morestuff posted:

Saw this last night and liked it a lot. I'd seen complaints about Blunt's lack of agency before going into it, but I thought that was pretty clearly addressed both narratively and thematically. Her "flaws" are a respect for the chain of command, and a moral compass. You could have cast a man in the role and (aside from the sexual assault) mostly been fine, but the way she's disrespected, patronized and used in a calculated way just underlines the noxiousness of the system.

Terrorist Fistbump posted:

Interesting to hear that others saw the movie with lovely audiences. I had chalked the laughing and applauding and "oh poo poo!"-ing in my screening up to NYC audiences being universally terrible.

Viginti posted:

I also took that 'no-one will hear about this' line as a follow-up to the chat about the hanging bodies. The media will be told and will tell that some violent mexican criminals attacked heroic americans and lost, if they're told anything at all. It will be positioned as a righteous act, and therefore there's nothing to write about; Blunt knows that they provoked it, that they shot first, that they were in control and that the story isn't that simple but no-one else will.

It ties into the line that Brolin has when she asks what they're going to Juarez to do and he says 'overreact' or somesuch. It's not that the cartel aren't a threat (anyone with a gun and malintent is, as we know) just that like al-quida, the mujahadeen, ISIS, they aren't actually on the scale of a national invasion but that's the scale of the response. It's important that they don't take SWAT with them on these missions but Delta Force. It's a clear appropriation of War on Terror tactics to the War on Drugs; Medellin is no different than democratically installing a dictator. If you're comfortablt with the War on Terror, if you cheered in Zero Dark Thirty, then I can see why you would here as well.

There is a whole hell of a lot going on in the movie, it just skims past so much of it, leaving you to decide your opinion, then being blunt as hell at others. Like that score, which could so easily have been ridiculous but worked so well with his style.

Uncle Boogeyman posted:

On my Villeneuve rankings i put it as much better than Prisoners and maybe a smidge better than Incendies but not as good as Enemy.


Alejandro definitely wet the willie.

centaurtainment posted:

The script refuses to take a stand on how it feels about what's going on, which would be fine except that Blunt's character also fluctuates in how she feels (she objects to and then goes along on at least three separate missions, and then impotently points the gun at Alejandro at the end), which keeps the audience from having an identifiable human anchor in the story. And the script's single attempt at having a human character (Silvio, the Mexican cop) is spoiled because he is ultimately just a tool to make the audience feel a certain way about Alejandro in the highway scene. Talking about Sicario after the fact makes it sound like it has a much better script than it actually does because a lot of the characters/scenarios work as metaphors for America's attitudes about US/Mexico border relations but are not very believable on-screen.

Luckily Villeneuve is a good enough director and the cast are all good enough actors to compensate for this.

justlikedunkirk posted:

Throwing this in here for fun: A very well-written pan of the film that I pretty much disagree with 99% of.

http://reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2098/sicario

centaurtainment posted:

Showing Silvio eat breakfast four times with his family and like, wink at his wife when she sees him add booze to his coffee, does not a character make. We know nothing about his motivations, all we know is that it seems like he loves his son. Then the first time we see him outside of that very basic setting is the scene at the end of the tunnel, at which point he simply becomes a human shield for Alejandro, who kills him for basically nothing.

That arc works very nicely if you're writing an essay cuz you can make the same claim that you did, that he represents the unseen victims blah blah blah, but that doesn't make his character in the movie strong or compelling. You don't need dialogue, but why not show him playing some soccer with his kid while dressed as a cop, or him going to the game with his family (like at the end, but with him?). Keeping us in the house, when he's waking up, for multiple scenes, was a waste of time, and his role in the story was too small to justify those repetitious scenes.

Or focus on the wife if you're gonna stay inside the house. She could have been the character you're talking about, but since she barely interacts with Silvio or his kid she's relegated to the sidelines until her last scene at the soccer match (no pun intended).

I know I'm taking the negative view in this thread but I really liked this movie. It's one of the best this year, but it falls short of greatness for some very basic and fixable reasons, all of which have to do with the characters either being weather-worn cliches (Alejandro) or inconsistent in their behavior (Macer). The movie is under-written to its own detriment, although since you're using the term "expository dialogue" pejoratively I'm not going to go too far down that road.

Uncle Boogeyman posted:

i'm not sure there's a more concrete example of a movie that so many people made up their minds on before watching it.

maybe Last Temptation of Christ, i guess.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

Also American Sniper didn't get bad publicity.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

Regarding the scene you're referring to

The cop that shadows the convoy is from Juarez, while Silvio is from Nogales. He had nothing to do with the Americans until the tunnels

Something else:

I can't say I pegged Silvio for an innocent when he was first introduced. All the secrecy and conspiratorial menace that happened prior, really clouded my perception of a Mexican man sleeping through the morning.

