Helps to see her in more of a heroic role. It was so easy to revile her in Basic Instinct and Casino. I also liked her in Total Recall and Sphere.
Love cowboy movies, let me re-recommend the Japanese Unforgiven remake, starring Ken Watanabe.
Also, The Abyss is on Hulu now, so great.
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The white savour critique of DWW is silly. There is literally a whole nation of indigenous people called MĂ©tis that were the product of western people and indigenous people having kids.
He also doesnât save them at all in the movie. It makes a pretty strong case he does nothing to save them. He fails miserably.
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Agree with everything here, and I just wanted to add one thing:
I recently read Rum Punch, the Elmore Leonard book that Jackie Brown is based on. And never have I read a book where the characters are so clearly burned in my brain as the actors from the movie. There was not a single page where I wasnât picturing Jackson, Grier, DeNiro, Fonda, and Forster saying every line. Even though both Grierâs and Fondaâs characters are explicitly described as not looking anything like the actresses that play them.
Such a great movie. I go back and forth on which QT movies I like best, and Iâm pretty sure that neither Pulp Fiction nor Reservoir Dogs are in my top 3.
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I like Jackie Brown but get triggered when people says itâs his best film. It seems to be the favourite of people who donât really like QT.
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See I donât think its actually racist really but at best its a dated choice of focus. Your movie that is seemingly seriously addressing the Native American genocide is centered around a heroic white man who happens to be having a romantic relationship with another white person for a good portion of the film. You can easily not do that.
The modern (correct) take on this issue is seen in Killers of the Flower Moon where the white people are just straight villains.
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Thatâs fair. Itâs the saviour part that is silly. If anything the indigenous people save him not the other way around. They save her too.
Iâll add every white person except those two are villains.
I smiled
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The juice is loose brings to mind
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You never know.
Past Lives
Loved the scene at the end where they showed them as children again but I thought overall the film did too much telling and not enough showing. The character interactions were boring and trivial.
OMG. Miles and Miller are the screenwriters. Those are the guys behind Smallville.
I have some issues with this. The biggest issue is that a white man goes into a tribe of Native Americans to assimilate to them. He falls in love with an assimilated white woman. Why did he gravitate to this white woman instead of a Sioux woman? What did he do related to her at the end? What will their lives be after leaving? Will they be assimilated Lakota Sioux wherever they land, or will they become re-assimilated white people?
He decided to leave because he felt his presence endangered them despite the immediate threat due to him to the tribe being eradicated with the diary used to track the tribe and him returned to him. The postscript according to the plot description on wikipedia is that they werenât immediately found but they still got screwed. Where is our happy couple now? Would it not have been better to stay and die (eventually) with his new family rather than leave and live, if he truly wasnât trying to âsaveâ them and the white woman, especially since the tribe and Costnerâs character werenât even found in the movie? Bringing the captured and assimilated white woman back to white society was a very common trope in old Westerns with a very famous one being the extremely racist The Searchers.
Granted, itâs been a little over 20 years since Iâve last seen the film (had to watch it something like 6 times when doing work for it back then) and another 13 before that, but white person gravitating to white person was hugely problematic in the movie. Itâs kind of like the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. If you didnât have an extremely angry reaction at the writer of that book wondering whose side he was supposedly on, you also might not have an issue with Dances with Wolves. I also saw that a reviewer thought it had a very noble savage type approach to the movie which I canât remember well enough to agree with but do seem to remember it well enough to not disagree with.
The problem in that era of filmmaking and how Native Americans were treated in general from the late 80s to mid 90s is that it was two things. 1. The Noble Savage 2. We did not exist.
With the two white characters marrying each other and not doing anything to âmixâ with the tribe, your Metis reference means nothing to the plot of the film. Would Hollywood have allowed an A-list star to be in an interracial relationship with a Native American at the time? Who knows? But they certainly could have written a plot that included that instead of getting two white people together.
This is all the film criticism version of the constant left wing idea that not perfect is the same as perfectly bad.
That is a very unthought out and poor response to what I wrote. I know youâre capable of better.
Nobody said it was the perfect depiction of indigenous culture but it was orders of magnitude better than what came before it is still better than 99% of what we see today. This my point, not perfect isnât the same as bad.
Also, nothing you wrote counters my original .point that itâs in in no way a saviour narrative. That critique is just not rooted in facts in any way.
I donât generally disagree with your points but they also donât effect my enjoyment of the film at all. For its time it was as progressive as any film could be.
My points donât affect my enjoyment of the film. The main difference is I canât ignore those points while you can.
An example is The Searchers is a great movie, but it was the most uncomfortable Iâve felt watching a movie in a long time because of how racist it was.
Probably because he interacted with her more than other women because she was the translator.
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Or maybe because it was set in 1860 and not 2024. 