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Last Buffalo
Nov 7, 2011
The narrative has this twist of Paul Dano actually being the victim and being unable to help because of the tough attitude of the police and then the torture by Keller. However, I don't think his character was portrayed as so dumb and scared that he wouldn't lead the police to the kids if he actually wasn't into the whole murder/torture thing. First, I don't think it's very plausible within the film. Second, at the end of the day, he's an accomplice to the abduction and stuff. He would be charged with something or put away, and he's not the innocent victim the script wants to set him up as. I think the logic of the story works against the themes it wants to run with.

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bullet3
Nov 8, 2011
In both cases, there's an element of insincerity that holds the movies back. Prisoners and Sicario both feel very artificial and manipulative, like watching chess pieces being moved around a board instead of real human characters. It's like a David Fincher movie with all the skillful trappings that would entail, but with the secret sauce missing, it's tough to articulate.

The minimalism and complete sidelining of the protagonist might work better if I believed the movie as a procedural, but nothing about the operation feels believable to me. If the CIA wanted someone dead, and they had a target to follow, there are way easier ways of accomplishing this than sending a renegade assassin through Drug Tunnels to cross the border. You don't think we have hundreds of assets operating in Mexico that would get the job done? And it's awfully coincidental that Benicio's family happened to be killed by this exact drug lord so he can go seek revenge. This is where the movie has kind of an identity crisis in my opinion, where tonally it feels like it's going for a strong sense of authenticity, like Zodiac or Zero Dark Thirty, but Benicio's character and his entire climax feels like something out of a Luc Besson action movie. That, coupled with the "twist" that our protagonist actually has no relevance to this story, really deflates the movie for me.

Again, on a technical level? Masterful. But it truly is an example of style over substance if I've ever seen it.

bullet3 fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Oct 2, 2015

Pedro De Heredia
May 30, 2006

Last Buffalo posted:

The narrative has this twist of Paul Dano actually being the victim and being unable to help because of the tough attitude of the police and then the torture by Keller. However, I don't think his character was portrayed as so dumb and scared that he wouldn't lead the police to the kids if he actually wasn't into the whole murder/torture thing. First, I don't think it's very plausible within the film. Second, at the end of the day, he's an accomplice to the abduction and stuff. He would be charged with something or put away, and he's not the innocent victim the script wants to set him up as. I think the logic of the story works against the themes it wants to run with.

I don't really think the script sets him up as an 'innocent victim', and the story doesn't depend on that characterization. In fact, there is no need to group the concepts of 'innocent' and 'victim'. One can very well be a 'victim' (of crimes, of circumstances, etc.) without being innocent.

The story works well because he is materially (if not intellectually) involved with the crimes. Otherwise, it would be a very different story, with a message like 'well torture is bad because what if you torture someone who didn't do anything wrong' or 'torture is bad because you don't get any real useful information out of it'. It's a good middle ground between 'torturing a completely innocent person' and 'torturing a monster who clearly committed this crime'.

Pedro De Heredia
May 30, 2006

bullet3 posted:

It's like a David Fincher movie with all the skillful trappings that would entail, but with the secret sauce missing, it's tough to articulate.
Again, on a technical level? Masterful. But it truly is an example of style over substance if I've ever seen it.

David Fincher is kind of style over substance personified.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010
That's a false dilemma. Style is substance.

Something Else
Dec 27, 2004

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022
I saw this movie last weekend, it owns. All that thermal vision stuff was extremely my poo poo. All the narrative complaints in this thread have been valid, and it managed to be anti-feminist when it would've been really easy not to. She could've figured out some way to kill Bernthal, why not? Still a visual feast tho.

Immortan
Jun 6, 2015

by Shine
Holy loving poo poo this thread. Comparing this to Zero Dark Thirty as :spergin: AMERICA FUK YEAH!!1! propaganda :spergin: ? What the gently caress?

But yeah, this is definitely up there with No Country For Old Men with me. The pacing, editing, tension, and cinematography were all top notch. Also, I wasn't expecting Alejandro to execute that drug lord's family in front of him before blowing his head off as revenge. gently caress. :catstare: I like to be surprised.

