I mentioned it a few posts up...it is quite good.

Who are you?

Bad voiceover:

The Hateful Eight
Demolition
Maleficent
Savages
300
Dune (from what I recall)
Forrest Gump (does that count?)

All I can think of for now. There are several good examples already mentioned in this thread. My point is valid, in the wrong hands it's a terrible device. Of course there are times when it is serviceable, other times when it's great. Other times, it's Demolition.

omg the VO in savages was soooooooooo bad

St. Vincent

I couldn't make it through. The screenplay had to have been written by a computer program.

Voice-over in Forrest Gump wasn't bad,it's part of the character,and a great option to the typical death scene.


Watched the Last Picture Show.

Still don't know what to think.

Boring episodic storyline,but not badly acted.
Several good soliloquies,but they aren't very organic,it seems like they were inserted to showcase a character.
Wonderful cinematography,captures the decay of a small town,b&w really adds to it.

Maybe the time it came out adds to its quality,the shocking frankness of adultery is old hat in today's society.

Good use of background music,but I imagine most of it would be lost on many unfamiliar with that type of music.

Zero Days

It's the Fat Man and Little Boy of the 21st century. The 19th century had the Army and Navy. The 20th century introduced the Air Force. The 21st century brought the world Cyber Command. Stuxnet is our Enola Gay. The first use of a cyber attack. It took the world 40 years for MAD and other nuclear policies to develop. We are in the infancy of doing so for cyber war.

This is a riveting and scary documentary which outlines the new branch of the military. Like its spiritual cousins, Citizenfour and The Internet's Own Boy, Gibney rightfully points out the single biggest threat is not the technology itself but the over-classified nature of the discussion around it. The secrecy is the real killer.

This should be shown in every classroom on earth. Period.

Grade: A

Just finished watching What We Do in the Shadows Its a low budjet New Zealand mockumentary horror comedy about Vampires.

Didn't expect much but it is hilarious seriously one of the best comedies that I have seen I a long time. Think it would have made a really good TV series would love to see a spin off.

8/10

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is my favorite Ford.

To be honest i think you have entirely missed the point of the movie nunnehi. Ethan is obviously racist and is an anti-hero. No one supports Ethan's racist views.

When Ethan shoots at the eyes of the Indian, claiming he can no longer enter the spirit land, his group do not agree with his actions.

When Ethan is about to shoot Debbie, Martin Pawley protects her. You are definitely rooting for Ethan not to shoot Debbie. And at this point in the movie, we are not meant to like Ethan.

The last scene where Ethan is not allowed in the house demonstrates him and his racist views do not belong in this world, which is moving on. This is absolutely an anti-racist film with racial themes.

lol, good job ascribing today's views to a movie made in 1956.

You do realize that Martin is not presented as any kind of hero figure? He's de-humanized by Ethan. I'm confident the vast majority of the people who would have seen that movie in the theater were rooting for Wayne's character.

ETA: By the way, you can argue the film's not racist and get a pass. You absolutely cannot argue the film is anti-racist. That is an offensive point of view to me, and speaks to tone deafness. I believe that Ford just was telling a story of a fractured man and family, with no social message. It comes across as racist to a whole lot of people, especially anyone with Native American blood.

You're ignoring that Ethan was not there for this family since returning from the Civil War. He was not shut out, he was never in by his own choice. He suffered no loss.

I enjoy reading nunnehi's posts. Whether I agree with his analysis or not, he always has solid reasoning and good examples to back up his views.

Dom, you are way out of line with the namecalling / loltldr / "go outside you post too much" crap. If you disagree with his analysis, that's one thing, but there's no reason to spew all that garbage. If you don't want to read his stuff, the ignore button is available.


Kenny - thanks for mentioning WWDITS. I keep meaning to watch it and keep forgetting. Will watch it tonight.

nunnehi can indulge his wall-of-texting penchant all he wants as far as I'm concerned, knock himself out. I just never engage him at all. He's more of a problem in ootv than here, hijacking every show thread around.

Kubo and the two strings: 7/10

Really good animated film about a boy searching for a magical suit of armor to be able to fight vengeful spirits from his past. Great story and voice cast from Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey. Highly recommend if you have little ones or like animated films.

Been looking forward to seeing that and The Red Turtle.

Westerns and Science Fiction have always been great vehicles for dealing with social problems that couldn't be dealt with more directly. Do you really think the film is about Native Americans and Whites? Don't ignore when the film is made, or the fact that Martin in the novel is White but is 1/8 Indian in the screenplay. Don't ignore that Ethan also becomes Martin's guide and mentor during the many years they spend together. Like I said, it's a complicated film, one that should be seen, and one not simply dismissed as racist.

And I am quite cognizant that the movie would and did offend many.

I also believe it's similar to a great many war films, that putatively anti-war, end up glorifying war in many critics' eyes. I am hardly tone deaf, so I can argue that The Searchers is both racist and anti-racist, and I would hardly be the first to do so.

