Posted on 08/26/2011 11:11:00 AM PDT by Borges
Edited on 08/26/2011 11:32:12 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
The whole idea of ‘Camp’ is a ‘So Bad It’s Good’ mentality. It’s an idea that started in the Gay subculture and was popularized in a 1964 Susan Sontag essay.
Moby Dick is the closest 19th century English got to Shakespeare and Milton.
Concur on it being a bad film.
The only thing worse than a film critic, is one that can’t stand by his opinions.
This guy should be proud to have panned it, but I suspect that he is feeling left out of the group think of his lefty pals.
“This is more of the elite rolling around in the gutter and calling it great art.”
To be fair, I don’t think anyone’s calling it great art. It’s more a case of “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and if “Scarface” holds people’s (or vocal minority of people’s) attention 30 years after its release it must have done something right. This article seems to attribute to it actual worth, whereas I wouldn’t put it above “so bad it’s good” or a guilty pleasure (though not for me, as I still genuinely dislike it).
Your point of view can develop over time it’s just that this guy happened to have been right the first time.
Scarface may have been not “ahead of it’s time” but simply a bad example that became popular.
The old “if you build it, they will come”. If you portray slime younger people will be wont to imitate it. (Columbine & Basketball Diaries).
That is why they should not have been made but the Pandora’s box is opened and here we are.
“Basketball Diaries” was a moral parable that wasn’t really violent. Comparing it to Columbine is nuts.
“Toward the end there’s a scene I think where he falls face down in a mound of cocaine and I said loudly ‘I hope he’s dead’ and the entire audience burst out laughing. It was a debased vile movie then and I assume it still is since nothing has changed”
You’re right, and he was more objectionable even than other cinematic mass-murdering drug kingpins, including Pacino’s own Michael Corleon, who at least valued his family in ways other than wanting to have sex with them. It would be unpleasant but nevertheless purposeful if “Scarface” were a morality tale. For instance “MacBeth,” in which we see how awful is wealth and power in the hands of the illegitimate and depraved. We don’t even get that, however, as Oliver Stone feels the need to add a scene where Scarface informs his fat, rich, lilly-white fellow restaurant patrons that he’s a bad guy because they need him to be one.
Know what, Tony? We don’t need you to be bad. We don’t want anyone to be bad. We wish you were dead, and that’s that.
“Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction aren’t all that violent. At least not onscreen.”
But they are depressing and mostly depraved.
The youtube video was funny.
Thank you for posting.
That’s four of my favorite movies you listed.
Depressing? Both are highly comic. Especially the latter. RD is a story extremely well told.
I’ll take your advice on that as I never saw Basketball Diaries.
But I know one thing from first-hand experience (Elizabeth Taylor’s “Secret Ceremony” which I was taken to as a 9-10 yr old and imitated Mia’s fate 4 years later to a T tho I survived) - kids imitate what they see on the screen, especially when there are no decent adults in their life guiding them.
I remain convinced that having been made to read Shakespeare is and was child abuse. Same for Silas Marner. Also applies to being forced to read more than one book by Dickens. It wasn’t until the 12th grade that school assigned us to read Clarke’s “The Star.” What a wonder that was. That lead to “Rescue Mission” and then decades of reading sci fi. Finally.
‘Catcher in the Rye’ supposedly influenced a bunch of assassinations. There will always be misguided people who can be set off by just about anything.
That post goes towards explaining your awful film reviews.
I think the naming of Basketball Diaries along with Columbine is because Harris and Kleebold both were inspired to dress and act as they did by a scene in the movie where the lead character kills fellow classmates with a shotgun. So the comparison is valid.
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