11 posts categorized "Dystopia"

March 11, 2014

TAXI DRIVER — CLASSIC FILM PICK

COLE SMITHEY

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

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Taxi DriverSo much of American popular culture, and modern Cinema’s urban aesthetic, owes a debt to Martin Scorsese’s groundbreaking fourth feature film that it is impossible to imagine a world without “Taxi Driver.” From Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score to Robert DeNiro’s unpredictable anti-hero character, everything about “Taxi Driver” was innovative.

A 26-year-old Paul Schrader famously wrote the audacious screenplay for the film in less than a month after a period of living in his car in Los Angeles, when his love and professional lives had fallen apart. Schrader has described the script as a piece of “juvenilia.” Which works fine. Indeed, the seething narrative carries a quality of introspective desperation that seeps from the pores of a young testosterone-overloaded male who sees trouble in every direction he turns.

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Constructed in the popular vigilante mode of ‘70s-era American Cinema, the gritty story follows a deeply conflicted ex-Marine-turned-hack who is all too suggestible to Manhattan’s rampant culture of crime, violence, pornography, prostitution, and drugs. Robert De Niro’s repressed, racist war-veteran character Travis Bickle gets off on the disgust he feels for the pimps and drug dealers who clutter and defile every inch of 1976 Manhattan. Latent homosexual leanings lurk at the edges of Travis’s actions around women. Here is an avenging angel who wants to defile the Madonna and liberate the whore.

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Travis fantasizes about “a real rain” that “will come and wash all the scum off the streets” during his bouts of chronic insomnia, which allow him to work insanely long shifts for days, and even weeks at a time. Although there was no “post-traumatic-stress-disorder” diagnosis when the film was made, Travis Bickle clearly has what was then called "shell shock."

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Scorsese introduced the world to the underbelly of mid-‘70s Manhattan at a time when economic collapse and garbage strikes left the city covered in trash. This reality shocked audiences unfamiliar with New York’s distressed state. In actuality, New York’s violent atmosphere of crime and degradation was even worse than Scorsese’s version. For New Yorkers at the time, every journey outside their tiny apartments offered a constant threat of confrontation, mugging, or worse.

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The film’s political commentary hides in plain sight. Travis is a right-wing reactionary intent on assassinating a Democratic Senator running for President. Travis accepts his fate as a suicide mission. Travis trains obsessively for the assassination, working out in his small Hell’s Kitchen apartment and constructing a mechanism that will slide a pistol into his hand. He tests his tolerance for pain by holding his arm over an open flame.

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Practicing his moves in front of a mirror boosts his confidence. The movie embeds the viewer so deeply inside Travis’s conscious and subconscious mind that we can’t help empathize with him, regardless of how messed up he is. Here lies the genius of the film. Objectively, Travis has good qualities too. He also wants to rescue a child prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster), though it's not his priority.

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Paul Schrader addressed the confusion regarding the film’s oblique ending as a way of returning to the beginning of the film. The epilogue “could be spliced to the first frame, and the movie could start all over again.”

Rated R. 113 mins.

5 Stars

Cozy Cole

Cole Smithey on Patreon

June 22, 2013

WORLD WAR Z

COLE SMITHEY

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon. Thanks a lot pal! Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cole Smithey on Patreon

 

World War ZThe “Z” is for zombie, but “World War Z” has little in common with the loaded social satire that the zombie genre is known for — dating back to its cinematic inception in 1932 with Victor Halperin’s “White Zombie,” and most fully realized by George A. Romeo — see “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “Dawn of the Dead” (1978),"Day of the Dead" (1985), and “Land of the Dead” (2005).

It says something [negative] about modern filmmakers that only a few are able to harness the potential of the zombie genre. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright struck comic gold with their inventive addition, “Shaun of the Dead.” What a fun ride that movie is. Zack Snyder (“Man of Steel”) hit the right notes with the George A. Romero co-written update of “Dawn of the Dead” in 2004.

Colesmithey.com

However, “World War Z” a stillborn effort that never rises from the dead. Set up as nothing more than a prolonged chased movie with a few twists of CGI spectacle thrown in to account for the film’s exorbitant budget, the story has little to say about global consumer culture [an easy target if ever there was], or the potential for a widespread corporate-driven poising of the population, or any other of a hundred au currant premises you could come up with. The movie doesn’t even bother relishing in the intrinsic Grand Guignol aspects of brain & intestine-eating activities that zombies are known — and loved — for.