OneDeadman
Oct 16, 2010

[SUPERBIA]
This was a very good looking Noir movie.

But, i'll echo that the story has problems

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


"Feminism" in a movie isn't "Lacks people who are feminist," guys. Like if your big takeaway was that everyone's behavior towards Emily Blunt was cool and right, or that there should have been an ending wrapped in a bow that reassures us all, you missed the point of the movie.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
The reference to Zero Dark Thirty is not just a reference to the compound raid at the beginning (seriously, look at the overhead shot of the property) but the slow disempowerment of Jessica Chastain's character, which offers us a melange of the New American Hero archetypes: the stoic, self-sacrificing technocrats, the capable professionals who get the job done At The End Of The Day but have maintained their brash charm, Level 0 Operators, etc. Zero Dark Thirty criticizes the boys with toys approach, comparing them to aliens, the stripping of Bin Laden's compound to a corporate raid, and all that good stuff.

Sicario is taking you exactly where that leads, an arrogant, coldblooded worldview that doesn't value anything in particular aside from letting the leash off. This is why you get a protagonist who's a tough-minded Tac Team leader who inadvertently falls under the sway of Josh Brolin's Kurtz-meets-The Dude.

morestuff
Aug 2, 2008

You can't stop what's coming
Saw this last night and liked it a lot. I'd seen complaints about Blunt's lack of agency before going into it, but I thought that was pretty clearly addressed both narratively and thematically. Her "flaws" are a respect for the chain of command, and a moral compass. You could have cast a man in the role and (aside from the sexual assault) mostly been fine, but the way she's disrespected, patronized and used in a calculated way just underlines the noxiousness of the system.

Gaunab
Feb 13, 2012
LUFTHANSA YOU FUCKING DICKWEASEL
This thread was a little hard to read since I haven't seen Prisoners yet and don't want to have it spoiled. Anyway I saw this yesterday and I really liked it a lot. I can see someone coming out of it thinking Alejandro is the most badass guy ever or that Trump is right and we need to build a fence at the border, but they'd be missing the point. I liked Emily Blunts character and I don't really get the complaints about her.

morestuff posted:

Saw this last night and liked it a lot. I'd seen complaints about Blunt's lack of agency before going into it, but I thought that was pretty clearly addressed both narratively and thematically. Her "flaws" are a respect for the chain of command, and a moral compass. You could have cast a man in the role and (aside from the sexual assault) mostly been fine, but the way she's disrespected, patronized and used in a calculated way just underlines the noxiousness of the system.

Yeah this pretty much. I think the scene that sums it up is after the tunnel when they're talking how it went well except for the two assholes. It's pretty easy as an audience member to say that if you were in that situation you'd take charge but we'd probably be just as clueless in her situation.

porfiria
Dec 10, 2008

by Modern Video Games

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

The reference to Zero Dark Thirty is not just a reference to the compound raid at the beginning (seriously, look at the overhead shot of the property) but the slow disempowerment of Jessica Chastain's character, which offers us a melange of the New American Hero archetypes: the stoic, self-sacrificing technocrats, the capable professionals who get the job done At The End Of The Day but have maintained their brash charm, Level 0 Operators, etc. Zero Dark Thirty criticizes the boys with toys approach, comparing them to aliens, the stripping of Bin Laden's compound to a corporate raid, and all that good stuff.

Sicario is taking you exactly where that leads, an arrogant, coldblooded worldview that doesn't value anything in particular aside from letting the leash off. This is why you get a protagonist who's a tough-minded Tac Team leader who inadvertently falls under the sway of Josh Brolin's Kurtz-meets-The Dude.

Cyborg supercommandoes are our future. That scene on the highway where they blast those vatos is fantastic. Compare stuff like: Clear and Present Danger.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

porfiria posted:

Cyborg supercommandoes are our future. That scene on the highway where they blast those vatos is fantastic. Compare stuff like: Clear and Present Danger.

I've been thinking about a couple things, particularly about how much Vileneuve does not seem to have any particular concern for "realism" and risks coming off as dangerously cheesy. I like a confidently unsubtle director. See: "This is the future, Kate."

