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Dale Cooper Black

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Posts posted by Dale Cooper Black

  4. Posted

    For whatever it's worth, I used to work in a video store (back when they existed) and whenever I recommended Raising Arizona to anybody, they ALWAYS fell in love with it. Whenever I recommended Big Lebowski, the majority of people didn't like it. (Granted, this was several years before it became such a ubiquitous presence in nerd culture.) Anyway, easy yes for Raising Arizona.

  5. Posted

    Why start with part two? Because this is that rare sequel which, like the Godfather Part II and the Exorcist Part II, surpasses the original in my opinion.

     

    Smokey and the Bandit Part II (or as we fanatics refer to it, Smokey II) deserves to be in the Canon on the basis of its spectacular car chase involving 50 trucks and 50 cop cars, if nothing else. Jackie Gleason gives his most masterful performance, and Burt Reynolds is great as always. I think we can all agree with Roger Ebert when he raves that "...this movie is just what you're looking for."

     

    I watched this movie with my dad when I was a boy. He was a truck driver who was rarely home even before the divorce, and this movie is one of the few memories I have of him before he died in a horrible, multi-vehicle trucking accident, but I don't think nostalgia is clouding my judgment at all.

  9. Posted

    Is this really happening? Is The Driver going to enter the Canon in a landside? Are people's critical faculties that seriously impaired?

     

    Maybe Joss Whedon can come on and nominate The Last Chase and we can all vote for it just to kiss his ass.

     

    I don't think the Canon can recover from this.

  12. Posted

    Thanks for this episode! It's certain to spark an interesting debate, and it calls attention to two movies that truly deserve it. My head is still spinning from Justin Chang's misguided and misplaced critcism of City of God, though, so it's hard to know where to begin my own dissection.

     

    I'll start by saying that I'm grateful for the opportunity to reassess my opinion of Black Orpheus. I first saw it in my early 20s, on VHS. (Those were the days when you really had to work hard to imagine a film's panoramic beauty.) I spoke highly of the film and recommended it to others at the time, probably because I thought I was supposed to. Watching it again all these years later, however, I'm struck most by its similarity to the bland, condescending travel documentaries of its era.

     

    Black Orpheus was made at a time when bored American suburbanites were taking their first tentative steps outside of their white bread world, thanks in part to such esteemed cultural ambassadors as Harry Belafonte and Carl Dudley. Suddenly Americans were eating tacos and planning trips to the Bahamas, and, hopefully, falling in love with bossa nova, and this film is aimed squarely at them. (This is arguably an embryonic form of today's so-called slum tourism.)

     

    It is true that the movie has a kind of mysterious, lyrical beauty to it, and both hosts did an admirable job of eloquently conveying the tone of the film. But Black Orpheus makes a very abrupt shift from VistaVision travelogue into something much darker, and the movie simply cannot juggle these two aspects effectively. (If Belafonte's Carnegie Hall album had ended with a rendition of the finale from La Traviata, it would be remarkably akin to the scene of Orfeu carrying Eurydice's body through the streets.)

     

    As for City of God... did this movie kick sand in Justin's face at the beach or something? He seems to have some kind of weird, personal grudge against it, and I can't quite figure out what his problem with it is. His case against it seems to echo Amy's devastating (and sorely needed) assault on Goodfellas, which left Devin sputtering in a dismal attempt at defending it. As I've said before, Goodfellas is strong enough to stand on its own, but Amy's points against it were 100% valid, and witnessing her near-fatal attack on that goliath was truly a thing of beauty. One of my favorite moments of film criticism, ever.

     

    But City of God is no goliath (business-wise, it's nowhere near in the same league as such ponderous and genuinely "overwrought" crime movies as Heat or American Gangster), and the arguments against Goodfellas simply don't apply to City of God. (Maybe I'm wrong, and Justin wasn't channeling Amy's critique of Goodfellas, but that's what it seemed like to me.)

     

    City of God is a film that deserves to be championed, even if only on the flimsy premise that it's an excellent gateway film for people who resist foreign-language films with subtitles. Beyond that, of course, it's a remarkably well-told and ridiculously entertaining examination of a particular (and particularly large) sector of humanity, i.e. people who are born into a system that provides them with absolutely no alternative beyond taking whatever they can get, however they can get it. I'm really surprised that Justin could have so thoroughly missed the boat on this.

     

    This isn't a movie that glamorizes or fetishizes violence, it's a movie about people who glamorize and fetishize violence. The gangleaders enjoy an elevated status within society (albeit as outsiders) because of the beneficial effects on so many other segments of that same society: Poverty-stricken street kids join armies that clothe and feed them, the media are provided with a controversial subject that sells papers, and the police receive kickbacks and job security. The biggest losers in this system are honest folk who want no part of the violence. (My apologies for pointing out the obvious.)

     

    Yes, there are a lot of hard hearts in this movie (understandably so), but there are plenty of sympathetic characters, too, and watching them get raped or gunned down is not fun. The violence takes a toll on individuals and society that only grows exponentially. Whether you're witnessing a single murder (like Benny in the nightclub) or the carnage of a giant shootout, you're witnessing the devastation wreaked by poverty. Somebody needs to explain to Justin that there's a difference between a filmmaker using characters as "gunshot fodder" and a gangleader (acting within the narrative) turning his soldiers into same. Yes, the violence is inhumane, but if you're not affected by it, it says more about your own cynicism than it does about the filmmakers'.

