Don't be worried! It's a good film. I just think he must have written a dystopian future, and then it has sort of come true. Holding pens of immigrants, right wing and left wing extremists. But it's also a farce, and it's funny. Just see it.
I honestly don't think either PT Anderson or Bigelow are that under-appreciated. (OK, I liked Licorice Pizza more than anyone I know.) Bigelow does have an Oscar for directing. Anyway, I'll be curious how you felt about both of the films.
I love both these directors and you’re right, they’re appreciated but they aren’t on the tip of the tongue for your average cinema goer in the way Tarantino is, for instance, who I both like but think is overrated. I take your word for it that the film transcends political bias, I just tend to dislike films or songs that are political, generally because of the fatal weakness in the creators bias. Political extremism isn’t new so I doubt it has “sort of come true” since he wrote - but I’m glad you acknowledge that the far left are extreme and dystopian.
As for other film news, we watched Dog Day Afternoon at the weekend, the missus hasn’t seen it and I hadn’t watched it in 25 years, at least. I went off Pacino, with all his shouting and OTT acting, some time after Scent of a Woman.
DDA was still extraordinarily great, and this actually did seem to predict the future, with the stimulated mobs outside the bank in place of our modern rent-a-mob unthinking activists, the trans boyfriend, the whole thing was absurdly brilliant - and Pacino gave a performance that stands as tall as any. Great cast throughout.
By strange coincidence, a couple weeks before this I read an excerpt from his new autobiography where he mentions influences, Brando of course standing huge, but he says also, “John Cassavetes, who was his own kind of phenomenon.” I love John Cassavetes, so I ordered the book from the library.
There’s an American librarian who has annoyed me a couple of times. Libraries today aren’t the hush places they used to be. They’re quiet but you don’t hear any librarians saying shush. One day I was checking my phone to look up a book - which I commonly do, as do others - and the American librarian went out of her way to yell over to me, no phones in the library. I told her what I was doing and she repeated “no phones” and I continued on the phone until I found what I wanted.
Another time I was collecting a book I’d ordered and she was going through my account and she saw I had a book that was overdue, already 4 times renewed. We can renew them five times, then we have to return them. We’re have no fines any more, a change in rules that resulted in thousands of library books being returned soon at it became the law.
She was labouring and humming about her difficulty giving me the book I’d ordered and she said about the overdue book, that we can only renew books 4 times and that the system wouldn’t let
her let
me take out the book I’d ordered. As I say, we can actually renew books five times so I was fiddling with my phone - again - ready to renew the book myself in front of her when she declared with much strain that she’d worked a miracle and could give me the ordered book, but she couldn’t resist adding, trying to be comical, “bring back that book!”
Last week I returned Dog Day and she saw i was taking out The Innocent by Visconti and she declared herself a cinephile and she praised Pacino’s performance and she says she sometimes has a group meeting of movie lovers and she’d seen the Visconti and had I seen this that and the other, and we were at peace! We didn’t even need Trump, we have movies.
By the way, the Pacino book is a fast read, very interesting, more so at the beginning, I’d say of the 370 pages, the last 100 covers maybe the last 40 years. There’s no index, which is a trial, but it’s well worth a read..
