. He is obsessed with Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), a 16-year-old neighbor. , and we should see his disdainful preference for her as a metaphor, as well as his decision to finally accept her as a human child and not as an object of lust acceptable as a redeemer. Doing this is almost very unlikely given the actor’s misfortune.
Shallow Hal stars Jack Black as a hypnotized guy who only sees people’s inner beauty, causing the shallow character to suffer the weight of the new love interest Rosie, played by then-recent Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow, in a big suit. Rosie, and it all ends up having something to do with the concept that we shouldn’t care so much about what’s out there. The challenge (and it’s not unusual for these kinds of films) is that the wellness message is absolutely belied through an almost constant barrage of great jokes (not to mention the fact that depicting “inner beauty” by conforming to traditional criteria is superficial in another sense). Even the otherwise sweet ending, in which Hal sees and accepts Rosie as she really is, includes one last shot when Hal tries to hug her only to realize that of course he can’t.
The Moment Mummy movie is a tainted copy of the 1999 original’s comeback adventure, albeit a fun one on its own terms. But, my goodness, the visuals are very outdated. To say that the titular Scorpion King (captured in motion by Dwayne Johnson, in his feature yet) sounds like something out of a video game, doesn’t do video games any favors, even 22-year-olds. Brendan Fraser defended the effects as fun. I’m more or less willing to go down this path with him, but the fact is that mediocre in 2001 is definitely shocking in 2023.
As one of many love stories that are less romantic than creepy to the eyes of fashion, The Notebook includes a scene in which the male protagonist (Ryan Gosling) swings on a Ferris wheel and threatens to fall and be maimed if Rachel McAdams’ Allie continues. Obviously and loudly they refuse to go out with him. Pretty!
“Maybe we’re all a little racist? That, I suppose, is the inexplicable point that Best Picture winner Crash tries to make, while also claiming that it’s some kind of revelation. Overly ironic and full of redemption arcs for its white characters, it presents a tacky concept of racial harmony, too undeniable and simplistic, but especially in 2023. It won awards because some Academy members weren’t going to vote for the homo cowboy movie, and I can’t believe many have bothered to watch since. (Don Cheadle is great, at least. )
We talked about the history of whitewashing in Hollywood in casting, but casting roles on white and non-white people is rarely the only potential problem: Here, director Rob Marshall and his company have assembled a talented Asian cast, but haven’t bothered to make a difference beyond that. Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh, Chinese and Malaysian actresses respectively, have been selected to play the Japanese lead roles in this very Japanese story. Japanese audiences (or, indeed, anyone who bothers to tell the story) were disappointed that non-Japanese artists were betting geisha, and Chinese audiences were disappointed by the uneasy ancient links between geisha culture and sexual slavery.
Oliver Stone’s interpretation of the occasions of 9/11 has garnered poor reviews, which would be good, but his reputation is tainted by a few things: First, Oliver Stone’s crazy conspiracy theories, some of which involve 9/11, have made it difficult to approach his films objectively. The film doesn’t address all of that, but it does make a smaller, but even uglier, casting choice: 9/11 savior Jason Thomas is a U. S. Marine who also happens to be a black American. Oliver Stone and his corporate cast, a white actor. William Mapother for the role, which they said was simply a mistake when pressed. I don’t buy it.
This crisis film through Roland Emmerich has a pretty fabulous cast: Thandiwe Newton, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, etc. But otherwise, it’s as generic as those things. Add to that the fact that it was created to capitalize on the bizarre idea that the world would end in 2012 (thanks to a planned misinterpretation of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican calfinishars), and there’s no explanation for why to revisit the film. Now, if the world had ended. . .
Sandra Bullock won an Academy Award for her performance in The Blind Side; It’s hard to deny its charm and offers wonderful functionality, yet its star strength only exacerbates the basic challenge of this story. While it’s very fact-based, the focus is rarely on aspiring star Mike Oher, who spent years going back and forth among an adoptive family. circle of relatives and his drug-addicted birth mother, but in the circle of wealthy white relatives who “followed” him. All of this is quite visible, but the film can’t overcome the challenges of its white savior narrative. More recently, Michael Oher claimed that was it: he was never officially followed by his circle of relatives, who instead convinced him to appoint him their corporate conservators. The Tuohys and their two biological children earned huge royalties from this film, while Oher himself earned nothing. If so, it highlights quite dramatically the challenge of white savior narratives concentrated on the wrong people.
Although relatively recent and full of remarkable performances that earned him Oscar nominations, The Help seems like a throwback in his conception of the civil rights movement. At first glance, it sounds like a charming, poignant film about other people coming together, but the delight in The Story of Black Domestic Staff in the 1960s is told from an almost entirely white attitude (which is perhaps not unexpected given that there were very few non-white employees). Filmmakers with vital roles: the camera; This also applies to the novel Source. )Despite her Oscar nomination, Viola Davis expressed her sadness in very strong terms, saying that by appearing here, “I betrayed myself and my other friends. “More than a decade later, we might (perhaps) be more susceptible to the fact that the era revolved around the demanding situations faced and the victories won through black Americans, not the learning curve of a white girl from the suburbs named “Skeeter. “
In Passengers, interspace traveler Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up in his hibernation capsule 90 years earlier; the shipment is on its way to a new Earth, and now faces the rest of its waking life alone, with no way to go back to sleep. An unhappy situation, to be sure, until she notices a pretty face among the other sleepers (Jennifer Lawrence) and makes the decision to cybernetically search for the main points of her life (she’s a journalist) before waking her up and pretending it’s a malfunction. She finally discovers her deception, which destroyed her dreams and plans and doomed her. live the rest of her life with no one yet, Chris Pratt, and, of course, she’s crazy at first. But he recovers and they live happily ever after. It’s a metaphor for destructive, poisonous masculinity as clever as most are. We’ll probably find that the chill that is warranted here is rarely just our personal point of view, but is presented as the empathetic hero.
There’s a part of me that enjoys DC’s era of cinematic superhero mayhem: a time when a movie’s plot can simply depend on the presence of a potty (thanks, Batman vs. Batman). Superman), but the first wave of attempts by Warner Bros. The Marvel Cinematic Universe collapsed midway through its first team-based film. In contrast to the meticulous, airless self-management of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the widespread taste for DC has been appealing to follow anyway. Justice League, originally meant to be a huge two-film pole, is eventually scaled down and improvised in combination through two radically different administrators (Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon), and never feels like anything more than Frankenstein’s monster. Snyder’s later and much longer edit is rarely very concrete. great, but at least it turns out to be the product of a singular (wrong) vision. Also, the special effects seem to charge upwards of $15.
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