FictionIsntReal

Taxi Driver is much more of a riff on The Searchers than Shane. The Searchers paired the hateful racist Ethan (who claims he will kill Debbie when he finds her) with the more sympathetic good guy Martin. Star Wars lightens it by making Han Solo/Ethan merely a smuggler with mercenary motivations (though he still has a change of heart at the end) and putting more emphasis on Luke/Martin (who turns out to be kin to the girl they're rescuing in a later movie). Both Shane and The Searchers end with the man of violence leaving because he doesn't belong in the more peaceful world the homesteaders are building. The difference is that Shane actually did try to live a peaceful life for a while, whereas that was never really in the cards for Ethan (who went from fighting for the Confederacy to the similarly failed Emperor Maximilian). Travis Bickle isn't thrust into violence by an attack from bad men, instead he thrusts himself into it due to dissatisfaction with his own life. At the end he isn't haunted by the "brand" of what he's done (he's on good terms with his mistakenly heroic reputation, if modest about it). His lingering problem is the flaw in his character which means he could still explode at any time.

I'd say this film is more influential than good. It looks create and is effective at creating a world, but it's not as effective at telling a story. I'd say I was getting off-topic, but since the podcast actually touched on these things: Trayvon Martin wasn't killed by a cop, but a civilian member of a neighborhood watch group (which reforms to police would be unlikely to affect). And "human capital" is a standard term in economics, which AOC herself used prior to objecting to others using it. Another economic finding is that our desire for uniqueness/variety as consumers is a big cause of rising "monopoly" profits. And the reason advertisers spend money on brands is the justified expectation that we will buy them is because others see what products we purchase and having seen the same ads can tell the kind of signal we are trying to send about ourselves. Deckard isn't really set up to be a replicant by the film. Ridley Scott seems to have come up with that after the fact, adding in unicorn footage from his next movie. As noted, it makes no sense to send an inferior model of replicant to "retire" tougher models. Rachel Rosen in the book is an attempt to disprove the validity of the test, under the claim that being raised on a space station resulted in a "false positive", though Deckard figures out that's B.S. In the film she's an unusual model in that it takes so many questions for the test to detect her. That seems distinct from the other models, although we don't have a name for that more psychologically human model. The character in the book is a bit more complex and perhaps has shades of being a "femme fatale" (although her only victim is an animal), but wasn't entirely coherent. I don't think this one qualifies as a "femme fatale" at all, since you can't really combine that with innocence. My understanding is that the scene between her and Deckard came off looking like a rape because the actors weren't getting along and so Ridley decided to lean into that if he couldn't make the scene as originally conceived convincing. I'm one of the few people who've read Alan E. Nourse's "The Bladerunner", and Billy Gimp is not a thief. He's a gopher for a doctor who provides black market medical care (medicine has been nationalized, and the above-ground variety comes with eugenic requirements for sterilization). Coincidentally, both scifi novels involve people getting around a city via flying cars. I haven't been able to find a copy of William S. Burroughs "Blade Runner (a movie)", which was never actually made into a movie but is how this film got its title. Ridley Scott owns the rights to it, but maybe someone could ask him for permission to adapt that story and then use a different title. For those curious how the film compares to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", they were compared by What's the Difference here and Lost in Adaptation here.

I wouldn't consider this to be "southern Gothic". A gothic story should take place in an old house with a lot of history which will come up in the story. But here the old family property has already been lost, and Blanche is moving in to her sister's apartment in New Orleans. One could tell a gothic story in New Orleans, but this one isn't about a past that took place there. A 17 year old is a year away from being a legal adult (and at the age of consent in many jurisdictions). Rather than a "child" molester, let's say she's an ephebophile who abused her position as a teacher. I know that Kubrick's Lolita was considered to be a failure as a result of the Code, but I don't think any remake of that has been better received. Contrariwise, William Wyler directed "These Three" under the Code, not even being allowed to use the name of the play "The Children's Hour" until decades later. Wyler actually preferred his original version to the post-censorship remake, and from what I've seen of both I agree with him.

