Quills

I was interested in seeing Quills when I first heard about it... but never had a chance to until it had been out of DVD for a while… and I really enjoyed it. I thought Rush gave a wickedly awesome performance as De Sade… Winslet and Phoenix were great... as was Caine… but what did everyone think about his character?

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I think his character was great, there were so many facets to him. I am kind of mixed up though, do you mean What do we think of his character, the way he played his character, or what do we think of De Sade?

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Sorry, I should have made my post a little clearer… I meant Caine’s character, the Doctor… to me, he was the really evil one…

I agree......but that is what made the movie so good....the supposed evil character turns out to be the martyr of the story

Eeesshhh the doctor, I can't watch another movie with Michael Caine without thinking about Quills, his character evil!!!

You should see "Secondhand Lions" good movie with him and it will release you from that image

Just saw Quills after seeing it up pretty high on the MoFo's top 100 list. Shouldn't be there, IMO.

My general reaction went from ecstatic to facepalm to impressed to utter meh. It could have been something much more than it was, but the script made some wrong turns early on and nothing felt like it clicked. Its main "technical" problems were really muddled and messy editing and character developments. Not quite surreal enough to merit any kind of narrative leeway. I promised I wouldn't criticize a misrepresentation of Sade, but I did find his character to be very disappointing in the usual ultra-reductionist Hollywood portrait of an artist or any historical figure. In the film: he was a manic writer, apparently. Someone who "had" to write. Also, he was a manic pervert who could only subvert his perversion through writing. Okay, I get it. But this is such a ridiculous simplification of his reasons, which, at least how I have understood it, were mostly intellectual. Let's be real here. Sade was not even a Bataille. He was no artist, and the scenes of the girl being "moved" by his "bootiful" writing is ridiculous. If you read or skim 120 Days of Sodom it is anything but perverse. It's almost mechanical like a set of pre-subscribed iterations through any number of "perverse" acts, at least in themselves as such. I have no doubt Sade was pervert, but his writing was more. It was, and this is up for debate, an attempt to oppose the Kantian ethics of never allowing the pain of the other to be ignored. What Sade does is make pain a duty, something which seems much more attributed to Michael Caine's character, who is probably one of the most poorly developed and inconsistent characters (in the sense that his inconsistencies are neither eccentricities nor incited shifts in character like Pheonix's character, for instance). Essentially, Sade realized that by making pleasure and pain a duty, the responsibility of the author of both are derealized and attributed to the pursuit of the duty. There is a precise academic exercise going on here, not a compulsion derived from some innately perverse character. Sade was studying the limits pain and pleasure, not good and evil. This is not to say that he did not embody a moral struggle, but the presentation of it borders on caricature. I saw no truths emerge from the uniqueness of Sade's "extreme" nature, only the insane ramblings of a pervert. As for the "cool" bits where Sade develops more and more personal, direct ways of "writing", I thought their progression was very successful and fun to witness. Not a bad film; just missed out on a lot of opportunities for depth, and much of what the characters did or acted like didn't make any sense.

7.5/10

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Have you seen this film yet?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073650/

Imagine this as the next feature in our Movie Discussion Club!

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Yup. Totally tame for apparently the "most disgusting film of all time". I think this film exactly succeeds in taking the perversion out of Sade. He's not about sexuality or morality at all, but in reaching pleasure and suffering at their purest. The fascist comment is also interesting.

It has my vote. A discussion on Salo would be amazing.

Actually, I think there's a bit more to it. The "why" always comes into play.

Tame? Do you have a giant pit in your basement?

It didn't make me go "ew" like other exploitation precisely because it wasn't exploitation. It was rather boring like most of Sade's work.

The "why" is to explicate Kant, a philosophical contemporary of Sade. Without Sade, we may have never recognized the ethical turning point Kant's Critique of Practical Reason marked.

And what a shame that would have been.

You are being facetious, but he essentially reinstated the "golden rule" into ethics. A shame indeed.

I'm a bit of an anarchist, so I don't buy into a lot of that - ethics that is. I haven't read much of Kant yet, but I know what he's about. I have Critique of Pure Reason sitting here on my bookshelf but I can find easier ways to be bored. So there it sits, right next to Kafka's books. aNow those get read, again and again.

Facetious, ha!

Kant is literally the most boring writer in the history of philosophy other than maybe Hegel. I wouldn't waste my time on reading either directly. I tried, but I found I got much more in work of secondary literature on their ideas.

Kafka is one of my favorites as well. I've read all of his short stories and they are all incredible. I started The Trial about three months ago but set it down for one reason or another and never picked it back up. Now that's a shame.

It's a good thing his buddy didn't burn his work.

Okay, we are officially getting off topic on this five year old thread you bumped up today, which by the way is a good thing. Most people wouldn't bother searching and just start a new thread. Kudos!

+Rep to PN for giving the movie a try. Shame you didn't like it more than you did. I do have to say, though, when I first saw the movie, I had no real knowledge of Sade so I had to take him for the character that was presented by the movie. I think my ignorance on the subject actually helped me to enjoy it, since I wasn't hampered by any preconceived ideas of who he was and what he stood for. But, again, Sade here is merely a character and isn't meant to be a true reflection of the real man.

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What's worse? Burning or mistranslating or reauthoring? Ah... the age-old controversy.

Absolutely. The character itself was fascinating and funny and really successful. Rush did an amazing job. I just couldn't help but feel that there were missed opportunities. And I did like the film. Still vastly superior to most films.

Ah, he was like an editor. Burning would have been much worse. Speaking of burning, have you read Gogol's Dead Souls?

I've read no Gogol. Sorry if you were expecting discussion.

We can discuss Kafka if you want????