I’m afraid that Albert Brooks defining William Hurt as the devil in Broadcast News has permanently burrowed into my brain and might make this difficult.
Love your story though. Despite the fact that I am one of those - one of my main job functions is to pester people to not do things because I have concerns with the legal ramifications - I’m able to detach and root against the faceless lawyers when I hear about stuff like that.
For more context, it was Fuqua pointing out various gang members, including the leader (guy who basically ran the neighborhood the climax was filmed in) who had a speaking role in the movie, and thanking them for allowing him to shoot in a place no one had ever been allowed to go to before.
That neighborhood has one way in and one way out and a lot could have gone wrong on a film shoot. Legal was like, ‘oh you gotta cut that, can’t be mentioning gang members helping on a movie’. My response was basically that if you took away Fuqua giving props it would be like he didn’t thank them for what they did which could cause him irreparable harm when trying to do future shoots. He was moderately known as a movie director at that time (The Replacement Killers and Bait were before that) but I think that movie launched his career in a major way. Thankfully, they agreed with my justification. He obviously never knew I fought for that to stay and who knows if he would have thought it was as big a deal as I did.
The specific version of the devil is the one trying to tempt Jesus. That’s Denzel in that movie with Hawke and when you watch it from that perspective, the character’s level of evil is really something. I think that’s a big part of why so many people just refused to believe he was a bad guy as the movie was going along. He’s joking, right? Right? Even in the big scene where it became obvious he was a bad guy, some people were still wondering. By the end, there was no doubt.
Sometimes when I’ve had a really bad day at work, I think of his line of ‘What a day, what a motherf****ing day!’. His performance of that line was spectacular.
He is so good in everything. That face scratch he does makes the whole thing so much more sinister. Small detail as but really amps up the tension. Like it’s all so meaningless to him.
Here is a TikTok about the gunshot sound design. Pretty interesting.
He addresses this exact point and it’s why he didn’t make it obvious who the good guys and bad guys were so you couldn’t cheer for one side. He made everyone watch Come and See as the template for what he was trying to do. If you’ve seen it you can see the genesis.
He knew if it was clear who the dems and republicans were it’s would just be war porn for side and ignored by the other.
Hawke is maybe the most underrated working actor. I love listening to him talk about art and film. He is brilliant. He was also in the greatest trilogy ever caught on film so that’s something. 
We are safer though, much safer, so that message is stupid.
People seem to be critiquing the posts they want people to be making instead of the ones they actually are, so a few points:
there is no real value or coherence in making a movie that is accessible to both the right and the left in a political sense, that’s not a very good movie or particularly meaningful. I also don’t really want any movie to “address” MAGA or anything like that (boring af). But you can see in this movie that the director is pretty limited in his world view and ability to tell a more compelling story.
“message” movies are inherently not very good, so I’m certainly not agitating for a message movie about a tremendously unrealistic scenario in which well organized factions successfully overthrow the government in the current climate. And we’re not drawing live to any meaningful insurrection. That’s just some lib-pilled nonsense or MAGA fantasy.
trying to remove “politics” from a civil war movie set in current times doesn’t work, especially when you inject abundant loaded political imagery into it. It also just results in a coded centrist take on things with sneak peaks into the fact that the director probably doesn’t actually have a very nuanced understanding of things. This detracts from the gritty realism he’s going for because you have things like “the antifa massacre” and the fact that in a civil war none of the main characters seem to have any political opinions. The idea that things could play out the way they do in the movie is itself a (dumb) political opinion.
He did the best he could though since that seems to be the measuring stick people want to apply to this.
If you’re nostalgic for the great movies of 1999 and like any Ringer show, they empaneled all of the non-Bill heavy hitters for this one (Fennessey, Amanda, CR, Mal, Joanna, Van, and…some dude who Joanna also co-hosts with that isn’t Mal). Recommended listening.
(Because I went hunting because 1999)
Man oh man, I remembered that someone didn’t like The Insider, but it crushes me that it was you. Five-star classic IMO.
You seem to be a Ringer fan, and some of their feeds really suck with knowing what is what, did Binge Mode ever come out with anything non-star wars after they finished Harry Potter and GOT?
They also did every MCU movie up to whatever point was current for them.
Nah, dont give a shit about that. Was hoping for some more book/movie tie ins, like LOTR or Stephen King stuff. I think The Dark Tower would go great in a in depth break down like that if there was some visual media support for it
Well it’s definitely an outlier movie in terms of my opinion vs the consensus (yours). I really wanted to like it too ! Maybe that will be for my next rewatch in 15 years…
(I also don’t really get the 1999 thing tbh)
https://twitter.com/RealGDT/status/1099151470581112832
I’d never even heard of Personal Shopper before, gave it a shot, my man Guillermo does not miss. Classic old-school ghost story. Why do people hate on Kirsten Stewart? She carries this entire movie, she’s fantastic.
I know nothing of this Personal Shopper film, but she was great in Spencer.
I’ve never seen Kristen Stewart be bad. If there’s derision out there then I’m guessing it’s to do with her connection to Twilight.
You could even see in Panic Room that she had something, because she clearly stood out over what you would usually get out of an 11-year-old.
I feel like dudes hate her because she was in a movie for teenage girls and she’s not the usual bubbly Hollywood starlet. She’s perfect for dark thrillers like this.
How did she get cast for that? I assume some kind of nepo thing. Great movie.
Looks like she was in some movie, The Safety of Objects, the year before, so she had already started getting discovered. I’d never heard of that one, but it starred Glenn Close and Dermot Mulroney so it had some name actors at the fore.
It does look like she has some ins:
Her father, John Stewart, is a stage manager and television producer, while her Australian-born mother,[2][3] Jules Mann-Stewart, is a script supervisor and filmmaker.[1][4]
I have no idea how a kid would get a major role that young without that though.
Shes great in almost everything.
That being said, she isnt in the Twilight movies, though thats probably 70% direction, 25% writing and 5% her performance.