I know Lawrence is considered the more important film, but I'll take Bridge On the River Kwai over it any day. All those "epic" shots of vast landscapes of sand just bored me in Lawrence. It's a movie about just surprising the enemy by being willing to walk a long distance. There's hardly even a battle once they arrive. Kwai has a clash of personalities with different beliefs in the unusual circumstances of a Japanese POW camp in southeast asia. Lawrence just has Lawrence, who's supposed to be something of an enigma (and I never found all that interesting). But if I could remove it in exchange for kicking off M*A*S*H, I'd be tempted due to how thoroughly I dislike that. Have you seen the video of David O. Russell throwing a tantrum at Lily Tomlin on I Heart Huckabees? George Clooney punched him on Three Kings, and Christian Bale had to get in his face to stop him being awful to Amy Adams on American Hustle.

I already expressed my disagreement with Amy on this film back in the Canon days, but I'd like to agree with those people who don't think it's "out of nowhere" or requires explanation for Henry to care about his brother or want to make the sauce right. Those are normal things which don't require exposition to establish. Henry's criminal activities are unusual, and that's what the film mostly focused on, only showing this other side of him when that intersected with his criminal life collapsing. I also don't really think of On the Waterfront as being a comparable "mob movie", since the main characters aren't really mobsters.

I had the same thoughts as Amy on how while Birth of a Nation may have done many things earlier, Intolerance did them on a higher level. I was surprised nobody compared the multiple timelines to a Christopher Nolan movie. Intolerance is typically thought of as Griffith's reply to critics of Birth of a Nation, so it's worth noting other films spawned in response, which given the times also commented on the first World War. "The Birth of a Race" (produced by an aide to Booker T. Washington) was intended as a response to Nation, showing a more noble side to the history of African people, to which is oddly appended a modern story about two German-American brothers fighting on opposite sides of the war in Europe. Thomas Dixon Jr, author of the novels which had been adapted into Birth of a Nation, wrote another novel, "The Fall of a Nation", whose adaptation he personally directed as arguably the first feature film sequel. The film is now lost, but it depicts a future in which Germans trick the U.S into disarming, resulting in a German invasion which is eventually defeated by a militarist southern Congressman and the sufragette who had earlier opposed said militarist. I suppose that's a more common portrayal of a modern female performer than is found in "Intolerance". Major industrialists still come in for critique, as Henry Ford (along with Williams Jenning Bryan) appears in parody form to be mocked for his pacifism. The book it's based on is even more forgotten, but is available on Gutenberg. As for how sincere Griffith was, Walter Huston interviewed him here for the 1930 re-release of Birth of a Nation, and Griffith notes that he was raised in the south as the son of a Confederate officer, and the film was "true" as he understood it.

I just didn't see the appeal of this. I've been considering watching some of Fosse's other films before "Fosse/Verdon", and I hope they're better. Mr. "I Am a Camera" just isn't an interesting character, and Sally Bowles isn't enough to elevate it. Why watch a movie about people who mostly weren't paying attention to the rise of the Nazis when you could instead watch something more focused on such events? Easy Rider at least was a seminal film in the development of the industry and the broader culture. This is just another adaptation of a musical that I'm sure was "hip" for its time, just as West Side Story was before it.

That sounds somewhat like the movie "Identity", which Adaptation parodied with Donald Kaufman's "The Three".

