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rhondacrockettYeah, it finally opened here. (It feels like you guys have been talking about it since January lol.) So I went out last night to watch it.
The pacing and the overblown narration took some getting used to, and for Marv's section of the movie I felt like I was being rushed through the story, but when I settled into it I had a good time. I liked Becky, the blue-eyed goth hooker, and Marv of course *pets him* Like Kill Bill, the violence is overblown, hyper-stylized and clearly impossible to replicate in real life. You just sat back and marvelled at these amazing pictures. The audience laughed out loud at one point because they'd pushed the hyperviolence so far, it had become funny. It didn't disturb me until afterwards, when I put on the Kill Bill soundtrack, read Wilfred Owen poems (pretentious, moi? ^.~) and thought about it too much.
There was one thing that did chill me at the time. It still chills me now, thinking about it. The Irish mercenary in the sewer, talking about how he prefers explosives to guns. My first thought was, "He's ex-IRA, isn't he? He's talking about planting bombs for Republican terrorists over here."
I'm not mentioning this out of any sense of offense or insult, though I suspect some people in this country will take it that way. But that one throw-away line, that once you've seen bits of people flying through the air you can't go back to just shooting holes in them, spoken in a thick Irish brogue, chilled and horrified me more than any of the other violence either portrayed or mentioned on screen. And I was immediately curious to know: did this resonance occur to Rodriguez or Miller? Was it a deliberate reference to very real (very local) acts of violence, or was it an accident which only audiences in Northern Ireland and the Republic (and possibly some people in certain towns in England) would pick up on? I would like to put that question to them. I'm also curious to know: did this occur to any of the Americans on my friends list, who saw this movie back in April?
A similar argument could be made about the swastika imagery used in Dwight's part of the movie: placing swastika-shaped throwing stars in the hands of a Japanese killer, and putting a neo-Nazi under the command of a black man. Although that confused me more than chilled me.
My end verdict: it's good, but I don't know whether it's something I'd want to see again or not. Although I am tempted, if only to pick up the lines of those crooks with "delusions of eloquence". They had great lines and I can't remember any of them now!
The pacing and the overblown narration took some getting used to, and for Marv's section of the movie I felt like I was being rushed through the story, but when I settled into it I had a good time. I liked Becky, the blue-eyed goth hooker, and Marv of course *pets him* Like Kill Bill, the violence is overblown, hyper-stylized and clearly impossible to replicate in real life. You just sat back and marvelled at these amazing pictures. The audience laughed out loud at one point because they'd pushed the hyperviolence so far, it had become funny. It didn't disturb me until afterwards, when I put on the Kill Bill soundtrack, read Wilfred Owen poems (pretentious, moi? ^.~) and thought about it too much.
There was one thing that did chill me at the time. It still chills me now, thinking about it. The Irish mercenary in the sewer, talking about how he prefers explosives to guns. My first thought was, "He's ex-IRA, isn't he? He's talking about planting bombs for Republican terrorists over here."
I'm not mentioning this out of any sense of offense or insult, though I suspect some people in this country will take it that way. But that one throw-away line, that once you've seen bits of people flying through the air you can't go back to just shooting holes in them, spoken in a thick Irish brogue, chilled and horrified me more than any of the other violence either portrayed or mentioned on screen. And I was immediately curious to know: did this resonance occur to Rodriguez or Miller? Was it a deliberate reference to very real (very local) acts of violence, or was it an accident which only audiences in Northern Ireland and the Republic (and possibly some people in certain towns in England) would pick up on? I would like to put that question to them. I'm also curious to know: did this occur to any of the Americans on my friends list, who saw this movie back in April?
A similar argument could be made about the swastika imagery used in Dwight's part of the movie: placing swastika-shaped throwing stars in the hands of a Japanese killer, and putting a neo-Nazi under the command of a black man. Although that confused me more than chilled me.
My end verdict: it's good, but I don't know whether it's something I'd want to see again or not. Although I am tempted, if only to pick up the lines of those crooks with "delusions of eloquence". They had great lines and I can't remember any of them now!
no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 05:41 pm (UTC)(And I did wonder how the scene would have played in the US if it had been a Middle Eastern guy talking about watching buildings collapse.)