criterionforum.org

Because they couldn't remember if she had won the award before?

domino harvey wrote:I just ordered the Late Show, as Art Carney's late-period resurgence has my curiosity piqued. If the award weren't the go to Carney, I'd say Albert Finney's hilarious Poirot from Murder on the Orient Express was the next most deserving of the award. I have no earthly idea why Ingrid Bergman did win Best Supporting Actress for that film, though!

Our tastes are not very similar, but The Late Show is a tremendous film and the last time that Robert Benton was any good, I think. Is it on DVD or Blu-Ray? I'd like to get a copy if so.

Warners put it out but it's OOP. I picked mine up new for $11 on Amazon Marketplace, there appears to still be at least one seller with it at that price

Sorry I haven't been more on top of this project, as my work responsibilities have been suffocating in the last year. But Dom, you've rejuvenated my interest significantly!

domino harvey wrote:Warners put it out but it's OOP. I picked mine up new for $11 on Amazon Marketplace, there appears to still be at least one seller with it at that price

Thanks, I'm going to order it if I can.
It's a shame that it's not better known. There's no UK DVD, and I haven't seen it since it was shown at the late lamented Cambridge Arts Cinema in 1979.

mfunk9786 wrote:But Dom, you've rejuvenated my interest significantly!

I now have, thanks to Black Friday and her cousins, every film needed to complete the previous Oscar round up and nearly all for this second incarnation. It's just a matter of filling in the cracks by fitting in those three hours epics and twinkly character pieces!


2000
Chocolat Okay, so excepting that this movie has no business being nominated and is only here because of the bullyboys at Miramax, this is not a bad little film. An MOR parable about intolerance and small-mindedness, the film is light and airy enough to draw comparisons to the many chocolate delicacies Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin whip up (I'm guessing without checking that every review for this film ever has some variant of that sentence within it)-- but why's that such a bad thing? I found this to be a lovely throwback to the fluffy escapist programmers of the forties and while yes, the only legacy this one will leave behind is its unsuitability for nomination, this is still a much better film than, say, the movie that allegedly "belonged" in this category and won.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I anticipated something more along the lines of Hero, which is why I never got around to this until now, but this really is something special. I appreciated how Lee gave the film room to breathe, and how, unconcerned with petty arm-grabbing, he lets the film unfold a good twenty minutes before the first of several elaborate fight sequences appears. I was surprised at how involved I was in the film's action sequences, and though I know everyone hated it, I'm very curious now to see Lee doing action on a larger scale in the Hulk. In a year without Traffic, this'd have my vote. But here we are.

Erin Brockovich Julia Roberts won the Oscar on a wave of owed sentiment (it's hard to remember she didn't win for Pretty Woman), and while my heart goes to Laura Linney, who'd have won in any other year, Roberts is as good as she's ever been as the titular foul-mouthed trashy dame who struggles to make ends meet before finding her calling as the ultimate people person. I'm not heartless and freely admit to being inspired by the true story outlined here. I understand the pushback from his fans, but it seems wrong to fault Soderbergh for not laying on his typical directorial markers in the process of relaying this clear and involving character piece.

Gladiator I hadn't seen this since my high school history teacher snuck in a bootleg DVD during class, so I indulged in the "extended cut" of the film offered on Blu-ray (YOLO &c). I doubt this is a film that ever felt short, but boy does it feel long in this fashion! Oscar-winner Russell Crowe is still the weakest link here, a generic slate with laughable character motivation that somehow translated into an Oscar win. I know this was a weak year for Best Actor nominees but c'mon. I must admit that though I found Crowe tiresome, I did enjoy Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielsen's interplay-- Phoenix plays such a shit and takes it to melodramatic heights often at-odds with the prestige of the film surrounding him that I was more than anything just glad to have something to distract me from the unimaginative cinematography, script, and dull fight scenes edited in the opposite direction of kinetic. In true Oscar fashion, the worst film nominated won.

Traffic In many ways the key film in Soderbergh's oeuvre, yet one I almost never see mentioned as such by either his fans or casual observers. In it one finds not just the rosetta stone to Soderbergh's methods, concerns, and S-T-Y-L-E, but a perfect synthesis of his strengths with none of his weaknesses.