Even though he's the hero, I don't see Fonda as "reason", he's instead acting like a defense lawyer and re-litigating the case. I don't think his "doubt" is "reasonable", he's instead just always reaching for an excuse for everything. I don't think there was any convincing him. So he thus represents George Bernard Shaw's victorious unreasonable man. I'd be interested in seeing that Japanese version, since a lone holdout could just as easily be someone insisting on guilt. Stereotypes are often accurate: women really are more law-abiding. Per William Stuntz' The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, women regularly got off for killing their husbands back in the gilded era, as the system was very pro-defendant and juries accepted many defenses aimed at their common-sense morality rather than the letter of the law. The notion of an independent-thinking jury member bucking convention reminds me of your canon episode for The Fountainhead, in which I thought Ayn Rand cowardly recoiled from her anti-majoritarian instincts. Looking back on it, I see that I made the same point citing Stuntz there as well. I assume Fritz Lang's "Fury" is where the David Milch written Hill Street Blues episode "Trial by Fury" got its title. I have to say, I didn't care for Lumet's "The Verdict". It seemed like a very cliche underdog courtroom movie, without even the distinctiveness you might come from a Mamet screenplay credit. When Todd Phillips said "Joker" was partly inspired by the work of Lumet, I have to assume he's referring to his 70s stuff like Dog Day Afternoon and Network rather than that. I tried looking up Lumet's wikipedia bio for more on him being mistakenly named during the McCarthy era, but didn't find anything. That's how it is in the Anglo-American adversarial system of justice, but in other countries judges are supposed to act as fact-finders pursuing an investigation rather than having opposing lawyers present different versions to them. I remember watching "In the Fade" and finding a German criminal trial odd for that reason. Which actually would fit the worldview of the bigoted juror.

MASH is not Altman's first film. He'd actually been directing for more than a decade. I'm not an Altman fan, the only one of his films that I've liked is McCabe & Mrs. Miller. But this is the one I disliked the most. I was aware of the show but like you guys never watched much of it. This just seems like the most dated countercultural kind of movie where the heroes just seem like jerks, and not in a fun way like the Marx brothers. I see the value in early SNL, National Lampoon and even what I've seen of Taxi, and they're all goofier because there's less of an emphasis on the characters being cool. Even Easy Rider is more self-aware and innovative. I'm also ticked that this was a big success while Mike Nichols' Catch-22 is considered a failure, even though that's far funnier and actually my favorite Nichols film. Regarding the lack of good roles for women in that year, one of Kellerman's rival nominees for Best Supporting Actress that year was Karen Black for Five Easy Pieces, a much better version of a woman mistreated by a man. I don't think of the protagonists as people who are sacrificing anything for a cause. They're just serving their time, avoiding authority and hoping to get out as soon as they can. I don't know if I'd want Ghostbusters on this list, but I definitely would prefer it to MASH.

I had heard Dr. Strangelove was inspired by the theorist of nuclear strategy Albert Wohlstetter. Per his wikipedia page, other inspirations were Herman Kahn, John von Neumann, Edward Teller and of course Wernher von Braun. I watched this after the AFI first put it on their list. My dad had talked up how funny it was, but I didn't get many laughs out of it. Maybe I was too young to fully enjoy it.

They just announced the next three: 1/9 - Dr. Strangelove 1/16 - The Gold Rush 1/23 - The Wild Bunch

I'm closer to Amy's opinion on Get Out than Paul's, but I have to note that it's MUCH better made than Stepford Wives. That had looked like a made-for-tv movie. Horror is perhaps my favorite genre, and I tend to like horror-comedies less than others because the comedy is so often at the expense of the horror ("You're Next" is my favorite of the sub-genre because the horror isn't diminished). So Get Out really can't compete with the scariest horror movies, but the comedy bits with Lil' Rel Howery were great and there was some really impressive scenes like "the sunken place". Some have said that's cribbed from Under the Skin, but one might as well steal from the best. I know that Americans tend to lump all Mexicans together (although the U.S government actually considers "hispanic" an ethnicity rather than race, so it doesn't exclude being white), but in this somewhat autobiographical film the director himself is supposed to be one of the kids in the upper-class white family, and clearly racially distinct from their servant.

John Simon's first piece for New York may have been a defense of booing, but he didn't always review things negatively. For example, his review of Cats was completely positive. And when he disagreed with Siskel and Ebert about Star Wars, he recommended that kids watch "Tender Mercies" instead.