We do not see him go to work, wash his car, or play soccer with his son, because they are irrelevant to our viewpoint. We do not see these things because it is only important that he is a Mexican, and we fill in the blank. You do notice how little we learn of him. He works late, he owns a gun he shouldn't have, he frequently isn't home.

If you imagine this movie without those scenes, Silvio would simply be another gangster with slightly more screentime. His role in the plot is so minor that it's repeated. Alejandro kills him, and uses him as a pawn to get closer to Manuel Diaz. Then minutes later, he uses Manuel for the exact same purpose.

Silvio could have been anybody, but instead he wasn't. His life exists outside of anyone else's perspective, even the audience's. He is everything that should be forgettable.



The scene when Silvio steps out of his car and walks towards Manuel is set up like the climax to a Western. The two men, a criminal and a lawman stand face to face while camera affixes at head level. They stare at each other until shots ring out, and both fall to the ground. But it's a total sham, and Alejandro steps out of the darkness and puts an end to that genre moment.

I just liked that moment

Hostile V posted:

Snak posted:

I understand the Mayor of Juarez's complaint, but there's not a lot you can do about that. Just because crime is getting better there doesn't mean that it hasn't been bad, and you can't hold films to be accurate by time they are finished being made. That's just ridiculous. No one really wins there.

As for the xenophobic aspect, I think it's basically unfounded. In fact, the way the story is told we really only see Americans (and Alejandro) being monsters and Mexicans being victims. Yes we see bodies and are told stories about the crimes committed by the Cartel, but none of these things happen on-screen. On the flip side, we see a bunch of (predominantly white male) American paramilitary operators gun down Mexicans like they are expendable movie bad-guys, and literally oppress the female and black police officers. These aren't accidents. Sicario makes a pretty damning statement about the way American authority treats human life. There's even a line reminding us that the American public's demand for narcotics is what fuels the Cartel violence in Mexico.

Snak posted:

I'm not gonna lie. I'm going through some reasonably serious depression right now, and I think I big part of why I loved this movie so much is because I felt like it affirmed my view that the world is poo poo and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Henry Miller posted:

Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while some one is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.

And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of poo poo. That, I believe, would be more miraculous than anything man has looked forward to.

- Tropic of Cancer

Judakel posted:

And I disagree. You never explain why it would. Apparently it just does.

Shut it with your straw man.

Judakel posted:

He has already granted me that the characters are developed lightly, so I have nothing left to prove. Learn about argumentation before you comment. Let him explain why character development and the simplistic moral struggle at the heart of this film are mutually exclusive, or own up to the fact that the characters are poorly developed without an excuse.

Hakkesshu posted:

Incendies was loving horrifying though, jesus. It's the kind of movie I can only stand to see once.

am0kgonzo posted:

Ignoring the way those scenes actually play out on screen to make a point isn't very interesting.

keyframe posted:

Just saw this. Probably one of my favorite movies of all time now. I read that the director and Roger Deakins are reuniting for Blade Runner 2 which makes me stupidly excited.

Snak posted:

Yeah this was announced awhile back. Actually before the movie even came out in wide release. It's how I knew he was the titular sicario. I'm not super thrilled about it, because I feel like Sicario is a perfectly self-contained film, and I liked the split protagonism between Blunt and del Toro.

But obviously I'm gonna keep an open mind.

Uncle Boogeyman posted:

it takes balls for a hollywood thriller to commit so fully to being completely unsatisfying. i mean that in a good way.

Uncle Boogeyman posted:

it takes balls for a hollywood thriller to commit so fully to being completely unsatisfying. i mean that in a good way.

Uncle Boogeyman posted:

it takes balls for a hollywood thriller to commit so fully to being completely unsatisfying. i mean that in a good way.

willie_dee posted:

Best movie of 2015 for me

centaurtainment posted:

The opposite problems, actually. I found it to be bloated. The script took what should have been a simple story and added in at least one too many subplots, which dilutes the impact it should have. If it were only its best scenes, it would be a great movie, but there's a lot of fat there.

centaurtainment posted:

I guess I was hoping that he would be able to build on the relative subtlety of Birdman when compared to his previous films, but the The Revenant is more like his older stuff, a very simplistic, on-the-nose type movie with almost nothing left to the imagination that treats the audience members like idiots who need every last thing spelled out for them five times. There are places where that works to its advantage, specifically Leo's character's parts, but overall I think it could have used a good editor to streamline it.

It's definitely worth seeing; like Sicario (we're still in that thread, right?) it has some incredible individual scenes and at least one great performance.

durk onion posted:

One other question: why were the illegals helping Alejandro with the tunnels? Wouldn't they think that they were going to shut down their way back into the country? They seemed awfully friendly.

96 spacejam posted:

Either way it goes along with the entire tone of the movie and kind of a moot point to argue over.

Death By The Blues posted:

Hello!

If anyone is interested my business partner and I decided to take a stab analyzing the themes within Sicario, hopefully this is kosher.

Sicario: The Mirage of the Moral World