One especially vivid image is Jenny Angel talking about how in the Money Shot, the squad with their futuristic kit look like horned demons descending into hell. At the beginning, the anonymized FBI/SWAT guys are riding in silence with the light going through the slats like they're going to certain doom (or prison). The Policia Federales ride around on technicals, totally stormtroopered out. Their job is to swagger around, intimidating the locals.

It would've been much easier to set this movie about Mexico, in fact, but adapting the story to the American context works so well. A lot of what you hear about cartel violence in the U.S. is greatly exaggerated, and it would have been more palatable as Traffic with the yellow tint talking about how they're not like us. By explaining the situation entirely in our context, it's much better, particularly in the use of the "deep state/captured state".

Like Silvio, Kate "makes such a good cop." When we see the sickening display of bodies in Juarez, notice how the more seasoned guys frame it for Kate, with admiration and respect. They have entirely congruent aims within their own organization; to use the useful, to recruit the streetwise and scare off everyone else. "It's brilliant what they do."

The emphasis on factions and factionalism just underlines that there is only one ideology, and the pretense of an existential threat is just empty thundering. The future is gang warfare writ large, extralegal punishment expeditions. State terror vs. non-state terror.

Terrorist Fistbump
Jan 29, 2009

by Nyc_Tattoo
The ideology espoused by Josh Brolin's team is specifically that liberal-rational society is too pragmatic in dealing with the cartels and that the real way to answer their violence is with more of the same. It posits that there is a separate world where the rules of the game are different and only real men can survive, and where the most cutthroat and sociopathic men are those that truly thrive. The film implies that this is also the cartel's ideology, which makes sense considering that it is one that justifies criminality and power for power's sake.

The overall arc of the film is Kate descending -- literally at points -- into a world where the above ideology is dominant and turning from an empowered agent for good into a helpless pawn as she descends.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
It's amazing how so much of this is conveyed with a protagonist whose dialogue is mainly variations on the phrase "I don't know."

Vegetable
Oct 22, 2010

How do you pronounce the name of the movie?

Wandle Cax
Dec 15, 2006
Sick-ah-ree-oh

porfiria
Dec 10, 2008

by Modern Video Games

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

I've been thinking about a couple things, particularly about how much Vileneuve does not seem to have any particular concern for "realism" and risks coming off as dangerously cheesy. I like a confidently unsubtle director. See: "This is the future, Kate."

One especially vivid image is Jenny Angel talking about how in the Money Shot, the squad with their futuristic kit look like horned demons descending into hell. At the beginning, the anonymized FBI/SWAT guys are riding in silence with the light going through the slats like they're going to certain doom (or prison). The Policia Federales ride around on technicals, totally stormtroopered out. Their job is to swagger around, intimidating the locals.

It would've been much easier to set this movie about Mexico, in fact, but adapting the story to the American context works so well. A lot of what you hear about cartel violence in the U.S. is greatly exaggerated, and it would have been more palatable as Traffic with the yellow tint talking about how they're not like us. By explaining the situation entirely in our context, it's much better, particularly in the use of the "deep state/captured state".

Like Silvio, Kate "makes such a good cop." When we see the sickening display of bodies in Juarez, notice how the more seasoned guys frame it for Kate, with admiration and respect. They have entirely congruent aims within their own organization; to use the useful, to recruit the streetwise and scare off everyone else. "It's brilliant what they do."

The emphasis on factions and factionalism just underlines that there is only one ideology, and the pretense of an existential threat is just empty thundering. The future is gang warfare writ large, extralegal punishment expeditions. State terror vs. non-state terror.

Yep, although the Cartel seems completely overmatched by DEVGRU et al. Do "the bad guys" get a single shot off in this movie?

morestuff
Aug 2, 2008

You can't stop what's coming

porfiria posted:

Yep, although the Cartel seems completely overmatched by DEVGRU et al. Do "the bad guys" get a single shot off in this movie?

That one federale takes a shot at Blunt.

Terrorist Fistbump
Jan 29, 2009

by Nyc_Tattoo

porfiria posted:

Yep, although the Cartel seems completely overmatched by DEVGRU et al. Do "the bad guys" get a single shot off in this movie?