I watched this a few years ago because I realized I hadn't seen any William Wyler movies, even though he'd won three Best Pictures and Best Directors, along with one Director nomination before that. After watching all of them, I concluded that the Academy had really overrated his early work but that Best Years of Our Lives absolutely lived up to the hype. I agree it's much better than The Deer Hunter, but I'd already criticized that earlier. Homer is the most memorable and doesn't suffer at all for not being a professional actor, but I liked that we had the other two to illustrate other aspects of the post-war experience. Ayn Rand didn't hate movies, in fact she worked in Hollywood and married an actor, but she did castigate artistic "realism", instead advocating for Victor Hugo-esque "romanticism".

I've never seen John Candy do a "threatening" role. John Goodman has done that for the Coen brothers though. I saw this as a kid and didn't care for it, although it is more of a real movie than the pure Boomer nostalgia of American Graffiti. Just not necessarily a very good movie. I voted against this movie's inclusion, but I disagree that it presents an idealized vision of America in which everything is good. It's full of ugly parts of American history, even if Forrest himself is too dumb to understand them. I'm also less bothered by Jenny getting AIDS as a result of "participating in the culture" since that included using heroin. Perhaps Lieutenant Dan could have gotten it instead. Even today, opioid deaths seem to be particularly high for that generation. I suppose "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" will have to be our closest substitute for Gilliam's take on Boomer history. Is the minty flavor in the chocolate candy that Paul is gesturing toward toothpaste? And yes, I stole this joke from Jim Gaffigan.

As far as I was able to tell, boomer nostalgia was the entirety of the appeal of this movie. But then, I didn't care for Last Picture Show either. THX-1138 is much better than both.

I had only listened to the earlier parts of the podcast when I commented earlier, so this is a continuation. "Have you no decency" was completely separate from HUAC. That was the Army's counsel in the senate hearing vs Joe McCarthy. McCarthy was never in the House, where HUAC of course was formed years before he joined Congress. McCarthy's censure did not end the blacklist, because it was a completely separate thing. McCarthy was reacting to cases like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss to claim that the federal government was infested with Soviet agents, secretly being fed info from Venona that J. Edgar Hoover didn't even tell the President about. HUAC was an amorphous thing going after whatever they people in charge of it decided to dub "Un-American", which permitted it to last a long time and go after different people. For example, Dalton Trumbo started informing the Feds of people who sent him fan mail for his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun" once the CPUSA flip-flopped to support American entry in the war, while Trotskyists and Bundists who continued to oppose that got targeted by HUAC. After the war when Uncle Joe was no longer considered our friend, HUAC changed course, otherwise you probably would have never heard of it. Barry Marshall won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for demonstrating, on himself no less, that ulcers are caused by Helicobacter pylori, not stress. Marshall has even said that no medical condition is caused by stress and there are more potential Nobels out there for anyone else who wants to debunk such popular but baseless claims.

I reviewed this film last week, and I'll try not to repeat too much of what I said there. Ben Hur came out the year before. I prefer it because at least it had spectacle, whereas this film did little for me and didn't seem to bear the mark of Kubrick at all. Paul is confused why anyone would consider this film Marxist propaganda, but Tom Breihan isn't. After finishing his "History of Violence" series he began going over the top film at the box office of every year, starting with this one. I'll quote him on its politics: [...] I find John Wayne's hatred of High Noon far more inexplicable, because most of the things he criticizes about it also occur in Rio Bravo, the movie he made specifically intended as a critique of High Noon. Those interested can read "The Tin Star", the story the film is credited as being an adaptation of, starting here and continuing from the seventh page starting here. The film is much more cynical, especially in its rather opposite ending, but I find it an interesting comparison.

Paul is confused why Friendly's goons didn't just kill Terry at the end, but this is explicitly addressed by Friendly himself when a goon suggests it: Terry just testified against him and Friendly is now facing serious charges, including a murder that Terry accused him of being behind. Killing Terry at that point would practically be an admission of guilt along with another murder charge, making it a certainty that Friendly would be executed. Friendly is probably somewhat overly-optimistic about his ability to beat the charges and make a comeback, as his boss is leaving him out to dry and his lawyer was Terry's brother Charlie, whom he just had killed for trying to protect Terry. The time to kill Terry was earlier in the alley outside his building, but Terry got away and now it's too late.

