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Prisoners was super shallow?
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Sep 28, 2015 10:09
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Nice to see Sicario continue Villeneuve's tradition of having a car be an absolutely terrible place to be.
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Nov 5, 2015 11:19
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Surlaw posted:Finally got around to watching Enemy after totally loving Sicario, I hadn't seen any other of Villeneuve's movies before and I loved Enemy too! Will check out Prisoners when I get a chance. Is his earlier stuff worth looking for too? Yes! Although both Maëlstrom and Un 32 Août Sur Terre get pretty weird. The start of Un 32 Août Sur Terre might actually be my favourite thing he's done.
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Nov 10, 2015 11:05
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Another thought on Sicario — the ending reminded me of Prisoners in that the film cuts as soon as the protagonist finishes their arc. In Prisoners, Keller Dover goes from a you've-only-got-yourself survivalist to being able to call for help. Once he's calling for help (on his daughter's whistle, no less), it isn't actually that important whether or not Loki finds him. Similarly, Sicario ends as soon as Macer makes the decision to not shoot Alejandro. One of the stories of Sicario is of people having given up their morals in favour of pure "realistic" exercises of power. By drawing the gun on Alejandro from the balcony Macer shows that she could do the same — that she could be a wolf — but she chooses not to. Writing this out, I realize that this motif of breaking the cycle of violence and hatred is present in all of Incendies, Polytéchnique, and Maelström. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Josh Brolin's Kurtz-meets-The Dude. So I've been thinking about this description of Graver, and I think there's a part of Graver's Dudishness that hasn't been brought up yet. Sicario presents "just going with it" as something that can potentially be really bad. Most obviously, there's Macer refusing to 'just go with it' with whatever Graver and Alejandro are trying to do. But I think that something similar is also present in Graver's general philosophy: the world is 'just' a certain way so you have to just go with it; cartels and cartel violence are inevitable so the most that one can hope to achieve is to be in a good position relative to that violence. This is contrasted with sexual violence committed by the delta guys — "just lay back and let it happen." And again, I'm seeing something similar with his previous films. Both Incendies and Prisoners criticize (in different ways) the attitude that 'that's just the way the world is.' And I guess this fits in with Villeneuve's sort-of-magic-realism style: the world isn't "just" as it is, and we should never stop trying to imagine what it could be.
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Nov 10, 2015 11:30
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General Battuta posted:I do think Emily Blunt's character was in a way incorruptible. She signed the document under threat for her life, which is, by the standards of most stories, not exactly heroic. But she can't or won't shoot del Toro as he walks away, making her one of the only characters in the movie who doesn't ultimately try to solve a problem by killing everything problematic. By Sicario standards that's a victory of sorts. This is very Villeneuve.
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Jan 16, 2016 07:16
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mrlego posted:Alejandro did choose the immigrants that had been to America before. Also he asked to see their hands/if they had a family/children. Maybe he was just asking them to see how honest/trustworthy they could be with him with small questions as a test for the larger questions about the tunnels. Also I could see Alejandro offering them something far more interesting in return for their help: letting them go. Given how family and questions about family had been used to that point, my first guess was that these people were vulnerable to coercion.
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Jan 16, 2016 20:35
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Death By The Blues posted:Hello! Thank you for making and sharing this. One thing I'd want to contribute is something that's been brought up in this thread before, which is that despite the total collapse of institutional morality, at the end Kate still acts morally when she chooses to not shoot Alejandro. Sure he gets away, but nearly every Villeneuve movie is about how revenge is bad and what is truly good is breaking the cycle of violence.
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Feb 4, 2016 23:05
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