It's clear that the cartel is not actually a threat to American security in any major way. There is a stark difference between the public brutality and open fighting in Juarez and the small-scale violence in the United States, which is on the level of what you'd see from a biker gang or the local Mafia. Brolin's team uses the vague threat that Arizona may resemble Juarez at some point in the future to justify acting far outside the law as a matter of course. Their real goal appears to be simply dominating the cartel in a primitive way based on the ideology I described above, rather than pursuing any specific security strategy.

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



I wrote a little blurb in the other thread.

---

Sicario - I've been really hyped for Sicario, and I may have watched that teaser too many times, enough to derive a bit too much out of the plot. For those sensitive to spoilers, this is a film that would really benefit from a blind watch. Yet, and I don't know how he does it, Villanueve (along with incredible cinematography from Deakins) manages to take whole swaths of his film and make them unbearably tense, and prolong that tension using sound design in a way that no other director is capable of right now. Sicario is probably the most moving and uncompromising film yet made on the US/Mexico drug war, and contrary to people claiming that it demonizes Mexico, it actually is amazingly effective at demonstrating the US' economic/militaristic complicity in the whole affair. At the same time it seemingly proposes, rather subversively, that many of the worst consequences of this fictitious war are heaped upon the shoulders of a rather poor and destitute Mexican populace. I think it's fair to say that the US is both insulated and largely unaware of the horrors happening in the region, but the film is both personal enough and daring enough to equate the American state to a cartel itself, a purveyor of what Chomsky would call "wholesale terrorism", and largely unanswerable for its own crimes against civilian populations. Great performances all around, especially Blunt and Del Toro. I can't wait to see what other people write about Sicario, because it's rather amazing.

Vegetable
Oct 22, 2010

Wandle Cax posted:

Sick-ah-ree-oh
Thanks, have been hearing Sick-care-rio and it was messing with my head

IMB
Jan 8, 2005
How does an asshole like Bob get such a great kitchen?
Great movie. Loved that Blunt and Silvio both smoked the same cigarettes. Two probably honorable cops sucked into the corruption above their pay grades.

Immortan
Jun 6, 2015

by Shine

IMB posted:

Great movie. Loved that Blunt and Silvio both smoked the same cigarettes. Two probably honorable cops sucked into the corruption above their pay grades.

:wow: I didn't catch that at first.

Also, I heard that The Cartel by Don Winslow is a great read and Sicario's similar subject matter finally convinced me to buy it. :D

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Terrorist Fistbump posted:

It's clear that the cartel is not actually a threat to American security in any major way. There is a stark difference between the public brutality and open fighting in Juarez and the small-scale violence in the United States, which is on the level of what you'd see from a biker gang or the local Mafia. Brolin's team uses the vague threat that Arizona may resemble Juarez at some point in the future to justify acting far outside the law as a matter of course. Their real goal appears to be simply dominating the cartel in a primitive way based on the ideology I described above, rather than pursuing any specific security strategy.

Maybe it's also because I've recently been reading a couple histories of the CIA, as well, and it seems pretty clear that the CIA prefers it this way. They consider their overarching mission goal to create "organized chaos", dramatized to a great degree here but very real in their history, successes and failures alike.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

Maybe it's also because I've recently been reading a couple histories of the CIA, as well, and it seems pretty clear that the CIA prefers it this way. They consider their overarching mission goal to create "organized chaos", dramatized to a great degree here but very real in their history, successes and failures alike.

Fun fact you can literally go to the Wikipedia page on Juarez right now and it'll semi-explicitly argue in favor of that organized chaos to you, citing the emergent dominance of a single cartel as a major factor behind the declining murder rate in the city, which is pretty much Matt's whole plan.

DickStatkus
Oct 25, 2006

The cartels being completely ineffectual in posing a threat to the characters is what really caught me off guard. They are basically canon fodder. The threat and terror more often comes from "the good guys." That ever present intimidation and threat of extreme violence that any decked out state sponsored storm trooper could inflict as they sped through residential areas. That combined with the complete lack of agency the only character with any moral fibre has me sitting at home in on a Saturday night kinda shell shocked. Beyond bleak and amoral.