What you get is Brad Pitt — and as everyone knows, he really quite good. Except, he’s the wrong actor to have saving the world from zombies because everything is too easy for him. When his United Nations agent Gerry gets impaled through the belly with a piece of metal, it barely slows him down for a minute. Suspension of disbelief is a problem. The last time I got impaled with a long piece of metal shrapnel, I was in the hospital for weeks.

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Without giving what little there is of a story away, the movie has one of the least satisfying and muddy endings you’ve ever seen. Gerry makes a decision that will most certainly kill him over time, and all others who follow in his footsteps, but the filmmakers don’t bother disclosing why the ploy is acceptable.

Colesmithey.com

A bevy of screenwriters pitched in to create a zombie picture that has more in common with “Man of Steel” than it does with “Dawn of the Dead.” That is a problem — a big problem. As the throng of apocalypse of movies continues to roll out as a weird guessing-game-prelude to the real thing happening, you have to ask yourself how much better the $125 million+ budget for "World War Z" could have been spent on improving infrastructure anywhere on Earth.

Rated PG-13. 116 mins.

2 Stars

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Cole Smithey on Patreon

October 22, 2012

MINORITY REPORT — CLASSIC FILM PICK

COLE SMITHEY

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon. Thanks a lot pal! Your generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cole Smithey on Patreon

 

 

Minority ReportSteven Spielberg's 2002 treatment of author Philip K. Dick's dystopian short story is a visually arresting murder mystery as prophetic about the obliteration of personal privacy as the story’s “precog” characters are at predicting murders before they occur.

For the film’s neo-noir look Spielberg employed a bleach bypass process to create a washed-out monochromatic appearance. The method has since been repeatedly copied as a kneejerk visual style for many other film genres.

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The year is 2054 in Washington D.C., where murder has been eliminated for the past six years thanks to a Justice Department program called "PreCrime." Think Patriot Act.

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In a high-security government facility, three carefully guarded psychic humans — called precogs — prophesize murders from their semi-conscious states. Agatha (Samantha Morton) is the female precog endowed with the strongest sense of foresight.

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Floating in a saline pool, the trio’s brains are wired to computers, thus allowing the PreCrime unit — lead by Captain Jon Anderton (Tom Cruise) — to apprehend murderers seconds before they commit their would-be crime. Since the film’s release, of course, the American government has initiated preemptive wars, arrests of terror "plotters" who never got past the talking stage of their future crimes, and drone strikes that make a “PreCrime”-styled approach to domestic law enforcement seem prescient.

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Anderton joined the program after the disappearance of his young son tore apart his marriage. His emotional Achilles’ heel serves as an ideal tool for the powers that be to set him up as a poster-boy killer in order to obfuscate other illicit secrets.

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In a trope recognizable to fans of sci-fi movies like "Logan's Run," precog-based evidence that Anderton will kill a victim within 36 hours sends him on the run from the same team of enforcement agents he once led. The “minority report” of the film’s title refers to conflicting intelligence among the precogs regarding their hive-mind premonitions. If there is such a conflict in the precog’s report on Anderton, it resides inside Agatha’s mind. In order to infiltrate his former workplace and retrieve the potentially vindicating information from Agatha, Anderton undergoes a gruesome eye-transplant procedure performed by a doctor he formerly helped imprison.

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U.S. District Attorney detective Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) is also hot on Anderton’s trail, as part of an investigation into potential flaws in the PreCrime program.

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Spielberg borrows elements from films as diverse as “The Big Sleep” to “Don’t Look Now” to “The Man Who Fell to Earth” to articulate his vision. The movie's combination of old and new influences energizes its believable futuristic elements. Targeted advertising follows citizens wherever they go — addressing them by name at each point of contact.

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A highly conceptual “maglev” system allows computer-controlled cars to travel vertically as well as horizontally. 3D holographic — anticipating today's Apple-created "pinch screens" — recordings of Anderton’s son and ex-wife allow him to revisit his past during a melancholic episode that resists the film’s otherwise noir aspects. Such thoughtfully designed features contribute to the film’s success as a pioneering achievement in the dystopian genre.

Rated PG-13. 145 mins.

5 StarsBMOD COLE2Cozy Cole

Cole Smithey on Patreon

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