24th Hall of Fame

I watched it probably about 16 years ago. I have thought about it a lot since then, despite not really anticipating watching it again.

I feel like watching it again, especially after such a long time, was an interesting experience. Mostly it feels like it cemented the feelings I remember having about it. I was surprised to find that it was more graphic than I remembered (for example I had completely forgotten about him )

I both appreciated the artistry and themes of it more, and had stronger objections to the content involving child actors.

Barry Lyndon



Kubrick's films often are greater on a technical scale than a personal scale, which has always made an overall rating for a lot of his films hard to rate. I feel with a second go around on this I feel about the same. It's a really good looking film, the cinematography is great and the costumes give it a nice historical feel. The score is really good too. Ryan O'Neal did a good job in the lead role and most of the supporting pieces were pretty good too.

Although I don't necessarily feel the length for the most part, I feel like the film is hurt for me by not really investing in O'Neals character. He just doesn't seem all that interesting or a character to me. Yes, a lot happens, but it doesn't seem to have any sort of emotional connection or a wow factor to me. It's like seeing the evolution of a Weedle to a Butterfree, we don't get very far from point A to point B to me.

Anyways, yeah, maybe a piss poor reference because I do like the film. But it doesn't reach any kind of a favorite status. It remains a mid tier Kubrick, which should be seen as a good thing because those bottom films of his I really really don't like at all.

what are the bottom Kubrick's that you 'really, really don't like at all', @rauldc14? If ya don't mind me asking.

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What I actually said to win MovieGal's heart:
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The Whisperers (1967)

I didn't know what to expect from a film about an elderly woman's life on welfare. Early on, the film didn't seem to have much going on for it. I didn't feel sympathy for Mrs. Ross (probably for having lived as a neighbor of a similar paranoid-schizophrenic elder woman for years). Her behavior isn't malicious by choice, but she's deemed fit to live alone, and her actions need to be judged from that point of view.


Fortunately, the appearance of the stolen money allows Mrs. Ross to seem a little more likable. It's obviously due to other characters being far more disgusting and consciously vile by comparison. The Whisperers ends up being a series of ordeals for her, as most of the people she meets seek to exploit her. In the end, it feels like she finally accepts her lot and is almost happy in her solitary poverty.

@cricket called this kitchen sink, but I somewhat disagree (though I'm not a pro in the genre and rely on Wikipedia article about it). I'd rather say it romanticizes poverty (at least as much as Beasts of the Southern Wild) and is kitchen sink on the surface only. Here money and dreams of a better life only bring misfortune, and the only time Mrs. Ross is seemingly content is the end where she's back to where she began and can't even remember the money (possibly still in the drawer she left them). It's not a commentary about the working class living conditions but a cautionary tale about reaching beyond your place. I don't completely agree with what it's selling, but it's really well done and quite entertaining.

The Whisperers looks gorgeous. Skillfully done black-and-white filming is so beautiful, and it fits the old and crumbling environment perfectly. Acting is top-notch, too. Technically, I have no complaints, but the subject isn't exactly my thing. None the less, I found it quite entertaining and far from the drag I expected it to be.

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That is an interesting take. When you look at it that way, the movie has more in common with a movie like Fargo than it does with Umberto D. There's also something to be said about how the movie shows that there is institutional encouragement for lower to middle class people to reach beyond their place, or to put it another way, make them believe that what they have isn't good enough. After all, there's so much money in it. You can see this in the betting office or in the magazine advertisement for Bahama vacations.

I didn't think that The Whisperers romanticized poverty. Quite the opposite, in fact.

(SPOILERS BELOW AND THEY AREN'T TAGGED!!! BEWARE!!!!)

The other characters we encounter who are in the lower class are not nice people. There's the couple who live upstairs, have loud arguments, and the wife physically threatens the old woman. When they discover her possibly dead in the street, the debate whether they should even do anything.

Then there's the woman she meets who turns out to be totally predatory (along with the rest of her horrible family).

There are the other people in the church who are rude.

I think that the film makes a pointed commentary about the way that people will behave when they are in that situation. The main character is a weird outlier because she doesn't think of herself as being poor. She talks about hiring domestic workers. She writes letters to her social worker as if her were a personal lawyer or something.

