Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by RGA (A) on June 14, 2005 at 15:11:27

In Reply to: You are one slippery guy. Do you unconsciously posted by tinear on June 1, 2005 at 06:19:02:

There was no redeeming value in Amon Goeth in real life or the film and in fact Spielberg and Ralph Fiennes did a fantastic job of giving Amon a multi-dimensional persona that is fitting to the pre-emininant historical novels by Christopher R Browning (Ordinary Men...) and Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners).

Goodfellas (which should have won best picture and director as most pro critcs acknowledge) lead character had redeeming qualities relative to many of the others. People in this world you may be surprised to know value greed and the easy life above all else and love to have power. Nowehere is that more clear than in Goodfellas and indeed Schindler's List. Gang mentality doesn't go away, desire for power is capitalism and if you can;t play within the system you create your own or your the sheep like most of us forum posters who do our job for X amount of money and lead vanilla lives.

Scorcese grew up in anything but a vanilla world and his world is our world -- just the part we like to hide under the covers. His characters in the films I believe work best Taxi Driver and Goodfellas have redeeming characters or at least pitiable characters even tragic. I have not seen Mean Streets - I bought the Scorcese Box Set(first one) and will look through the films to see where I stand when I see a larger sampling of his earlier work.

I'm not convinced that he is necessarily any better a director than Steven Spielberg --- Frankly from what i can tell Scorcese is successful in a narrow subject matter and far less successful when he he strays from the seedy. Spielberg can do it all whether it's the big stupid cheesey popcorn movie that is just one bag of fun or when he does something like Schindler's List which transcends the movies and is by quite a wide margin the best film I have ever seen. The anti-Spielberg crowd can kiss my hairy butt on this one.

Spielberg also has made some of the biggest dung heaps I've ever seen -- so at least when he misses he misses BIG. I'd have it no other way.