My Vote: Traffic

I'd still probably give the gold to Lee if just because the story of Traffic never matching in story quality what it has in structural/ stylistic quality. The politics of the film seem like a CNN fluff piece to me.

domino harvey wrote:Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I anticipated something more along the lines of Hero, which is why I never got around to this until now, but this really is something special. I appreciated how Lee gave the film room to breathe, and how, unconcerned with petty arm-grabbing, he lets the film unfold a good twenty minutes before the first of several elaborate fight sequences appears. I was surprised at how involved I was in the film's action sequences, and though I know everyone hated it, I'm very curious now to see Lee doing action on a larger scale in the Hulk. In a year without Traffic, this'd have my vote. But here we are.

This sounds virtually identical to my mom's reaction (with the exception of the subsequent Hulk interest). She's a reasonably adventurous movie watcher, but would never in a million years go near an Asian martial-arts movie, and she honestly thought I was kidding when I told her she'd like it. She begrudgingly saw it when it got all the Oscar noms, and to this day she'll thank me for steering her towards it.

1990
Awakenings Ugh. Charmless, lifeless pap about victims of encephalitis temporarily woken from their illness before slowly succumbing again. Robert DeNiro is okay as the first patient to receive the treatment, but it's not a part that demands much anyone else wouldn't offer. This is one of Robin Williams' early serious roles, so he tones his energy levels down to zero, which is about where the whole film is pitched. A few rungs down from most made for cable TV movies, this is one of the worst modern Best Picture nominees.

Dances with Wolves Pushing four hours on home video, Kevin Costner's western epic has good intentions. But Costner's desire to portray Indians positively leads him to binaries: The Sioux Indians are all good, every last one of them. The white men who fought in the Civil War are bad, every last one of them. I understand that Indians have long been marginalized/demonized in this genre, but as with Inglourious Basterds, switching sides doesn't excuse the same behaviors. The reductions here cheapen Costner's legitimate filmmaking skills, which are present and help things along. But the film this wants to be was already made twenty years prior, Little Big Man, and that too was a long film, but one stuffed with invention, novelty, and insight. Did the world need for Costner to provide a scene where one of the callous soldiers rips a page from Costner's journal (one confessing his love for his bride, no less) to use as toilet paper? To paraphrase Costner's character early in the film, I know he means well, but…

Ghost One of the few commercially popular films to be thrown a Best Pic nom that merited inclusion. Indeed, it's easily the best of the lot this year, regardless how respectable their reputations. The film is genuine and true to what it is, which is a crowd-pleasing romantic thriller with a novel premise and handsome actors to execute it-- It's no coincidence that the first shot of the film features both male leads shirtless! Demi Moore, never more fetching, and Swayze of course participate in one of the most iconic uses of diagetic scoring in modern film history, and the pottery wheel scene (like much of the film) is romantic and passionate without pretensions at high art. In the process it results in a true artistic achievement in the same manner most of the Hollywood product of the golden era did: by being an exemplary example of its kind.

the Godfather Part III As previously stated, this one's about as good as the first sequel and while neither belonged here, one excuses the other. There are some decent set pieces (especially the wonderfully ludicrous mass-assassination) and Sofia Coppola's performance isn't anywhere near the disaster some make it out to be. The film's biggest sin to my eyes is wasting Bridget Fonda. And poor Andy Garcia, remember when he was a headliner?

Goodfellas Scorsese's coked-up crime saga has found greater wide-spread affinity than I'd ever afford it. All of the little ticks that make Scorsese fall into ruts of familiarity are present, but thankfully so are some game perfs, namely the justly Oscar-winning Joe Pesci. Sure, the part doomed him to a career of variations on a theme, but what a just legacy all the same!

Spoiler

Though I think little of the film on the whole, Pesci's exit from the picture is one of the all-time great death scenes in cinema. For that if nothing else I can perhaps understand a little of what others see so much more kindly.

My Vote: Ghost

Re: the 2000s list, I don't really have a strong opinion on Chocolat one way or another! For the more cynical of us though, here is a clip from the late lamented Monkey Dust series that suggests what would happen if the same situation were to occur in Britain!

I do like Traffic a lot, and while I slightly prefer the original series on which it was based it is slightly unfair to compare the two since there are geographical differences (and therefore far greater storyline differences than is usual with remakes, especially the Pakistan versus Mexico sections) between the two works. While I like both I would perhaps go more for the practicality of Lindsay Duncan's hausfrau turned organisation leader over Catherine Zeta Jones's slightly more naive trophy wife (I love the final scene of the whole drama of Traffik where Duncan and the newly-released husband are having a slight power struggle over who is going to call the shots in the organisation now that she has gotten a taste for it, with the cops listening in, which is something that the Soderbergh film seems to allude to in its own ending).

