> However the film doesn’t do a good job at that. I see often comments about how people are missing the point of this movie.
To be fair, it's very hard in cinema to have people "get" the point without spoon-feeding it to them, which could fail anyway and make it a worse movie to boot. I'm sure you can think of tons of other examples.
Who was it that said it's impossible to make an anti-war movie because you always end up making it look cool on screen [1]? I think it's the same with any movie parodying or even denouncing something, unless it's turned into a manifesto. And this also bit Scorsese with this movie.
[1] Though in my opinion Netflix's "All Quiet On The Western Front" comes pretty close. I don't think anybody watched that movie and kept thinking war is cool or full of glory.
François Truffaut expressed that sentiment, though the various quotes I've seen attributed to him were not verbatim. The closest I could find was "Every film about war ends up being pro-war[1]"
The Wall https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4218696/ does for me. From what I recall, "people" largley didn't like it, probably because it's not a happy, feel-good, good-guys-win-in-the-end movie. Though who the good-guys are in that movie is obviously not obvious.
>To be fair, it's very hard in cinema to have people "get" the point without spoon-feeding it to them
And plenty of people will happily ignore any subtext you create, and most of the text you create, to just consume a portion of the imagery you put out. Neonazis LOVE all sorts of movies and characters that are supposed to be warnings about how bad Fascism is.
Yet they do NOT love Mel Brook's "The producers", because it makes Nazis look goofy. If you are trying to turn people off something, the absolute minimum bar is to demonstrate it's frank stupidity. You must eschew any and all "Coolness". This was also used to turn people away from the KKK when their stupid club rituals and limp handshake were shared without the normal framing.
To be fair, it's very hard in cinema to have people "get" the point without spoon-feeding it to them, which could fail anyway and make it a worse movie to boot. I'm sure you can think of tons of other examples.
Who was it that said it's impossible to make an anti-war movie because you always end up making it look cool on screen [1]? I think it's the same with any movie parodying or even denouncing something, unless it's turned into a manifesto. And this also bit Scorsese with this movie.
[1] Though in my opinion Netflix's "All Quiet On The Western Front" comes pretty close. I don't think anybody watched that movie and kept thinking war is cool or full of glory.