     

    Justin mentions that his viewpoint (with regards to the lack of humanity in the movie, specifically the portrayal of kids) is possibly colored by the fact that he is now a father; I can't even begin to wrap my head around how ass-backwards that is. This movie gives a voice to the ordeals of children whom the rest of the world (and even most of the people in their own society) do not seem to give a fuck about. Worse, he is happy to speculate about the treatment toward the child actors themselves, even comparing them at one point to animals that are mistreated in movies (at least, I think so; Justin doesn't always finish his sentences, and it's possible that I'm filling in the blanks incorrectly). But even on this point, he doesn't know what he's talking about. One of the filmmakers, Kátia Lund, turned City of God into a launching pad for an ongoing program that utilizes film workshops as away to help Brazilian kids escape poverty.

     

    Speaking of Lund... A giant, glaring omission in this episode is the nearly-complete dismissal of the contribution of Kátia Lund. Although her parents were American, Lund is a natural-born Brazilian, and an accomplished filmmaker who was (at minimum) an equal partner in writing and directing this film. She previously directed an amazing documentary about the brutal drug war in the favelas, called News From a Personal War--a film that, like City of God, is slickly edited and packaged for maximum impact.

     

    There are stylistic echoes of that documentary all throughout City of God--so much so that I suspect Meirelles asked Lund to collaborate precisely because he knew she'd be able to do much of the heavy lifting on the editorial side of things. I haven't seen too much of Lund's subsequent TV series City of Men, but from what I have seen, it shares the same kind of virtuosic excitement as City of God--something that Meirelles's own follow-up, the Constantly Mumbling Gardener, clearly lacks. Lund gets a brief mention as "co-director" near the end of the episode, but I am seriously scratching my head over the lack of discussion devoted to somebody who was so obviously such an integral part of City of God's success.

     

    Most disappointing, however, were Amy's softball rebuttals to Justin's water-logged complaints. Amy brought up several potentially devastating points against Justin's barely-formed criticisms, but she cushioned them in a wimpy "well I guess I can kinda see the counter argument" tone, as if she were holding back from embarassing her hero. But this is a debate show about movies, or at least it used to be. I would have loved to have seen Amy take on Justin with both barrels, even if only in the role of devil's advocate. There's no reason Amy couldn't have voted for Black Orpheus while also blowing huge holes in Justin's vague, pretentious, condescending case against City of God.

     

    Did I mention that I genuinely enjoyed this episode?

    • Like 2

  21. Posted

    Ultimately The Canon is about which films deserve to be considered the all time greats.

     

    Is it? And "considered" by whom? And what criteria need to be met for a film to "deserve" such an honor?

     

     

    Is Fatal Attraction of the greatest films ever made? No. Therefore it shouldn't go into the canon.

     

    There are two problems with this. First, there are already several "all-time great" lists, and they are all pretty goddamned predictable. If you're looking for a pedestrian list of the all-time greatest films, just google "AFI top 100" and voila, problem solved. Enjoy your Yankee Doodle Dandy movie nite. (Fatal Attraction didn't make the cut, but it was one of the 400 finalists, and it was one of their 100 "Most Thrilling" films, for whatever that's worth.)

     

    Second, what makes a film "great?" I ask this not to start a conversation, because it's a conversation that goes nowhere. Even films that are undeniably "great" (e.g. Citizen Kane) have their detrators. And some films (e.g. Fatal Attraction), for whatever reason, strike such a major chord with people that they become an indelible part of the zeitgeist in spite of their abundant flaws.

     

    The Canon isn't a scholarly list of The All-Time Greats, it's about movies that are special. Really goddamn special. Some of these movies need to be protected and fought for like baby birds (e.g. Freaks), and some of them are strong enough to stand on their own (e.g. Goodfellas), but they are all special. Fatal Attraction is like that annoying kid in school who destroyed everyone else in the debate championships. Maybe you hated her, but you couldn't deny that she was special.

    • Like 4

  22. Posted

    this episode, more than any of the other post-hiatus episodes, proves that the show is in desperate need of an antagonist.

     

    I respectfully disagree; the problem here is that the movie itself is so goddamn hard to pin down on its own terms. It's a trite, old-fashioned thriller with a banal moral lesson, but it is a very effective bit of moviemaking--not to mention the fact it features a truly iconic performance by Glenn Close. Also, it's impossible to examine this movie outside of its cultural/historical context, period. This movie is unquestionably worthy of consideration, and yet it would've been difficult for any host to make an airtight case one way or the other.

     

    Even for those too young to remember the impact this movie had at the time (the Reagan-AIDS-yuppie era, ugh), the ripple effects are still being felt today. This movie is ingrained in our cultural vocabulary like no other. It is constantly, continuously referenced in conversations about gender politics, especially if there is any kind of violent crime involved. (The recent Vegas Bray murder trial is only one of countless cases nicknamed a "Fatal Attraction" case by the media.) And "bunny boiler" is in the dictionary. Not the slang dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary.

     

    Even if we could separate it from its cultural position (and please note that WE CAN'T), the film is still a noticeable influence (both stylistically and thematically) on current films and TV shows, with the Affair and House of Cards being two obvious examples.

     

    I really don't like this movie very much. It is essentially well-made junk, and I could personally live without it. But would our culture be poorer without it? And, more relevant to the Canon, would film history be poorer without Glenn Close's performance? I would argue that the answer is yes to both.

     

    I'm abstaining for now, but only because I think this movie is already in the Canon by default. Unless I hear a convincing argument against it, I'll be voting yes before the poll closes.

    • Like 2
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