But having said that I much prefer the way the daughter on drugs subplot is handled in the Soderbergh film, with Erika Christensen always seeming fragile and childish compared to Julia Ormond (in her screen debut) playing the role as a slightly more of a self-aware spoilt brat. There is I think more of a sense of 'serves you right' towards Ormond's character getting kicked out of her private school, stealing from her family and hanging out with drug pushers, whereas I think Soderbergh tones down some of the aspects of the daughter that could perhaps give an audience the opportunity to say that she is irredeemable because of her actions. The same basic elements are all there in Traffic but slightly less heavy handed, so you don't actually see her when she is stealing from her family. Or get the same emphasis placed on her coming from and throwing away her privileged upbringing, which is the only element which allows her to sink to such depths and still be saved. The aspect is touched upon in, say, the drug counsellor scene in Traffic, but the emphasis is less on making the audience angry specifically at this privileged girl getting all the breaks, and more on a sense of disappointment that Caroline has fallen so low.

Here's that key assassination scene from Traffik. I think part of what I prefer about Traffic over Traffic is the way that the narrative is broken up into episodes really works for this drama, with the assassination here forming the climax to the episode. I especially like the way that, his character having been blown up, Tilo Prückner's name gets removed from the opening titles at the beginning of the next episode, leaving a surprisingly emotionally powerful empty gap where it used to be!

1976
All the President's Men Keep your action movies and explosions and car chases, this remains the single most exciting film I've ever seen. Never before had I actually been on the edge of my seat while watching a movie, but Pakula excites and stimulates the mind with such thrust and gusto that it's no wonder his film inspired as many young people to become investigative journalists as the book which it adapts. Even in the good company it keeps this year, this one stands out as one of the great films.

Bound for Glory Eschewing the traditional biopic for a rambling series of vignettes, many delightfully unimportant in any narrative function but significant in accumulative effect, Hal Ashby and cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who must be seen here as co-auteur) deliver us into the great depression as we follow Woody Guthrie through fruit picking plants and radio stations and trains and diners and lonely roads. Rather than feeling listless, I bought into the pacing and became immersed in the world of Woody Guthrie, thanks in large part to David Carradine's underrated performance as the guitar-picking hero of the working class. This is a long film, but when it ended I was sad to see it go, something I cannot say about a great majority of films, even good ones.

Network Paddy Chayefsky was responsible for some of the worst "adult" entertainment of the fifties, and so it is by no small miracle that he is also responsible for this brilliant satire of our If It Bleeds It Leads culture. It's become impossible to mention the film without the word "relevance" in the same breath, and that's because as a true satire, the flick pulls no punches and takes its message to maniacal levels that continue to satisfy on a base level of truth. This is a movie rich with Oscar-winning perfs, but the single best moment in the film belongs to Ned Beatty, who assesses a situation and proceeds to deliver one of the great monologues in film history. Jason Robards prevented a clean acting sweep at the expense of Beatty's gold, but he deserved it most of all. Though so did Brando in the last 3/4 sweep, so he's in good company!

Rocky My girlfriend and I were in Philly this summer and could not get within a quarter mile of the art museum and its immortalized steps without being bombarded with Rocky t-shirts and other assorted memorabilia. But this is a film with continued appeal outside of its setting, even becoming the default shorthand for "underdog story." And while I was expecting some sort of unholy melding of sports pic and treacly everyman tale, I was won over by Stallone's superior work. He may not be an actor with a ton of range, but he wrote the part to his strengths and he is phenomenal in the titular role. Everyone's good, though, especially Burt Young as the surprisingly likable yet brusque brother to Rocky's love interest. Young plays but one of several unsavory characters who are given warm treatment by the film-- none of the figures depicted are saints or devils, and the complexity of their portrayal aids in the investment the film inspires.

