A Fistful of Edits…
We rented a bunch of movies on the weekend, and are slowly working on watching them. We saw Bowling for Columbine this weekend, then watched the special edition of Battle Royale, then watched Returner and A Fistful of Dollars. We still have the Good the Bad and the Ugly checked out from Video Droid, so as soon as I have three hours to spare, I’ll be watching that….
First, Bowling. It was good. While I was watching it. And I still think it’s good, but it’s a good propaganda film. Not a documentary. I’ve read some of the criticisms of the film, and Moore’s response to those criticisms, and there’s some seriously flawed and deceptive techniques used in the film. Some of the editing techniques, especially involving the speeches by Charlton Heston, are outright deceptive, cobbling together lines from speeches that took place months apart, or even suggesting that certain speeches took place much earlier than they did. I agree with Moore’s general thesis in this film, that America’s exceptional amount of violent crime is bred from a climate of fear, I can’t agree with a lot of his methods. He had a good idea that could have been presented fairly and truthfully, and he blew it by playing partisan games. I still like the movie, I just don’t respect it.
Battle Royale and Returner I’ve seen before, in fact I think I wrote about Battle Royale earlier. Returner is like the Matrix meets E.T. meets Terminator, meets Transformers. And yes, it is as good as that sounds. Highly polished production and special effects, and style to spare, but not much more.
A Fistful of Dollars was excellent. There’s lots of creative cinematography and the plot is well-paced. I can’t wait to watch Sergio Leone’s other Man With No Name westerns now. I even want to go back and watch Shane and some of the John Ford/John Wayne films again….
More later…