Also, can we not get into the whole tactical realism thing, it's more fun to talk about the movie and not what some internet person "knows" about how the CIA operates. :D

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



morestuff posted:

Saw this last night and liked it a lot. I'd seen complaints about Blunt's lack of agency before going into it, but I thought that was pretty clearly addressed both narratively and thematically. Her "flaws" are a respect for the chain of command, and a moral compass. You could have cast a man in the role and (aside from the sexual assault) mostly been fine, but the way she's disrespected, patronized and used in a calculated way just underlines the noxiousness of the system.

I think there's a lot made of the general attitude and environment of violence against women in the film, too. Villanueve is no stranger to discussing said themes (see Polytechnique for anyone accusing him of anti-feminist sentiment, or hell, the entirety of Enemy), and he's very straightforward with the idea that even though US military force is 'equal opportunity' its central power structure is built exclusively on the principles of the white male boy's club. No time for irrationality or hysterical fits of morality and due process, play along or be stomped. Or, better yet, in a scene that mirrors Macer's attempted sexual assault (and the systemic sexual assault of women in both Mexican and American culture)...Josh Brolin puts a knee to her neck and tells her to be quiet and stop moving. She's forcefully subdued, as is her black male partner to the tune of 'just let it happen.'

I don't think the dad-cop's scenes with his son are cliche or pointless at all. They serve a direct purpose of humanizing the casualties of violence that are committed tit for tat by the 'cartel' of the American state and it's illegal/immoral covert operations. Just one result of loosing their unpredictable attack-dog hitman into the wild. No one will ever hear about it in the USA or even in the flat, towerless expanse of Juarez, just another body in a grave that doesn't matter. And yet, where's the final shot? The final shot is on the kids and single mothers living amid rampant violence not of their making. It's chilling and uneasy, very similar to the scene in The Counselor where he finds himself on the street amid a protest of mothers who've lost their daughters to kidnapping, reprisal attacks, and human trafficking.

The agency that is denied Blunt's character is the agency that is denied women in all warzones. I like how Lucy Ellman put it:

"It wasn’t women’s idea (war was invented by Bronze Age patriarchal societies, following the invention of superior weaponry), and it’s not in women’s interests: war promotes and entertains men, but it severely curtails women’s freedoms. It is designed to subdue women and deprive them of what they need. Women, therefore, shouldn’t have to help with this. They shouldn’t have to proudly or tearfully or bravely welcome home the dead. They shouldn’t have to provide the world with young men and women to be killed, raped, tortured, maddened. War devalues the power of giving birth. That is its primary purpose. War serves as a means of rejecting and destroying women."

BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Oct 4, 2015

Viginti
Feb 1, 2015
Yeah, any reading of this film as anti-feminist or pro-American is by an over-literal autist. You're not meant to enjoy or support any of what happens here. Take the border-crossing 'shoot-out' as many reviews call it; yes it could have made for a thrilling action sequence - it's still remarkably tense - but it purposefully ends with the gross, anti-climactic execution of the Cartel members who are shown to never have really been a match for the oh so unheroic Delta squad members. It could have been a matched conflict, the false policeman that Blunt kills could have been drawing a bead on Brolin from behind and he could have begrudgingly come to respect her, but that's not the movie.



As for the Mexican cop scenes, I rather liked them during the movie because they allowed for a number of different possible plot purposes (Was he the head of the Cartel, hidden by the small life and badge? Was he the titular Sicario, would he be the end of Blunt? etc.) but the ultimate revelation was pretty weak. Those scenes were too obtrusive and portentous for the small effect that they had. The final scene was great, though it would have been even without the set-up.


I really loved the line, paraphrasing, about 'Asking me to explain how a watch works, when you should just be keeping an eye on the time.' The script wasn't amazing overall though, serviceable sure, but had the Coens been given a crack at it some of those blunt message of the movie speeches could have sung a little more. Even in a movie that intentionally moves away from her Blunt was given more to work with here than McAdams In twelve hours of her show.