Taxi Driver Scorsese's best film, made before stylistic crutches, glamorizations of negative masculinity, and Now That's What I Call Classic Rock Vol 4 became 9/10 of a film. Indeed, his restraint, especially in the face of such salacious material, is commendable. Scorsese's long been fascinated with the more repugnant facets of masculinity, but in Travis Bickle he's found his most fascinating subject. Bickle's manifestations of paternalism coupled with his utter inability to process and function within traditional social situations results in violence so surreal that many doubt its reality within the narrative itself-- I used to be one of 'em, but seeing it again recently I'm less sure the ending is a manifestation of Bickle's wish fulfillment than just a confluence of events that turned out good this time. There's some precedence within the film for this-- De Niro finagles a date with Cybill Shepherd and does okay on the dress rehearsal; Jodie Foster seems confused but receptive to De Niro's offers of help in their initial visits, before Harvey Keitel warps her emotions back. This isn't a film with a lesson, and any offered is a genuine as the medical auspices of the pornos De Niro watches. It's a superior and unapologetic character study, one who's subject isn't confined within the simplicity of the narrative offered, and I suspect it's that unshakability that's led to the film's enduring popularity.

My Vote: All the President's Men, but this is the first and so far only year in which each nominated film could legitimately be the Best Picture


1977
Annie Hall I had every intention of not voting for Annie Hall. I don't think it's in the top tier of Woody Allen's works. I'm not sure it's even in the middle. Even the auteur himself seems mystified at its exceptional position as a popular favorite. It's funny, sure, and has some of the typical Allen moments that most of us know and love, but it's parts have never added up to a satisfying whole on my end, and the film just sort of fizzles to a finish. Unfortunately, my intentions were no match for the reality of the 1977 Best Picture nominees-- this is a year where the next best film nominated is a Neil Simon movie for Christ's sake.

the Goodbye Girl Typical crowd-pleasing romantic comedy that every so often sneaks its way into this category. This isn't a bad little film, but Neil Simon's sitcomy wiseacre approach to dialog undermines whatever nascent narrative skills his scripts possess. The famed Gay Richard III subplot, where Simon's over-affinity for one-liners should have served him best, surprisingly underwhelms, but like anyone throwing jokes at the wall, some do stick. Richard Dreyfuss won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Richard Dreyfuss.

Julia It takes less than a minute into Julia to figure out who's at the helm. In typical Fred Zinnemann fashion, the audience are idiots. It takes about twenty seconds for him to condescend accordingly:

"Oh, I think I heard this is a period piece. I wonder when it takes place?"





"Oh, she's a writer. Look, she's at her typewriter."



"Oh, she's stuck."





"Oh, now she's done gone shone some light on the problem!"

And then Jane Fonda pauses her smoke to take a drink, (I shit you not) crumples up the paper from the typewriter, tosses the paper into the wastebasket-- and then kicks the wastebasket! WHY, SHE MUST BE A TORTURED ARTIST. Then we see her torture Jason Robards-as-Dashiell Hammett (What the fuck was the Academy thinking when it gave him an Oscar for this) while they hang out on the beach in soft-focus, low light shots, each harping and barking at the top of their lungs for minutes on end.

I have only just described the first five minutes. There are 112 more to go, assuming you don't just decide to hit STOP and never write about 1977's nominees. But then you'd miss all those twinkly Vaseline-lens flashbacks, flashback to, flashbacks to when, flashbacks to when the, flashbacks to when the girls, flashbac-- ***STOP***

Star Wars Believe it or not, I had never seen this! Neither of my parents thought it was any good, so it was never around when I was a kid (though weirdly I did see Return of the Jedi in fifth grade-- how that was a day of class is another matter [and why would you show a class the third part of a trilogy only?]). Watching it as an adult, I feel I've clearly missed some sort of window for enjoying this. I didn't find it particularly exciting nor imaginative nor entertaining. Grasping as straws, I liked Chewbacca's presence, and Harrison Ford is doing his character from American Graffiti in space, which works. But Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are dead weight, with the latter yet another example of false empowerment afforded to women this year, and the gay droids' banter was interminable (and being stuck with them first for endless minutes didn't help my initial exposure to the film). The film's plot is surprisingly scant-- no wonder people wanted a sequel, the first film is all set-up and then bam, it's over. Of course, I'm coming to this from a lifetime of seemingly everyone but me knowing every minute detail of the film, so nothing could have lived up to the expectations and preexisting familiarity set by our culture-- but it should have come closer.

the Turning Point This backstage ballet thing gobsmackingly received eleven nominations despite possessing no insight into ballet not its back-stage machinations. Even a late physical catfight between Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine falls as flat as anything else here. The film is laughably inert, with dry lines whipped back and forth as though the actors had just seen the script five minutes prior, and Ross films everyone as though this were a cereal commercial-- I watched an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show the night before and the static three camera sitcom had a better sense of rhythm and movement. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne each received unwarranted Best Supporting noms for just being in the movie, I guess.

