Wet Wilderness
Ape Over Love

I didn't see Scream V, but I read the review anyway.

Last Man Standing
She's No Angel
The Manson Family
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
The Affairs of Janice
Heaven's Gate

 

I think the version on the Criterion Channel is the 2012 restoration, which I believe includes a few changes from the Director’s Cut that was previously available.

I believe Soderbergh did a fan edit that much shorter, interested to check it out, although given the runtime of less than 2 hrs I suspect it won’t be terribly coherent.

With the opening, I think Cimino was attempting something similar to The Deer Hunter’s wedding sequence in giving us a sense of a community before the main events kick in. Only I don’t think the movie gains much by establishing Kristofferson’s attachment to the upper class. I found his love triangle with Huppert and Walken a lot more compelling than his interactions with Waterston (who is especially one note) and Hurt (who is great, but I’m not convinced we needed that initial scene to get this across).

IIRC, the 2012 restoration did change the colour timing although I’m not sure to the extent as I haven’t seen earlier versions. Still looked plenty brown and dusty to me.

Rock wrote:

The Deer Hunter

I've never really agreed with the criticism of the film's depiction of the Vietnamese, because I don't see how it could be construed as an all-encompassing portrait of the Vietnamese people or culture.  We're limited to two pretty specific sets of Vietnamese, the Viet-Cong POW soldiers and this shady criminal underworld, neither of which come off in a good light, but neither are they suggested to represent the entire populace.  The specific use of Russian Roulette as a torture method has never been documented in these Viet-Cong POW camps, but there's no shortage of other testaments to the brutal tactics that were employed there, so I find that detail to be moot.  The criminal underworld isn't too different from what John Woo depicts in Bullet In The Head, and I haven't heard any aspersions against that film's portrayal.  As you point out, the perspective of the characters is the focus of the film, and it isn't as if the film shys away from also portraying a critical depiction of such American deficits as the poor veteran's health care and the futility of the war.  Regardless, I'm of the opinion that the film shouldn't really be viewed through a political lens anyway.

It's also worth noting that part of my aversion to this criticism is that at one point the loudest proponent of it was Jane Fonda, who had notoriously been photographed astride a Viet-Cong anti-aircraft cannon (which, to her credit, she has more recently admitted was a lapse of good taste).  Fonda's anti-war zeal had morphed from the peace movement to a more radical chic of open Maoist revolutionary support, so essentially she had her own political motives in crying racism in this context.  (And professional motives obviously, as her Coming Home was at the time the leading competition with Deer Hunter at the Oscars).

And for final full disclosure, I also admit that the fact that my father was a Vietnam veteran isn't completely irrelevant to my opinion on the matter.

Ebert nails it: "The game of Russian roulette becomes the organizing symbol of the film: Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, about how It touches the sanity of men forced to play it, will apply to the war as a whole. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous."

It would be easy enough to call this Martin McDonagh's best film, because I was never more than mildly amused with his hipster hit man farce In Bruges and the diminishing returns of the cynical pseudo-quirk of Seven Psychopaths and the flatulently condescending Three Billboards.  All of his style and stars are attractive enough, but his films have never had much heart, much less heart than his brother, John Michael, managed in his superior films like The Guard and Calvary.  Banshees, which roots McDonagh in his Irish clime, is perhaps his attempt to rectify this discrepancy.  Perhaps the fraternal tension is instructive.  By coincidence, I had just rewatched Mickey & Nicky shortly before Banshees, which is a similar tale of, not sibling exactly, but the deterioration of brotherly bonding.  McDonagh's setting of the Irish Civil War may be a bit on-the-nose, but, unlike Billboards, at least it's on something.  Whatever cultural/partisan strife that McDonagh was imagining he was skewering in Billboards is more faithfully explored in Banshees anyway, and although its resolution is still murky and without a lot of emotional insight, it is still more exemplary of what Armond White described as a contemporary "sickness of soul" (White was not a fan of the film), which in turn reminds me of that open letter that non-critic Donald Fagen wrote to Wes Anderson after watching the similar fraternal dissolution in his Darjeeling Limited.  (That latter film received none of the awards and accolades as Banshees, but is the more profound and amusing of the two films.)

Banshees is less reluctantly empathic than McDonagh's other films, which is welcome, but the true liberating spirit appears to be the sister character of Siobhan (suppoting actress nominee Kerry Condon) who manages to extricate herself in a minimally self-destructive fashion.  I suppose that's some representation of progress, as is the film's more earnest embrace of its own insecurities, even when they may manifest in embarrassing gratuity.  Write what you know.

8/10






Given this film's storied troubles at being made at all, a certain amount of grace is required to excuse its compromised condition.  Famously documented in the Lost in La Mancha documentary, this is the Terry Gilliam project that he finally managed to complete in 2018 after the original shoot collapsed nearly 20 years earlier.  Johnny Depp has been replaced with the suitably swarthy Adam Driver as our not-entirely-complicit Sancho Panza, and the late Jean Rochefort is replaced by Jonathan Pryce as our incorrigible Quixote.  Both leads are quite fun, and keep the film engaging, but the fatal flaw is an absence of Gilliam's typical zest.  There are spare visionary moments, an inspired kink to weave the troubled production history into the plot, but there's also an inescapable sense of exhaustion, as if this is *good enough* and let's be happy it got made at all. 

7/10
 

Also, to nobody's surprise, Assault on Precinct 13 fucking rips on the big screen.