"I didn't sign up to kill women or any children. For every enemy soldier we killing six civilians. And that ain't right to me. I ain't got enough of motherfucking fight in me. It frightens me."
"Bitches and guns, this is every man's dream, I don't wanna go home where I'm just an ordinary human being."
-Jedi Mind Tricks
Impossible to not observe the cycle of colonialist violence on display in Oliver Stone's Vietnam epic, from occupation to guerrilla warfare…
No matter how anti-colonial your values are going into Zulu, it's near-impossible not to be moved by the last few exhausted, besieged British troops breaking into a rousing rendition of Welsh war song Men of Harlech as a vast, final wave of warriors descends on them. But this isn't just a hagiographic exercise in British Empire nostalgia and rehabilitation, even though it might appear that way on the surface. After the climax, the camera lingers on the mountain of Zulu…
A fascinating and disturbing depiction of violence as a kind of cancerous cell, infecting everything and everyone it comes into contact with. Or in the case of Mortenson's Tom Stall, awakening inside him after decades in remission. It's an incredible, subtle lead performance -- watch his demeanor and accent shift ever so slightly when he sits down in a Philly dive bar in the third act -- and he's surrounded by fantastic character actors firing on all cylinders: Stephen McHattie, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt in an absolutely iconic, surreal, almost slapstick cameo that should not work but absolutely does. One of Cronenberg's best.
Say what you will about the overall redditness of this movie, it's fun, propulsive, with a very good cast and nice visuals. put it on on a lazy Sunday and half watch it while scrolling your phone, that's just a nice afternoon.
"Because imperialism in its very essence is what transforms men into beasts, it’s what transforms men into blood-thirsty beasts..."
-Che Guevara
Not really for me but features some beautiful visuals and fantastic performances. After what feels like an eternity of non-stop hollow assembly line superhero slop it's nice to see filmmakers and actors come together to try sometime weird and interesting.
Civil War is very competently directed, looks great, very nice cast, and seeing America get completely wrecked is just viscerally satisfying on some level. But it suffers greatly from trying desperately and ultimately failing to be Important. What is the point of any of this? America is polarized. War is hell. Orange Man Bad. Journalists are the true heroes. The contradictions have never been more heightened and Civil War has nothing interesting to say about any of them.
An effective piece of fourth reich propaganda. and though it is impossible to recreate the look of a Tony Scott film no matter how much you try, still a worthy follow up to an iconic 80s classic.
A pretty great cast, some competent suspenseful sequences, a few interesting visual flourishes — DOP Tod Campbell was doing some stuff — all in service of a story populated by unlikable characters that ultimately promotes a nihilistic and reactionary worldview. "People bad" is a rallying cry for Western liberal narcissists who recognize on some level that the systems and institutions they cherish so much have completely failed, bringing us to the brink of ruin, but are too cowardly to confront this in any real way.
This guy convinces himself he's building a superweapon to defeat the 3rd Reich and ends up kickstarting the 4th. And America still accuses him of being a Communist spy. If Oppenheimer hadn't been blinded by his towering ego he might have realized that FDR's idea of a postwar US-Soviet alliance that very well could have ushered in an unprecedented era of peace and global prosperity died with him, and not ended up as a central preparator of one of modern…
An all-time classic in the genre of films that start out as one thing and then violently shift gears at the midway point to something completely different. I would absolutely watch an entire film about Tippi Hendren's charismatic socialite with legal trouble becoming entangled with Rod Taylor's more straight-laced attorney character who likes her in spite of himself. But that's not what this movie is, and after taking ample time setting the stage, introducing the characters and the sleepy seaside…
A flawed but well-crafted time capsule from the End of History and the dawn of the information age, where genuinely thrilling and exciting portrayals of scientific discovery and exploration overcome the somewhat ham-fisted dormroom science vs religion debates. It might be hard to see what Jodie Foster's idealistic and uncompromising Ellie Arroway has in common with Matthew McConaughey's hippy-dippy New Age snake oil salesman Palmer Joss, who sells millions of books about how "we can e-mail each other any time…