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Planet of the Apes… People still don’t grasp the twist ending.
It’s got to be The Matrix.
These red pill people view “liberals” as the Matrix they’re escaping…when the film explicitly says the opposite.
Do red people know that both of the writers are trans…?
I can speak from personal experience on this one: Taxi Driver (1976)
When I first watched it (admittedly I was only 13 or so at the time) I pretty much took it as a story about
spoiler
a socially-warped but well-meaning hero who stood up against the baddies and won, and saved the girl in the process.
Watching it a few years later, the true horror of it became clear to me, and the contemptible piece of shit Travis Bickle is was made obvious. I think I was just too young to get it, but I was also a huge De Niro fan and so, whatever his character was, I was ride or die with him.
Travis Bickle predicted incel mass shooters. People seem to think he was the cool antihero he thought himself to be, I often see his face in people’s profile pics and on cringy self-aggrandising quote memes. He was a disgusting pig of a man and the film is not a celebration of anything he did. On the contrary.
V for Vendetta. V was the bad guy.
Not sure this is the full story.
V is a flawed character and throughout the story he does some despicable things. But he was definitely shaped by the actions of the dystopian fascist government that he lives under, and his actions are in response to people who have committed violence against himself and the people. He is not a good man, but it doesn’t make him the ‘bad guy’ of the story.
I can recognise that his actions are intense, and the things he does to Evey in the film are horrific, but I can’t in good conscience consider him the villain of the film when he stands against a form of fascism that is becoming all too familiar these days.
Anti-hero maybe – he’s insane and does some incredibly fucked up things. But I’m pretty sure the “Nazis with a different name” government and its toadies were infinitely worse.
I just reread the plot synopsis, still don’t get it, how is V the bad guy?
He’s not, but he does some questionable to fucked-up things.
American Psycho
apparently there’s communities that take Patrick Bateman as some kind of role model
Fight Club, but to be fair there’s a lot going on in the film. The book makes the many themes more apparent.
Princess Bride. Every single person I talk to says it’s about true love but it’s really the most important lesson is to never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
I don’t know, seems pretty inconceivable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It’s about fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…
AND KISSING
ew
lol - I love the lack of context the inbox gives so I was thinking “…what did I say???” - makes me laugh every time something like this happens. :)
Misunderstanding The Princess Bride is one of the classic blunders, right up there with getting involved in a land war in Asia
I’m sad he never ended up completing the sequel Buttercup’s Baby. I read the sample chapter ages ago and was very excited about it, but I’m pretty sure the author has died since.
Then again we already have The Fitz and the Fool books by Robin Hobb, which I think hit a lot of the same notes we would have gotten.
Am part Sicilian, can confirm.
I’m gonna go in against you because death isn’t on the line.
V for Vendetta. Even the director missed the point of an anarchist revolution story.
The obvious one for me would be Wolf of Wall Street. Clearly tried to exaggerate excess and hedonism, but people praised the lifestyle and tried to think “that is what I want to be one day”
Same with the movie Wall Street: it was meant as a cautionary tale about greed and callousness in modern society, but Reagan era yuppies ended up identifying with the villain.
Several decades later, they made the atrociously titled sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” which had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the genitals and Trump cult members STILL managed to consider the obvious villain admirable.
500 Days of Summer.
Everyone thinks it’s another one of those “manic pixie girl” rom com movies that were all the rage in the mid 00s but it’s not. It’s more of a story about Tom’s inability to have a healthy relationship with just about anyone. He builds this ideal girl in his head for Summer, falls for her, but she’s just not into him. For her Tom is just a fling, that’s it. People wanted the two to be together but she just never had feelings for him. And he doesn’t learn his lesson at all because at the end he does the same thing again with another woman named Autumn thus further proving it’s all going to happen again. they meet because they have a similar interest in ONE topic and she even initially declines his offer for coffee. He builds these women in his head without actually taking them for who they are. He constantly falls for the wrong women. like the changing of the seasons.
Starship Troopers I think, though that’s a bit of a weird one since I remember that the movie is a lot more antifascist than the book it’s based on.
The book is fine. The opening pages tell us clearly that we are nuking bugs on planets with intelligent beings, using all the ammo (because it’s too expensive to return with nukes) and leaving for another planet with bugs.
After that we jump to our protagonist, who is being brainwashed in high school.
Finally, Heinlein was writing his father’s worldview and wanted to take it to its logical end.
I love that book and movie.
So how do you rate it as an adaptation?
In a lot of ways the movie is a spoof of the book. Verhoeven famously hated the book and it’s depiction of military fascism.
The book doesn’t so much promote fascism as explore it. It’s more obvious when you read his other works that that’s just what he does, explore premises.
Stranger in a Strange Land came out less than 2 years later and depicts the creation of a free-love hippie space religion.
Dune 1 and 2.
Moral of story: beware blind loyalty to messianic figures
Audience reaction: Paul is so cool and admirable, I hope he wins!
