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reno dakota wrote:

aox wrote:Sorry to bring this up, but are the audio skips/blips during the credits universal, or do I have a defective disc? I can't tell if they are digital or not.

I just checked my disc and found no audio problems in the spots you mention (not sure what the $20*0 is, though). Have you tried playing the disc in a different player, or on a computer?

Once it reaches them, the diameter of the rescue borehole will be very narrow. so each miner will have to ensure they have a waistline of no more than 90 cm (35 in) to escape.

dad1153 wrote:^^^ They'll have plenty of dough to go around when they sell their movie/book rights to the highest bidder (you know its coming). Even better, they'll be breathing!

dad1153 wrote:Oliver Stone (not the one from "Wall Street 2" but the one from "World Trade Center")

aox wrote:and more importantly, was World Trade Center really that good?

Drucker wrote:DVD Beaver compares the MOC and Criterion.

Drucker wrote:Though the only place it seems the Criterion might really be "too dark" (based on the caps) is in that 6th set of caps. Look at the side of Douglas's face.

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu Apr 30, 2020 8:28 pm Ace in the Hole
My favorite tonally-distinct ‘serious’ Wilder, though he's still up to his usual playful tricks. This is a morality play that begins like a fable, with Douglas coincidentally finding himself in a new place, stars aligning to shake up a narrative, like if the Devil from Faust dropped into a demented Alice in Wonderland in place of Alice. He presents as a man with a cynical outlook entering a magical land that is jovial and doesn’t support that view, only to go searching for avenues to exploit that very perspective for self-gratification. However, he's no cookie-cutter character, for here the 'evil' is personified and given the starring role, and we find out that he isn’t a metaphor at all but a fallible complex human being with a fragile ego who projects his bitter cynicism onto the world around him, thus forcing his worldview to come true. And while Douglas certainly does uncover the selfish side of even the expected humility in rural society, he is the independent variable that infects the milieu he steps foot in with poisonous attitude and intrusive control, which begs the question: is this exposition actually the 'truth' about people, or only an aspect that’s been manipulated and motivated by a deep-rooted conviction run rampant? Probably a bit of both.

If there's any issue here it's that Wilder’s interest in exploring moral compromise is a bit on-the-nose, but Douglas is perfectly cast as the noirish existential antihero whose only quest is to ascend back to the position he once had and thinks he deserves. All the pieces of noir are here, including a particularly cold femme fatale, though everyone plays their parts with an authenticity blended with the fantasy- the central acidic pairing are movie-star confident and yet transparently pathetic all the same. Douglas may spell it all out for us time and time again, but the overexplaining only cements how thin a veil he wears in the insecurity of his own vision of society and human nature. He needs to be loud, rigid, aloof, and fight for it constantly to make it true. Doesn't that say something about the invisibly pervasive good in humanity contesting his position from intangible space? That half of Newton's law might be hidden here, but Wilder knows it's there, just as he knows how people insert their wills with aggression to make tangible what is so uncomfortably unavailable.

The human psychology dissected in news reporting is ahead of its time and treating people as commodities is maybe as dark as Wilder has ever ventured. This also hits on the familiar theme of hollow facades of meaning, where even Leo is excited by the notion of fame in getting in the newspaper, but neither this publicity nor Douglas’ will give the men satisfaction or substance worth anything outside of a vacuum. I used to believe this film exposed the Hobbesian nature of people across sociopolitical lines, but now I gravitate more toward a fairy-tale angle of one man’s core beliefs externalized, and hitting on the vulnerabilities we all have to bend at the knee in favor of inherent selfish interest; less cynical-as-ideology and more of a magnifying glass on moral relativism. This is a glass half-full or half-empty pick-em, with humanity possessing both empathetic and selfish traits, and sensitive enough to be swayed in this social world. If the film is cynical it’s not about human nature being innately cold, but the possibly more terrifying truth that people’s commitment to morality is more delicate in its construction than we’d like to believe.

And yet there is growth, a conscience infiltrating Douglas and exploding his own facade of cynicism. Just because it's "too late" doesn't mean the sun has burnt out. To Wilder's credit, his film has a lot more depth than the simplified, dirty superficial surface we assess at face value. The problem is that the the action functions like its lead - brash and raw with intent, so we have to propel ourselves to independently dig in order to discover the more interesting side of the coin that is absent from our discernible peripheries, which may be more rope than some are willing to give this deceptively percipient film.