Both the Turning Point and Julia are widely seen as having arrived in the Best Picture category on a wave of claims that the films were "feminist" because, as best as I can ascertain, they had female characters interacting on-screen. These two are among the worst nominees for this award ever, and it speaks more of an audience's desperate desire to see strong female characters on-screen than proving that they exist in these films.

My Vote: Annie Hall

Now that's terrifying. I had some hope for Julia since Zinnemann had a surprisingly good '60s and Sargent is usually good as a writer, but that does sound tiring. Maybe I'll hold off on finishing off '72 (I'm trying to get things done in order).

Wow, Domino as time goes by I find myself agreeing with more and more of your insights/analyses...hell with your tastes! I've always found Star Wars absolutely overrated. I tried to watch Julia once upon a time, but literally gave up after 20 minutes. And as far as The Turning Point is concerned, although he is long forgotten, there was a time when Herbert Ross was apparently very lauded in Hollywood. He was extremely uneven, maybe one of the most in the history of cinema. How does one go and make The Last of Sheila and the Seven Percent Solution and then the god awful Nijinsky, Pennies from Heaven and Footloose?

Domino is killing this thread (outside of his puzzling lack of appreciation of Goodfellas). I feel fatigued just thinking about how many films he's watched in the past week or two.

I'm with domino on Star Wars too. I was the target audience, I guess - eight or nine years old - and saw it towards the end of its original run having heard all the playground hype and expecting something mindblowing, but found it just sort of surprisingly ordinary. Lots of nice special effects for the time, sure, but often creaky, with lumpy pacing and dull characters. I just thought it wasn't a very good film. Not that my taste was particularly sophisticated at the time, but I was going through my young horror movie phase, so most of my favourite films back then were Hammer horrors or Corman Poe adaptations.

As for Dances with Wolves, the combination of smarmy self-conscious 'good intentions' and dumb, unconscious racism makes this film just unwatchable for me. How can you reconcile the movie's overt message of racial tolerance with its ugly, reflexive terror of miscegenation? (Our Hero is so progressive and open-minded that he's going to marry a squaw, but DON'T PANIC!: she's not a real squaw, she's a proper white woman!) That's called having your cake and eating it, and the cake's got a dead rat baked inside it. And the whole 'White Man: Saviour of the Natives!' storyline: has that ever not been repugnant?

When it's turned on its head so that the white guy doesn't do much of anything like in the Man Called Horse films, Little Big Man, and Big Trouble in Little China it seems to work out though a straight play through of that trope is almost by nature gross. By the way I'll third the confusion over Star Wars. When I rewatched it some years ago I was shocked at how light it felt really becoming just a small piece to a rather big budget serial. Pretty much just Han, Vader, and Cushing's performance stood as anything interesting. I still found Empire to be great though and it stands up on its own rather well.

zedz wrote:As for Dances with Wolves, the combination of smarmy self-conscious 'good intentions' and dumb, unconscious racism makes this film just unwatchable for me. How can you reconcile the movie's overt message of racial tolerance with its ugly, reflexive terror of miscegenation? (Our Hero is so progressive and open-minded that he's going to marry a squaw, but DON'T PANIC!: she's not a real squaw, she's a proper white woman!) That's called having your cake and eating it, and the cake's got a dead rat baked inside it. And the whole 'White Man: Saviour of the Natives!' storyline: has that ever not been repugnant?

How does this add up to "reflexive terror of miscegenation"? That's an extremely hyperbolic and ugly charge that you've mustered very thin evidence for. She was never presented as a "squaw" in the first place, IIRC we understand that she's white from the get-go. No one on earth was watching this movie and about to "panic".

And in what way is Costner's character presented as the "Saviour of the Natives?" He leads them to a buffalo herd that they'd have found anyway and he gives them a few guns, but in the end has to flee because he brought them more trouble than they were already in.

Yeah, I wouldn't go as far as zedz and call it a terror of miscegenation, but the film does play it very, very safe, presumably with the box office in mind (and perhaps not wanting to inspire any controversy that could overshadow the film). Tho' I like to think he married the lone white woman because none of the sqaws thought him a suitable mate (which could've made for a funny scene if they had actually played it that way).

Brian C wrote:How does this add up to "reflexive terror of miscegenation"? That's an extremely hyperbolic and ugly charge that you've mustered very thin evidence for. She was never presented as a "squaw" in the first place, IIRC we understand that she's white from the get-go. No one on earth was watching this movie and about to "panic".