This is the correct take of the message. It also, given the universe the story is set in, is the only way towards success. Within the big picture, I have empathy for Paul, as he is put in a situation he cannot win and has to follow for the better outcome (for himself, family, humanity).
Wishing for omniscience is like wishing for immortality. Be careful, you might get it. I love the scene after the awakening. Seeing all paths, knowing the only one that will work, and seeing its horror.
It gets worse. Even Frank Herbert started having a cult, his answer was: “did you guys not read my book??”
I think he mentions it in one of the commentaries at the end (or beginning) of Dune Messiah.
In my experience, the fans of the Dune book series are pretty much always cultish.
More than any other book series, people think they’re special if they like Dune.
Holy shit, that checks out. The two most Dune-obsessed people I know well are both born-again Christians (previously agnostic/atheist of Catholic upbringing) and both initially fell into the MAGAsphere.
Ah yes, the original Imperial Truth -> Imperial Creed pipeline.
well Paul does have powers that no one else has …
No one else has -yet.
Fight Club
There’s a theory that the main character actually is suffering from cancer and that the love interest is also a lens for him to confront who he really is.
Fascinating how that upends it all, but I am not sure I believe it.
There’s also a theory that Tyler Durden is created in response to The Narrator’s inability to form a real personal relationship with Marla.
There are a million Fight Club theories. My favourite is that the narrator is Calvin and Tyler is Hobbes.
All movies with a manic pixie dream girl seem to have the point missed. 500 days of summer, eternal Sunshine of a spotless mind, garden state, Scott Pilgrim etc.
steve jobs| (listed as “Steve Jobs” but stylised as the former)
A lot of people assumed it was a fluff piece about the late Apple co-founder and dismissed it. Then it came out that it wasn’t very historically accurate (the people who lived many of those moments came out and said “hey, that’s not the way that happened!” and more people looked away.
The point was how much of an asshole Steve Jobs actually was and how he basically got lucky and exploited circumstances. It was also built like a stage play, with three acts, each consisting of a series of skits where Steve interacts with various people — the same people, in each of three eras. The launch of the Macintosh, the launch of the NeXT Cube, and the launch of the iMac.
The only punch Aaron Sorkin really pulled was the Lisa stuff. According to her, he was kind of a creep. Not quite #MeToo level, but like, he’d ask her if she touched herself in bed, and she’d say “ew, no,” and that would end it for the day. One day she said yes to shut him up, and he started talking about how she was gonna be popular with the boys… or something like that. In the movie, he was only really mean to her in the first segment, and then only at first.
One thing the movie did get right is why every time they show a digital clock, it’s always 9:41. (With analogue, 10:10 or 2:50 are common because it looks like a smile.) It’s 9:41 because that is the exact moment the Mac was announced. Jobs came up with a lot of stupid reasons for why it had to be that time — the timing was planned in advance — but those numbers were cemented in his brain and his subconscious wouldn’t let his conscious mind see it. He may have been on the ASD spectrum as well. Anyway, the numbers came from a paternity test that said there was a 94.1% chance he was the father of Lisa, which he was in denial of, and famously stated that some 20,000 men could have been the father. And yet, he took that number and, no one knows what mental gymnastics he went through to get to 9:41 without making the connection, but that’s the time he announced the Mac and it’s why every Mac, iPhone or other Apple device shows 9:41.
Anyway, the whole movie is good, and watching it reminds me why I like not just movies, but the craft of acting and building scenes and stringing them together. The rocket scene was pretty solid (Jobs explaining the logistics of a NASA mission and it tying into his plans), but the best scene is Michael Fassbender (Jobs) and Jeff Daniels (former Apple and Pepsi CEO, John Sculley) hashing out their differences around the middle of the movie (“Why do people think I fired you?”). Takes place across two timelines (present and flashback) and these guys are talking about 2-3 things at once while advancing one conversation. Had I been 30 years younger, it might have made me get into filmmaking. But as it stands, it just made me appreciate the actors and the writer more.
It’s entirely possible I missed the point, because it’s not exactly a hit piece on Steve Jobs like I initially suggested. They left a lot of things on the table in that regard. It’s just not the fluff piece people make it out to be, though I can understand, there’s a lot of Apple glazing going on. Either way, it was an enjoyable film for dialogue in much the same way The Man From Earth was.
That it’s historically inaccurate makes it uninteresting to me.
And that means there’s no point in it, in my opinion.
If someone wants to write fiction, fine, but using a real figure like Jobs to ride his coattails just makes it lazy.
And since I was around for a lot of the history, the inaccuracies would be distracting. For someone who doesn’t know the history, it makes the movie revisionist history; propaganda.
there’s also quite a bit in the film that just didn’t happen. like the final confrontation between Woz and Jobs and essentially the who basis for the three confrontations. Woz himself said that never happened. Also most of the stuff with Hertzfeld didn’t happen. Like the stuff in the first act where Jobs threatened him. Andy said himself he doesn’t recall jobs being THAT much of a dick to him although jobs very much was an asshole.