I already said why I didn't care that much for Philadelphia Story when Amy matched it against His Girl Friday at The Canon. The "meta" aspect of the character vs actress did nothing for me. It was just a lot of people insisting she needed to be brought down a peg.

I watched this recently enough that what I wrote is still accessible under Disqus' now shortened history, so I'll quote from my verdict there: "When I said that Me and My Gal fell short of a certain standard of comedy, that standard is set by Bringing Up Baby". It was one of the funniest films I've ever seen, and since Hawks' later "His Girl Friday" helped set my standard (which the Philadelphia Story did not meet when they matched up for the Canon), I probably should have seen it even before this podcast prodded me to do so. Many old-timey comedies aren't actually that funny now (like the two I've slighted above), but this & Duck Soup really do seem to deserve their place of cinematic immortality in a way that most Harold Lloyd also doesn't (Lloyd was arguably more of a populist who prioritized quantity with a relatable lead like any interchangeable comedy today over perfectionism in reaching the greatest heights of comedy). Maybe I haven't seen enough Judd Apatow, but I highly doubt his stuff can compare to that zaniness. Groundhog's Day is a good movie, but unlike some commenters above, I primarily judge a comedy on just being funny. More laughs means a better movie, which is why the Paramount Marx brothers movies are better than the MGM ones. Worrying about Grant's character as a poor victim of this insane stalker is the wrong way to watch the film: all his suffering is for your amusement, like Margaret Dumont or any cartoon victim of Bugs Bunny. Divorce really was much less common back in that era. The difficulty of obtaining a divorce prior to no-fault laws was part of the plot of "Sullivan's Travels", which you've covered before. I don't know if the film can be given credit for inventing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope though, I've heard others say that My Man Godrey did it a couple years earlier.

I'm with Amy in preferring this to The Graduate. The latter is a lot of flashy direction in service of a much less interesting film. Virginia Woolf is hardly an easy watch or something I'm eager to re-watch, but the difficulty works for it. At the same time, it wasn't quite enough to make me want to vote for it. I haven't seen the stage version, but I imagine the most distinctive aspects of it are all in there. And a filmed version of a stage play can be good, but I don't think that's enough to deserve its place on the AFI 100. At the same time, I'm not going to vote against it, because I don't want to contribute to it having more downvotes than The Graduate.

You must not have seen Birth of a Nation. That actually does make black people into its villains while the Klan are the heroes. I do think Paul & Amy misrepresent Birth vs GWTW's takes on the Civil War though. Birth presents itself as pro-Lincoln (perhaps because Lincoln had been practically universally recognized as a great martyred President), and his death is depicted as the cause of trouble between north & south. At the end of the film northern & southern whites are supposed to have a happy re-union as Lincoln supposedly wished. It's not the dream of an independent south rising against/apart from the north. It's called "Birth of a Nation" because it regards national unity as having been forged through the experience depicted. For it's part, Gone With the Wind isn't as concerned with race, but it does romanticize the Old South plantations. It's primarily taking the POV of someone who benefitted from that system, emphasizing how nice it was for that class and how much worse it was for them afterward. It criticizes the southern fireeaters who kicked off a war they were overconfident in winning, but they're being blamed for losing a way of life the movie holds in high regard. Contrary to Amy's assumptions, the wealth of the industrialized north was NOT dependent on slavery. The idea has been promoted by some historians recently, but economic historians find it doesn't hold up. https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/slavery_and_industrialism/

You should, it really lives up to the hype. Unlike The Deer Hunter. I agree with others that it's a really overrated movie, with Michael a practically flawless protagonist. Part of my negative attitude could be the result of watching Cimino's first three movies all in a row and getting increasingly annoyed at his bloat*, but I really do think that Platoon & Apocalypse Now are both better in their different ways. The Deer Hunter just arrived earlier. *I know it's not being covered here, but Heaven's Gate really is a bad movie serving as a monument to Cimino's wasteful ego.