There are countless historical precedents for white men in the position of Costner's character taking Indian wives. It's the most natural thing in the world. And yet the film goes ludicrously out of its way to place a convenient white women right there within the tribe. As Sausage notes, it's a film that would rather pander to the racist elements of its audience than put its money where its mouth is, all the while patting itself on the back about how 'progressive' it supposedly is.

And yeah, "terror of miscegenation" was hyperbolic: I don't think anybody behind the film was actually freaked out by the prospect of 'mixing races', but rather that the film was engineered far more cynically to dodge the issue and protect certain markets - which I actually find worse, in some respects.

I thought the problem with DWW was that it wasn't really about the native people, who made up essentially a picturesque backdrop; it was about the central white character (nearly ubiquitous in this kind of "message movies") who can ride into the sunset, leaving the Lakota people and their way of life to be more or less wiped out by the settler society. It all feels inevitable, so we can feel comforted that a sympathetic white character at least wished that it could all be different. The "evil" of the "bad" white characters is far too simplistic and superficial for a western that sets itself up as so much more evolved than the simple good vs. evil of the old westerns. And white viewers can feel good for appreciating a film with such noble sentiments with respect to the past, which show how far white-oriented depictions have come since the days of the westerns of old. So many "revisionist westerns" dealing with Indian subjects have that feel to me, though they're often just trading one set of problems for another.

That's a good point, and the 'dying race' fiction (and its cousin, that of the 'noble savage') was around, and scarcely progressive, a century before Dances with Wolves was shot.

Indeed, the 'dying race' fiction was responsible for one of the more grievous abuses Native Americans had to suffer: the residential schools. In my own country men like Duncan Cambell Scott pushed for aggressive assimilation simply because it was assumed that the Native American people and cultures were dying out anyway, so there was nothing to do but either make them into white people or let them die out. The result was that all Native American children were forcibly taken from their homes and parents and placed in boarding schools that forced them to forget their cultures and act white, schools in which the conditions were often appalling, so much so that they would today count as human rights abuse.

I have a soft spot for Star Wars and its place in my adolescence, though to put this fondness in perspective, I don't own the DVDs or Blu-Rays. That said, I believe Star Wars' appeal is largely in the details rather than from a unique, rousing narrative, or actually, the details energize the rather generic framework until it becomes something more. I think Kolker suggested Lucas and Spielberg created their cottage industry by taking b-genres and treating them as a-list projects, not just with unheard of budgets, but by telling the stories with the sophistication of master technicians. I would argue Lucas is, and has always been, a terrible director (from what I've heard, Coppola was on set everyday during the filming of American Graffiti, "protecting" his investment, and it is well documented that visually, Star Wars is a patchwork of other shots and scenes from documentaries and films, appropriated by Lucas for his space fantasy), but since Star Wars had top-notch art direction, set decorators, and special effects (and that John Williams "gravy"), it hardly matters. For instance, every Star Wars fan loves the cantina scene. Why? Because we take the time to listen to that wacky song while soaking up the local culture, which includes dozens of unique races. This suggests an entire universe, when in fact, we're only shown 20 costumed dudes in make-up. "You fought in the Clone Wars?" Again, that one line suggests so much to any kid with an imagination (well, it did). The fanboy culture around Star Wars is obsessed with these very details, to the extent they live, debate, and breathe them, which is more attention than a narrative, even a creative one, could ever inspire. The Empire Strikes Back features episodes over a driven narrative, but again, the Hoth battle, training with Yoda, the romance between Hans and Leia, the Cloud City, and the impossibly dramatic final battle are each such compelling set pieces (this time softened with Kasdan's humorously casual dialogue), that the idea of a narrative is second to the framework of a conflict and the details that fill it.

zedz wrote:There are countless historical precedents for white men in the position of Costner's character taking Indian wives. It's the most natural thing in the world. And yet the film goes ludicrously out of its way to place a convenient white women right there within the tribe.

This isn't really fair, as the Mary McDonnell character is white for a more pressing reason than avoiding miscegenation: she serves as interpreter between Costner and the Sioux. Without her there'd be no tale to tell, period. Is that convenient? Well, yeah, but no more than any other plot device in any film

Are you suggesting that Sioux can't speak english? Not even one? The choice to make her white is still one that exists explicitly to make things safe. Has anybody who has read the novel know if they problems are there and either worse or better if so?