What I think the ending nods to is the idea that people will go back to what is familiar, even if it is overall worse for them. As sad and lonely as her solitary habits might be, there is a comfort in them and she retreats to that after the trauma of her experiences. Her life of denial is ultimately more "home" to her than being with her manipulative family members. We aren't meant to see her impoverished life as "better". I think that we are more meant to understand that it is tragic that this woman has no real support structure (even the horrible couple have each other) and ultimately must retreat into a fantasy world.

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I'm starting to think that La Dolce Vita is just a collective delusion harbored by everyone else but me. It was supposed to arrive in my mailbox on January 28th. I'm not sure this movie exists.

I don't think that romanticizing requires everyone to be nice and noble. Besides, it's easy to rationalize their behavior through the cautionary tale (or common) logic.

The couple upstairs has been harassed by Mrs. Ross for a long time, and her outspoken stance towards them is judgmental and condescending. It's very easy to imagine her as the instigator of their ongoing feud, and in that case, the cause is, at least partially, her imagined (and thus undeserved) position in the upper class.

The woman who robs her is just a standard cautionary tale ordeal. They're not even proper characters, but a pack of evildoers who are in the story to punish Mrs. Ross's aspirations for a wealthy life.

In the church, the "rude" people are just going through the hoops. Play pious, do as your told, and you get what you deserve. Mrs. Ross acts as if she doesn't understand how the system works and is ridiculed by the "congregation".

Rudderless (contains spoilers)

This review will probably make you question my viewing comprehension abilities (even more):

This is an involving, honest and unique exploration of grief and fatherly love that comes close to greatness but does not quite stick the landing. Billy Crudup gives a strong performance as Sam for how he conveys the grieving process and his dilemma of whether performing his son Josh's songs and bonding with fellow wayward soul Quentin (Anton Yelchin) is the right way to do it. That Sam not only grieves, but also gets to know his son through his music also resonated with me because in my own experience, at least, it accurately represents how fathers and sons prefer to communicate and express love for one another. Anton Yelchin is also very good as Quentin for how he brings Sam out of his shell and copes with the fallout of the big revelation about the songs' author. Speaking of Quentin, his character arc pretty much represents my relationship with the movie, but without Sam's parting gift to him. In other words, my reaction to that other revelation about Josh was not unlike what happens when Josh's ex Kate (Selena Gomez) spills the beans. When I saw Sam and his ex-wife Emily (Felicity Huffman) cleaning graffiti from Josh's grave, I was thrown for a loop because I assumed that he was a victim of the campus shooting rather than the killer. In the first two acts, all we see about the attack's aftermath is a clip of a TV news segment and reporters hounding Sam for a statement. Director Macy and company may have believed that this was enough to identify Josh as the killer, but journalists are just as likely to stalk the parents of the victims of school shootings. Besides - and while you often never know what someone is really like until it's too late - isn't it safe to assume that based on what the movie lets us know about Josh and the tone of his songs that he would want nothing to do with guns? In short, the moment at the cemetery went against everything I had every right to believe up to that point, not to mention made me wonder if Sam's struggle is about grief or if it's about him coping with his son having been a murderer. Again, the performances are strong and my reactions to how the movie depicts grief, the father-son dynamic and the dangers of treating people as surrogates like Sam and Quentin did for each other felt genuine enough for me to give the movie a mild recommendation. Oh, and the songs aren't half bad either. It's just a shame that I'm still questioning if my reactions were the right ones to have.

I didn't realize he was the shooter till that moment, and I definitely think that's intentional. It's supposed to be a shock and question any sympathy you were feeling. I would say that's the point of the movie. For me, it just wasn't very effective in that goal because the characterizations and the script really didn't have me feeling anything.

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But then what (or who) is being romanticized about poverty?

Honestly, I think that you could tell a very similar story about a rich woman living in a mansion all by herself. It was her isolation and alienation from her community that was the tragedy.

Aside from the characters I listed, what other characters were there to consider?

I confess. We all chipped in to bribe your mailman in order to keep you from completing the challenge ahead of everybody.

