Rodion15

Another masterpiece of American Manichaeism.

This movie serves as an excellent case for analysis of American absurd hunt for scapegoats.

Clint serves as a perfect representative of a society in which criminals and perverts serve as scapegoat of citizen's day-to-day frustrations and anger. Against Europe's predominant and more balanced philosophy in which crime is no more than what it us: a burden to society of difficult treatment, Clint champions a regrettable social deviation in which citizens' frustrations are satisfied through a scapegoat which, upon satisfaction, leaves him more ignorant and blinded than he was. Whether it is the Jews in the Germany in the thirties, the Armenians in the pre-WW1 Turkey, thugs in China, adulterous women in Muslim countries or criminals in present-day America: honest citizens need someone to crap on. The appalling result of this disparity is that the criminal suffers a double punishment, the second one utterly undeserved and owed to a social pathology.

In the case in point: the spectator is confronted with a revolting crime in which one's visceral crave for a scapegoat is put inside a morbid labyrinth of who-and-who's not, until the intrigue eventually satisfied to ones wishes. In the course of it, a pedophile is beaten to the pulp (to death) because he was abusing a child in a car, and a suspected pervert criminal is portrayed as obviously deserving to be the spectator's scapegoat; something which, when it occurs in real life to real people, will do doubt release such reactions, for it is obvious that if one has been sexually and brutally abused, one may probably and justifiably wish to wreak vengeance onto any pedophile; and that if one's beloved daughter is killed by a pervert, one will probably and understandably like to chop him to pieces, and it would be probably justifiable in many cases. The problem occurs when the masses are served this as bread a circuses.

This type of movie reminds me of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, in which the masses are exposed to these type of Manichaean movies where the bad guy is hunted for and ultimately bombed to death to their ultimate catharsis.

This is 2nd World War seen from the other side, that of the German soldiers, the movie is 3 hours 10 minutes long, (the director's complete version is 20 minutes longer); it may seem a bit slow but it's worth to sit it out, the photography is astounding, take care to see it in a dark room, the color of the movie is rather dull (this is a submarine). I missed something important: how's it they never spoke of the Jews?, didn't the German soldiers ever talk about the fate of all those Jew neighbors that had been carried away?, clearly this would have made the characters less sympathetic to the public, but it would have made the movie even more wholesome.

I went just reluctantly to see Gladiator, with the idea that it would fall wide short of Spartacus, but I was mistaken. Its 150 minutes passed quick as lightning; after the first time I saw it I was so amazed that I couldn't quite make up my mind as to the real quality of the piece, so I read some reviews and talked to some pals and got multifarious feelings that ranged from `A royal stunts-and-special-effects surrounding a void' to `A landmark that will get all the Oscars'; so I decided to enjoy it again and make myself clear. This movie has an excellent plot of noticeable roundness, full to the brim with nerve and surprise. Though it hasn't all the appeal to me of Spartacus, it doesn't lack depth. A weak point: It spares too much in blood and crudeness, which would be very valuable not for morbid curiosity's sake but as an effective means to represent the most brutal aspects of the Roman Empire and to make us reflect on the value of human rights nowadays and when compared to the most sophisticated of ancient civilizations. A good movie for lovers of both Schwarzenneger and Stanley Kubrick.