I’d add that ZDT either sidesteps being propaganda or at the very least muddies it due to the reveal that...
WARNING: spoilers below
they already had all the pertinent information they gained from torture due to previous intel and didn’t need to torture to get it.
they already had all the pertinent information they gained from torture due to previous intel and didn’t need to torture to get it.
Really sucks the air out of it being justifiable and necessary, though admittedly, doesn’t touch on it being ineffective to the degree it probably should.
Still a fantastic movie.
Yeah; while still a valid criticism on its own, just focusing on ZDT doing things like not placing enough emphasis on the failures of the CIA's torture program feels like cherry-picking to me, in light of the way that the film pulls no punches with how naseous the sight of the waterboarding scene was, which made it particularly uncomfortable to watch in a theater (and was almost as distressing to watch as the actual scenes of terrorism in the film), the naked bloodlust of Kyle Chandler's character ("Do your ****ing jobs; bring me people to kill"), or Maya's obvious drained state at the end, showing a lack of emotional satisfaction on her part, even though she helped get her man. In light of all that, the film's hardly a rah-rah, blemish-free cheerleading of American flexing its imperial power.
57. Drive (2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)
Refn's stylish neo-noir seems custom-built to recharge the 'style over substance vs. style = substance' debate. I think this film firmly sits in the latter, a pulpy exercise that requires little additional subtext, and still a more entertaining film than his more complicated concoctions of style and ambition,
Only God Forgives and
Neon Demon, although Refn is also one of the more singular filmmakers today who's always worth watching.
So is
Drive really better than
Parasite though? What was I thinking of? Albert Brooks maybe? These aren't all hard-and-fast rankings.
Personally, I can't fall into the "style automatically = substance" camp (because if I did, I would hold a very different opinion about something like
Basterds), but I feel that style can
enhance substance. So,
Drive[/i] would have some amount of substance automatically just because of the way that the relationship between the Driver & Irene develops, but it resonates so much more because Refn directed the hell out of that film in the process. At any rate, I would also place
Drive slightly above
Parasite, since I felt the latter was a bit too dialogue-heavy in its first half, but that's just nit-picking, since there both
9s for me anyway.