I like the way you post John, but I'm missing something crucial I need to agree with you and that's back up for your reasoning. The book also has Martin becoming Amos's heir in it, and the movie certainly doesn't have that (does Amos try to leave Martin behind in the book?). The reasoning I'm looking for with anyone saying the movie is anti-racist is why you think it's anti-racist. I'm looking for a good solid reason, and I find none. I just find it exceptionally hard to believe that Ford was telling anything other than a straightforward story, and that his lack of being able to see what Wayne was doing is what caused the movie to come off the way it did. Here's a quote I found from Ford's biographer after I wrote what I did:

This is exactly my stance on the film, and if the audience the film is targeted at doesn't even notice a theme SO subtly drawn (if there, and I don't agree it is), it's not there. It has no effect. John Ford certainly didn't make any movie for film scholars, from what I've read about what he thought of his craft. In hindsight, people are seemingly trying to re-draw the Ethan character into some kind of nuanced multi-layered performance. It's not. That's pure over-analysis.

This:

Does not line up with this:

If I remember correctly, you're significantly older than most of the crowd, but this is the exact kind of thing I would expect to see from someone with your apparent stance (I still have one "gotcha" left for whoever it comes from, if it does). I doubt I would agree with it, but I'm basically asking you to justify your stance that the film is anti-racist in addition to being racist. I think it's easy to make the case the movie was racist, for anyone desiring to do so. I think it's also easy to make the case that the movie had no intended social message. I think it's extremely hard to make the case that the movie was anti-racist, and that you're more likely to end up tying yourself in knots to get there. I'm fairly certain you would agree that this movie is absolutely nothing like Bad Day at Black Rock in how it tackles any perceived injustice. And I also don't think that Bad Day at Black Rock was heavy handed in how it dealt with its themes. They got the audience on board with the character, and then let the story develop. The shocking twist probably left a lot of the audience in knots. It would have been really interesting to have seen the reaction if the movie would have been made when the story took place. Hollywood didn't even want to make the movie 11 years after WWII, as the "discomfort" over Japanese-Americans and the huge amount of racism they faced during WWII couldn't just be glossed over one year later with "oops, we were wrong".

I'd just like to underline something about the book/movie that is another reason why stories like this tend to be regarded as racist. Movies and books like this were essentially based off the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a famous "captive" of Native Americans after a massacre. In The Searchers, the whole story is driven by the fact that the guys were lured away from the homestead, and while gone the family is killed and unknown untoward things happened in addition to the kidnapping. So, it becomes a basic revenge story, with rescue elements because the peaceful family was slaughtered just for being there.

In reality, Cynthia Ann Parker wasn't plucked out after her family's cold blooded murder. She lived in a settlement and the whole settlement was attacked for reasons unknown. A large battle ensued, which ended up with people in the Fort. She was one of the people who was taken with the attackers after it was over. She was raised in their ways, and didn't even understand why anyone was looking for her. Upon being forced to return as an adult into white life, she couldn't adjust and died younger than she should have. She was just fine with the life she had, but those darn white people thought they knew better for her. They couldn't waste all those years only to find out what they had brewed so much hate over wasn't what they thought.

And again, from the little research I did, that whole thing wasn't even about the white people. It was about the tribe asserting its dominance over other tribes, and saying that nothing could be done without their permission (this appears to have come out of a series of negotiated treaties with other tribes by the person who created the settlement). The attack was intended to tell other tribes not to work with the white people without their express permission, in my opinion.

When you take a large political story, that was done on a much larger scale in real life, and turn it into a personal revenge fantasy, yeah that's racist.

I also can't find any indications that Jeffrey Hunter had any Native American blood in him in real life. That storyline ends up as just more whitewashing, which was completely standard at that time. And the fact that Ethan ends up hating Martin more because of that blood diminishes that argument. The way that scene was treated was as de-humanization of him, in my opinion. From the "movie is racist" perspective, that inclusion could have been used to say "stop rooting for Martin, he's what we hate". Martin is definitely the closest thing the movie has to a hero, in my opinion, but by devaluing the character in the story's universe, it undermines any potential of the audience of the time treating him that way.

There's a lot of offensive ageism itt.

Seriously lol at you. You're nothing but a clown. In your world, "content" is hijacking every show thread around (most of the discourse in OOTV is among the most laughable stuff I have ever seen, and if I have a goal it's to try to make people think harder about what they watch), despite you being a guy who puns into every thread with zero content any time he gets a chance. And when you do post actual content it's wrong or tone deaf probably almost 90 percent of the time (Gordon not an alcoholic is a great example of this). That's, I guess, why you should stick to your one liners. It limits your exposure.

The people I respect in this world are those who can actually articulate their thoughts in more than one sentence. That doesn't mean you can't have one sentence responses, but most stuff that's being discussed can't be discussed in one paragraph.

I may not agree with a lot of what Bluegrass Player says in many TV and movie posts, but I love the fact that he's willing to put himself out there with giant walls of text when necessary. He's not going to say he doesn't like something and not back it up with solid reasoning. This whole forum could use a lot more of that.

Politically I'm surely much closer to nunnehi, but the punning is way more valuable to the forum than the politics. (especially outside the politics forum)

You knew this day was coming when people projected Social Security insolvency right around the time my generation retires back in the 90s. The war is just a lot more civil.

FYP

Guessing that's referring to my dislike of the 2 episodes in Fargo S2.

I think a few other things too, but that and Sicario are the big ones.

Sausage Party

I thought the humour fell pretty flat unless the only thing you find funny is sex. The religious commentary, however, was pretty advanced. I'm a little surprised the right hasn't lost their minds over this film as it's the most sophisticated atheist manifesto I've ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood film.

Grade: B

Nunnehi should definitely post less.

That bull**** about if people don't notice a theme then it isn't there. I mean come on. I doubt even 5% of moviegoers know what a theme is.