Guys, let's throw an icon in the river.
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Some people actually like Catcher in the Rye. Y'know, taste is a funny thing...
How much of Sinclair's socialist agenda stays intact in the film?
It was a great film.
It's the same forum that thinks No More Heroes was a noteworthy game. Go figure.
It's the same forum that thinks Uncharted was a noteworthy game. Go figure.
Quote from: Ichi on February 28, 2008, 09:54:02 PMSome people actually like Catcher in the Rye. Y'know, taste is a funny thing...Oh you suck
I love Catcher in the Rye. I'm so emo.
I really liked it, but I can to a certain degree understand the hate. The best rebuttal I've heard yet came from Salon, which I don't quite agree with, but I can see where they're coming from.http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2008/02/20/daniel_day_lewis/
People hate on Catcher in the Rye wtf? TVC explain
Histrionic, fatally confused and socially evasive, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is all the worse for its touching upon important subjects, oil and religion in American life. Putting the best interpretation on it, Anderson is simply way in over his head, with ultimately disastrous artistic consequences. [...] The film’s publicity variously suggests that There Will Be Blood is “based on” or “inspired by” Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil! [...] Anderson has the right to make any film he chooses, but it seems light-minded in the extreme to invoke Oil! as inspiration or even a “stepping-stone” while creating a work that only makes passing reference to a few sequences in the original novel, and radically transposes or alters those, sometimes to the precisely opposite effect. [...] Oil! is not a great work of art, but it is lively and observant. [...] It is worth noting some of the differences between the novel and the film—differences not bound up with the changes that inevitably arise from adapting a work to a different medium, but with distinct and even opposed artistic and social purposes. [...] Sinclair’s oilman, Ross, is an affable individual, a caring father, slightly overweight, largely uneducated although a shrewd businessman, thoroughly pragmatic. [...] Anderson’s Plainview is a different sort of animal: paranoid, unfriendly, secretive, a lone wolf—the director’s is a far more “radical” (and, frankly, trite) vision of a prospective oil baron. [...] Indeed, Ross remains likable to the end of the novel, and continues to enjoy his son’s affection throughout, even as the latter becomes a “social reformer.” The older man’s defense of his misdeeds, when challenged by his son, is that there’s a “difference between a theoretical and practical view of a question.” [...] Oil! is nothing if not expansive (perhaps too expansive) in its ambitions. The title of the book is somewhat misleading, as it seeks to make a more general survey of American political and social life in the first quarter of the last century. [...E]veryone (with the possible exception of Plainview’s son and the latter’s future bride, who have minor roles) takes a turn for the worse in the film as compared with the novel. The genial Ross, who merely believes that “practical” men like himself are obliged to bend the rules, becomes the misanthropic Plainview, who proclaims that “I see the worst in people,” whose life seems to be an accumulation of pointless hatreds and who murders two men in cold blood. [...] Details in the book are turned upside down for the sole purpose, apparently, of making the characters more malicious and their behavior more irrational. [...T]he oil workers themselves undergo a transformation from novel to film. Sinclair’s attitude, as much as he criticizes the depredations of the private companies, is essentially sympathetic toward the discovery and production of oil. [...] The men, too, as hard as they work, are not downtrodden and crushed. [...] In the film, the oil workers are nameless, faceless drones, ominous and interchangeable. This, again, is considered the “radical” view of things these days. In fact, it represents a diminution of life. [...]Plainview’s growing lunacy simply goes unexplained. Very wealthy individuals may go entirely mad, like Howard Hughes, or not, like Warren Buffett. An artist makes it very easy for himself if he or she simply implies that the acquisition of wealth and power in and of itself is enough to drive someone insane. The lack of concrete connection between Plainview’s social existence and his mania tends to conceal, rather than lay bare, any mentally devastating social processes that might be at work. [...] What could have been a scathing assault, through a reworking of Oil! or otherwise, on corporate America and fundamentalist religion is no such thing, despite the claims of various “left” critics and wishful thinkers. Of course Anderson is under no obligation to launch such an assault if he doesn’t believe one is necessary, but choosing Sinclair’s novel and then systematically declawing it seems an almost provocative act. [...] No one has any use for a “political film” that is didactic or pat, or knows all the answers, but Anderson is excluding the possibility of an artistic, spontaneous and insightful examination of social life as a whole, the possibility of presenting the big picture. [...]
Quote from: Phoenix Dark on February 29, 2008, 12:02:38 AMPeople hate on Catcher in the Rye wtf? TVC explain "BAWW PHONIES I HATE THE WORLD I'M A TEENAGER"/Holden Caulfield
