movies where you disagree w/ the screenwriters on who the 'good guys' are

Does Simba demonstrate any qualities during the film that suggest he would be a good leader, or are we simply accepting that because his father was King that he should in turn be King?

that's kind of how monarchies work...

I have no patience for you sad sacks who are okay with eliminating sentient life by <100%. Thanos is a schmuck, full stop. He’s trying to save the two-legs category out of a cheesy Malthusian conceit.

Go big or go home, chumps; if you think people don’t deserve to exist, just fucking own it.

clearly not his point he had environmental concerns but was like totally into ppl too

Lotsa unmanned planes crashed

hmm thats a good point thats gotta have fucked up his 50/50 split right, the collateral damage

thanos u reckless sonofabitch

hes just another ferris

I just finished Toni Erdmann and the villain is not machinery of capitalism but rather it is Toni Erdmann but also maybe we are meant to think so?

Toni Erdmann is Ferris + 50 years.

Hm... he did steal an expensive vehicle under disguise...

Literally heard someone in an argument with a friend argue that Scrooge was the good guy, that he paid Cratchit a good wage, but Bob was just irresponsible with his money

What else did Jacob Rees-Mogg say

there's an editorial every christmas about how scrooge is really the good guy. none of the authors have read dickens.

In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge learns how to be a more paternalistic capitalist.

Paris, Texas

Point Break would own this thread

Nah, what's so awesome about Point Break is that Bigelow 100% knows that both Johnny Utah and Bodhi represent failed, self-deluding versions of masculinity/heroism.

Regretted posting that almost immediately, partly because you're right. Point Break isn't a good/bad guy movie. It's not ambivalent or conflicted, it's an indictment of the entire concept of macho conflict.

not sure who the good guys are meant to be in Paris, Texas either

Armageddon

lord of the rings is about keeping societal power away from the oiks

It’s spelt orcs I think

Polly Toynbee's father Arnold famously wrote a piece about how wretched Tolkien's books were and how he was glad people had finally come to their senses and got bored of all this ridiculous fantasy claptrap, literally weeks before they became a huge international top sellers. Or something like that.

Any US movie with cops, feds or military. Sure it might make me look pro serial killers/hitler/kkk but over time it will balance out just fine!

not sure who the good guys are meant to be in Paris, Texas either

he's meant to be terrible

But doesn't the movie try to redeem him ultimately? I've always had a problem with the fact that we never see the Dean Stockwell and Aurore Clement in the second half, after HDS and the kid have left. I'm always thinking about how they're feeling, how they have no idea what is going on or what condition HDS is in. That's such a massive oversight by Sam Shepard, and imo goes a long way in suggesting that HDS can be redeemed via his odyssey.

In Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone is supposed to be the good guy, but he's actually the bad guy.

I only saw Paris Texas once, on VHS, but iirc the redemption comes only in HDS realising / remembering / acknowledging (strike according to preference or interpretation) how badly he's damaged those around him. Removing himself from everyone's lives (again) is an act of atonement, not a transformation, and certainly not a recasting of his entire previous history as being a "good guy".

ha ha, Oliver Stone doesn't deal in good guys, but possibly every lead is a Mary Sue, bcz Stone thinks goshdarnit everyone loves a bad boy!

the Avengers are fascists

not really but I still don't get how people were team Stark in Civil War

Black Panther

idk if Killmonger is a villain necessarily but the "good guys" are ultimately on the side of US imperialism against an anticolonial revolution

I don't remember it very well but I seem to remember not really jibing with 'Thank you for Smoking'

I seem to remember it being possibly the most facile "satire" on American politics I've ever seen

i see a lot of comments about marvel movie villains being ideologically correct even if their actions are evil - killmonger is the most common one but i remember similar comments about thanos and now i've seen it about christian bale's character in the new thor as well. which makes me wonder what their game is - are they being intentionally subversive in undercutting the heroism of their heroes or are they countersubversively arguing for colonialism etc? but i know realistically probably they're just trying to come off as "complex" without having any coherent or consistent POV, right?

I dont think Nick Naylor was supposed to be a good guy. his whole thing was that he's super charismatic which allows him to get away with a lot of morally grey stuff.

they're just trying to come off as "complex" without having any coherent or consistent POV

dingdingdingdingding

some sort of emergent POV from hollywood norms + focus groups + insurgent social movements + geopolitical necessities + international markets etc
often comes together as a vague notion of liberal pluralism giving everything a fair shake before being forced to destroy it in self-defence and/or for its own good

it's not that dissimilar from the anticommunist action movies with sympathetic soviet characters/administrations but the politics feel even messier now

xp at NA

That's kind of the Marvel comics shtick, most of the villains have some hook in their character that makes them sympathetic or at least comprehensible. There are few outright evil characters, and in defeating them the protagonists have to confront some issue of moral complexity, etc

With Koyaanisqatsi it's obvious that Godfrey Reggio wanted to portray clouds as the good guys and humanity as the bad guys. But because it's made of stock footage from a particularly interesting time and place, it comes across as a combination of nostalgic shots of life in New York circa the late 1970s plus awesome timelapse shots of cool glass skyscrapers. I kept thinking "what happened to those people" and not "look at those ants ruining nature". It's a good example of a film that's excellent by mistake.

With Powaqqatsi it feels as though he realised his mistake, because it's a lot more concrete. But it still comes across as unintentionally psychotic because the film crew sat there watching people suffering so that they could film them.

I was thinking of Escape from Alcatraz, where the main characters were real-life armed robbers, and there's no suggestion they were framed (or even driven into a life of crime by society), but on the other hand it's one of those post-Watergate/Pentagon Papers 1970s films where all the characters are bastards and heroism is incompatible with the setting. The same goes for the two Sweeney films, because even the good guys are obviously massive dicks.

Manhattan? The writer intended for the lead character to be a quirky wit, but he's a multimillionaire who grooms a 17-year-old girl. Why did that character have to be 17? Why not... 38?

I can’t think of specific titles at the moment, but it feels like there’s an entire genre of 1970s films wherein the male lead is a smug asshole to everyone (especially women), yet the film wants us to view him as a righteous countercultural dude thumbing his nose at the polite conventions of straight society, rather than a prick.

That's some of the plot of Hair.

And the Pink Panther.

I don't have much use for Ferris Beuller either.

O I c we did that years ago

Men's Scarehouse - "You're gonna like the way you're shook." (m bison), Sunday, December 31, 2017 9:18 AM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg one of my finest hours as a display namer

I can’t think of specific titles at the moment, but it feels like there’s an entire genre of 1970s films wherein the male lead is a smug asshole to everyone (especially women), yet the film wants us to view him as a righteous countercultural dude thumbing his nose at the polite conventions of straight society, rather than a prick.

Five Easy Pieces comes immediately to mind.

I can’t think of specific titles at the moment, but it feels like there’s an entire genre of 1970s films wherein the male lead is a smug asshole to everyone (especially women), yet the film wants us to view him as a righteous countercultural dude thumbing his nose at the polite conventions of straight society, rather than a prick.

cuckoo's nest, five easy pieces
CROSSPOST

watched rear window again recently and Jimmy Stewart's character is such a condescending jackass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpSEv2r6hY

Haven’t revisited since the initial viewing but I remember not rooting for the Run Lola Run characters.

killmonger was right