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I thought the reason though was that I stole it from her mailbox.

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I didn't feel The Whispers romanticized poverty, though I don't feel it condemned it either.

The film maker went to great lengths to show poverty as a lonely existences, as evident by the scenes of the stray cats in the desolate streets.

However I do feel the old woman was content in her own delusions and was the safest when she was alone in her fortress of folded papers and misplaced items. Personally I felt the film was more of a character study than a moral commentary. Though I can see how a case could be made for it as a moral commentary.

Like @seanc said, keeping the nature of Josh's involvement in the shooting under wraps is definitely intentional and is meant to confront us as much as it does the characters. Even though I don't think the film makes the most of it or executes it as well as it should, I do think it's a novel approach to a subject that is very sensitive. At the end of the day, the parents of a "shooter" have double or triple the grief to deal with (loss of a child, that child being the culprit, and the burden of those that he/she killed).

As for the content of his songs, I think they do give you a glimpse of a young man struggling. Some bits of lyric from the main songs...

"Well I'm trying to get home
but it feels like another life
Yeah im trying to stay strong
but sometimes i realise
that the further i go, the more that i know
That i wanna go home"

"The angel and the devil
Secretly they get along
Sitting up there
with me in the middle
From dusk till dawn
I get so confused by it
Which way to turn
They're looking at me like
"Decide which bridge to burn"
If I'm wrong or right
You stand by my side
The devil never knows
The devil never knows"

"Stuck in your confines chewin' it over.
Caught in your headlights. Stop staring.
Don't know what's on my mind. What am I thinking?
Whatever I say is a lie, so stop staring..."

...They really show an inner struggle, or an unhappiness. I also think the scene where he's stuck in the dorm while there seems to be a party outside; then he's interrupted, show that he wasn't really comfortable with his life, where he was, or how things where going for him. It's quite subtle, but I like that.

I also think it's interesting how Sam changes the "course" of that last song, so to speak... that's the one that Josh had left unfinished and close to the end of the film, he added the lyrics...

"Stuck in your confines chewin' it over.
Caught in your headlights. Stop staring.
Don't know what's on my mind. What am I thinking?
Whatever I say is a lie, so stop staring. Tread carefully

Take a breath and count the stars.
Let the world go round without you.
If you're somewhere you can hear this song
Sing along.

Close your eyes and count to ten.
Maybe love's the only answer.
I will find a way to sing your song
So sing along."

Those new lyrics complete his arc as they help to give him closure while also trying to pass forward a message to anyone that might be going through the same as Josh... "tread carefully... take a breath.. count to ten..."

I guess I didn't misinterpret the cemetery scene, then. Still, like I said, the movie had enough going for it until that point as an examination of grief, the ethics of treating someone else as a surrogate to cope with such feelings, etc. For those of you who have seen World's Greatest Dad, a movie which it reminded me of, I don't mean to criticize Rudderless for being something that it's not, but that reveal was as if the movie changed horses in midstream.

All of that makes sense, especially the song lyrics. Good catch.

Oh well, good or not, the movie has generated some worthwhile discussion. In the end, isn't that the real truth?

I guess romanticizing may have been a wrong word. My idea was that the kitchen sink is about showing something as broken and in need of a change while The Whisperers appear to be the opposite; the change is bad, and it brings harm to either you or others or both. The status quo is moral, and moving up in society is wrong.

Also, if you focus only on Mrs. Ross's story arc it is actually romanticizing. And I don't know why you wouldn't do that. Everyone else in the film can be seen as a plot device to pave her way. If her finding out the happiness in her poor little life and forgetting the money and the mansion isn't romanticizing then what is? Or then I understand the word somehow wrong.

I see what you're saying. I found Mrs Ross's life in her cluttered old home, living by herself...to be a comfort to her. I mean she's surrounded by things she values, like old newspapers. Crazy as that might seem, she had her own world as was safe there, until she ventures outside of her house where she's prayed upon first by the grifter woman, then by the state that tries to help her by forcing her to live with her estranged, a**** husband. Oh and her encounter with her a**** son messes up her life too.