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Etherdave (161)


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This pretty much sums it up. Let's Talk About Io... View all posts >


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The music is terrible, one of the most egregious examples of James Horner's bizarre autokleptomania in his soundtracks. Motifs from 'Wolfen', 'Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan', 'Glory', and 'Titanic' abound, and are repetitive, distracting, and hopelessly overblown. That silly trumpet triplet figure is played over and over and over until it becomes comic and ultimately meaningless, even as it echoes over the two snipers' final encounter like a Hornerian version of Ive's 'The Unanswered Question'. Regrettably there will likely be little change over this in the future, as Horner's publicist stated shortly after his untimely demise that writing music wasn't really what he loved- apparently that was flying airplanes. How does it even matter? Two good ol' boys, rampaging around the county in a pickup truck, armed with shotguns, is simply a symbol of personal freedom and individuality. One might say these two are out to discover America, albeit in their own ignorant, uneducated, sociopathic way. The important thing is the sudden, awful collision of different people's concepts of personal freedom and individuality, and how it is used in the film to complete the doomed, hopeless journey of the two protagonists. It's a fitting testament to this film's screenplay that it still shocks viewers to this day. Spector is the dweeby guy in the tan jacket and Scumbag Steve hat testing the cocaine at the airport. He is the main characters' 'connection' to the buyer, who is never seen. They made a movie like that, dingbat. It was called 'Thelma And Louise'. And they weren't lesbians, just two working-class women fed up with the men in their lives. Agreed. Totally silly. Where is it written that baboons will attack the Antichrist, or for that matter, that dogs will be his servants, acolytes, and protectors? If worldly lower creatures can recognize the Antichrist, why are they not constantly attacking him? If Damien is the child of Satan, was that Satan, then, inside the dog that copulated with a human woman to impregnate her with the Antichrist? So the dog was... possessed by Satan? All very silly, but eminently, thoroughly entertaining. It's clear the film was manufactured out of a series of eschatological tropes, not necessarily connected with Christianity, or Christian concepts of End Times, or Armageddon. The purpose is to create a miasma of detail, along with every creepy, gory, silly trope that can be presented within a single film, including an impaled Patrick Troughton, and David Warner's head on a sheet of glass. What about the title of the film itself, which is a misnomer: there is no omen, rather, a (fictitious) prophecy that only forms the backstory of the narrative, and really has little to do with the story itself. The film is about a switcheroo between a powerful American statesman's child and this one, and his protectors' battle with forces that oppose him on earth, even as his adoptive father slowly comes to learn his son isn't who he thinks he is. It's 1979, I suppose they could have called it 'The Changeling', or maybe that one was taken already. Agreed. The food seems downplayed in this film. I looked for the 'Fricasee' in the buffet food, but all I saw were the institutional mashed potato rounds. The entire film was deliberately shot using wide-angle lenses, so such detail becomes very hard to discern. The exchange between Leamas and the employment official sounds suspiciously like a 'phrase/counterphrase' meant to let the official (who is a plant) know this is the man to whom to give the library job. It looks totally set up, and Nan is the pawn dragged into the operation because of her Communist Party affiliations. So how, then, did Nan get the job, and for how long has she been a helpless tool of British Intelligence? You might ask John Le Carre just how far back this is intended to go, except he's dead. You could ask Len Deighton the same question about Harry Palmer's office romances; were they real, or simply engineered by Control to keep Harry interested/occupied? Alas, Deighton's dead also, so you get the same answer as from Le Carre. Oh well. I'm pretty sure this story, in novel and film both, is about the downfall of Alec Leamas, a talented and intelligent upper member of British Intelligence, almost certainly to be Chief one day, who is driven to despair and alcoholism by his own boss, Control, who sabotages Leamas' agents and networks by turning them over, one by one, to East German Intelligence, and then finagles a 'revenge mission' to eliminate Leamas, and discredit a talented and intelligent upper member of East German Intelligence, all to protect its head, Mundt, his own double agent behind the Iron Curtain, and also possibly to protect his own job and position. When Leamas, who has lost his job, his career, his pension, and his reputation, sits atop the wall and witnesses the death of Nan, he finally realizes she was the last thing in his life that hadn't yet been taken away. Control then took her away, too, since she could never be trusted to keep secret the things she now knew. Time to leave the party. Fiedler was already on Death's door because he was Jewish, living in a system where anti-semitism thrives, now that the Nazis have been beaten. In the end, if it came to that, Fiedler was always going to be the one liquidated because he was Jewish and Mundt wasn't. If you look at the whole story, you can see that Fiedler and Leamas were both necessary sacrifices made to protect Control's REAL asset- the double agent Mundt. In the book: grief and guilt over the General's death drives Mostyn to resign. In the film: Enderby knew Mostyn gave Smiley privileged information, and fired him for it. View all replies >