Rate The Last Movie You Saw

It's a sad fact of life that people will look for any excuse to dehumanize one another; they always have, and sadly, they probably always will, whether it be due to someone's race, politics, gender, or whatever other petty reason we come up with to view another person as less than, well... a person. However, as the late, great Roger Ebert once said, "cinema is a machine that generates empathy", and if that's the case, then Neil Jordan's The Crying Game is a machine that's working overtime and then some, as a film that boldly crosses so many of the lines that we draw to divide ourselves each other, and ends up crafting a daring, compelling, and ultimately unforgettable Drama in the process.


It tells the story of Fergus, a member of the IRA who, in the midst of The Troubles in the UK, participates in the kidnapping of a British soldier named Jody, and holds him hostage in an attempt to free one of the senior members of his "army", under the threat of execution should their demands not be met. However, as the three day deadline draws ever closer with no sign of progress towards their goal, Fergus finds himself unexpectedly bonding with his captive, despite all the historical and situational animosities that should render that impossible, and, following a few shocking turns of events, Fergus finds himself embarking on a sort of personal journey to make amends for his sins, one that will put him through as much emotional turmoil as anyone watching this twisted, but emotionally affecting tale will be in by its end.


Jordan achieves this by meticulously placing a number of unexpected story twists in our path here, but not at all for just the sake of senseless shocks, as the personal and emotional effects of these turns are fully followed up with his detailed, in-depth writing here, helping the most notorious aspect of the movie to avoid ending up as just fodder for an outdated, spoiler-ific punchline on The Simpsons (HUGE SPOILER HERE, OKAY??: h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-zzbkT712k&t=294s ), as it become an essential component to the film's most prominent theme, that of dehumanization.


The film explores this theme through a sort of "sliding scale", starting easy, and then getting progressively more difficult as it goes, first having us empathize with Jody and the literal dehumanization he faces as a Black man in Northern Ireland, as he's called a "monkey" by the racist locals there (among other slurs), before it asks us to also empathize with an IRA terrorist (a aspect that Jordan attributed the film's failure in the UK to), before finally doing the same for a transgender person, a highly misunderstood group that movies had almost always portrayed as either psycho killers, or the butt of extremely mean-spirited "jokes" in the past, which is something that Game subverts by daring to treat its transperson with the actual sensitivity and care she deserves, a lesson that many movies unfortunately failed to learn in the movie's wake (looking at you, Ace Ventura...).


Finally, The Crying Game excels through just the sheer level of craft and care that Jordan puts into it, whether it be the multiple parallels that he places throughout (such as the mirrors of its bookending songs "When A Man Loves A Woman" and "Stand By Your Man", the former of which takes on much greater dimension by film's end), the patient, gradual pacing and building of its story, or its characters' complex, ever-evolving relationships with each other, with can be best described as "up-and-down", in the most cinematically compelling sense of the term. It's an uncomfortably intimate experience, but in the best of ways (if that makes any sense), and while the Game might make you cry, the movie is more likely to leave you speechless, not out of frusturation, but out of having a cinematic experience so bold, and utterly challenging such as it.

It's a sad fact of life that people will look for any excuse to dehumanize one another; they always have, and sadly, they probably always will, whether it be due to someone's race, politics, gender, or whatever other petty reason we come up with to view another person as less than, well... a person. However, as the late, great Roger Ebert once said, "cinema is a machine that generates empathy", and if that's the case, then Neil Jordan's The Crying Game is a machine that's working overtime and then some, as a film that boldly crosses so many of the lines that we draw to divide ourselves each other, and ends up crafting a daring, compelling, and ultimately unforgettable Drama in the process.


It tells the story of Fergus, a member of the IRA who, in the midst of The Troubles in the UK, participates in the kidnapping of a British soldier named Jody, and holds him hostage in an attempt to free one of the senior members of his "army", under the threat of execution should their demands not be met. However, as the three day deadline draws ever closer with no sign of progress towards their goal, Fergus finds himself unexpectedly bonding with his captive, despite all the historical and situational animosities that should render that impossible, and, following a few shocking turns of events, Fergus finds himself embarking on a sort of personal journey to make amends for his sins, one that will put him through as much emotional turmoil as anyone watching this twisted, but emotionally affecting tale will be in by its end.


Jordan achieves this by meticulously placing a number of unexpected story twists in our path here, but not at all for just the sake of senseless shocks, as the personal and emotional effects of these turns are fully followed up with his detailed, in-depth writing here, helping the most notorious aspect of the movie to avoid ending up as just fodder for an outdated, spoiler-ific punchline on The Simpsons (HUGE SPOILER HERE, OKAY??: h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-zzbkT712k&t=294s ), as it become an essential component to the film's most prominent theme, that of dehumanization.


The film explores this theme through a sort of "sliding scale", starting easy, and then getting progressively more difficult as it goes, first having us empathize with Jody and the literal dehumanization he faces as a Black man in Northern Ireland, as he's called a "monkey" by the racist locals there (among other slurs), before it asks us to also empathize with an IRA terrorist (a aspect that Jordan attributed the film's failure in the UK to), before finally doing the same for a transgender person, a highly misunderstood group that movies had almost always portrayed as either psycho killers, or the butt of extremely mean-spirited "jokes" in the past, which is something that Game subverts by daring to treat its transperson with the actual sensitivity and care she deserves, a lesson that many movies unfortunately failed to learn in the movie's wake (looking at you, Ace Ventura...).


Finally, The Crying Game excels through just the sheer level of craft and care that Jordan puts into it, whether it be the multiple parallels that he places throughout (such as the mirrors of its bookending songs "When A Man Loves A Woman" and "Stand By Your Man", the former of which takes on much greater dimension by film's end), the patient, gradual pacing and building of its story, or its characters' complex, ever-evolving relationships with each other, with can be best described as "up-and-down", in the most cinematically compelling sense of the term. It's an uncomfortably intimate experience, but in the best of ways (if that makes any sense), and while the Game might make you cry, the movie is more likely to leave you speechless, not out of frusturation, but out of having a cinematic experience so bold, and utterly challenging such as it.