Quasipox
Sep 6, 2008

I went and saw this again with my brother and I don't know if anyone else had this happen, but there were some weird reactions in the audience the second time. I don't want to sound like I'm saying people watched it wrong, but there were a lot of chuckles and murmurs of agreement during some of the scenes that I had a completely opposite reaction with.

The interrogation of Guillermo, when Matt and Alejandro are questioning the corrupt cop, when Reggie gets thrown down and threatened, etc.

It was weird and a little unnerving to be honest. Hell, maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

I also want to say holy poo poo that score. The bit that really wowed me was the helicopter shot with that droning noise. It was unsettling in a perfect way. There's not much I can say that hasn't been said, but this is assuredly one of my favorite movies this year.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Quasipox posted:

I went and saw this again with my brother and I don't know if anyone else had this happen, but there were some weird reactions in the audience the second time. I don't want to sound like I'm saying people watched it wrong, but there were a lot of chuckles and murmurs of agreement during some of the scenes that I had a completely opposite reaction with.

The interrogation of Guillermo, when Matt and Alejandro are questioning the corrupt cop, when Reggie gets thrown down and threatened, etc.

It was weird and a little unnerving to be honest. Hell, maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

I also want to say holy poo poo that score. The bit that really wowed me was the helicopter shot with that droning noise. It was unsettling in a perfect way. There's not much I can say that hasn't been said, but this is assuredly one of my favorite movies this year.

The movie is pretty much a scumbag demolition derby and on top of that has all kinds of melodrama and characters who come off as cool guys in one scene and total sociopaths in others.

Fill Baptismal
Dec 15, 2008
I don't really see where people are getting the reading of the cartel being not a real threat from. They kill more than 40 people on US soil, and have American police officers senior and respected enough to be buddies with FBI agents totally under their control. Not to mention the sophisticated money laundering and counter intelligence that they get up to (they have a tame cop investigating the task force less than a day after the money is confiscated.) They're very much a real and powerful threat. The fact that their gangbanger minions get stomped whenever they go against the best trained special forces in the world isn't really that big a check against them in my view. If anything it makes them kind of more frightening, because they aren't an enemy you can point a gun at and kill, no matter how hard you try.

atrus50
Dec 24, 2008

OneThousandMonkeys posted:

The movie is pretty much a scumbag demolition derby and on top of that has all kinds of melodrama and characters who come off as cool guys in one scene and total sociopaths in others.

Basically this. I don't think I needed as much of the Mexican family, and def needed more Blunt. The MSG sequence was way gratuitous imo, and probably cut into time the script could have spent fleshing out our leading lady. The titular sicarios probably needed less screen time and dialog but if you've got the actors squeeze em I guess. I hated Blunt's partner as a character. Deakins did well at least

Josh Lyman
May 24, 2009


atrus50 posted:

Basically this. I don't think I needed as much of the Mexican family, and def needed more Blunt. The MSG sequence was way gratuitous imo, and probably cut into time the script could have spent fleshing out our leading lady. The titular sicarios probably needed less screen time and dialog but if you've got the actors squeeze em I guess. I hated Blunt's partner as a character. Deakins did well at least
The fact that you refer to Blunt as "our leading lady" exposes your misinterpretation of the text.

atrus50
Dec 24, 2008

Josh Lyman posted:

The fact that you refer to Blunt as "our leading lady" exposes your misinterpretation of the text.

expose me i guess? she's the goddamned lead like it or not. the drama of the movie's hooked on her and her decisions alone

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

second-hand smegma posted:

Or, better yet, in a scene that mirrors Macer's attempted sexual assault (and the systemic sexual assault of women in both Mexican and American culture)...Josh Brolin puts a knee to her neck and tells her to be quiet and stop moving. She's forcefully subdued, as is her black male partner to the tune of 'just let it happen.'

The line is even "just lay back and let it happen, baby."

Medellin/Alejandro does a lot of invasive/violating poo poo to his detainees, somewhat reminiscent, oddly, of Bane. In that movie, you have to imagine what Bane does to torture someone because it's PG-13 (but you imagine it's quite intimate and sensual as he brings them close and caresses them before they die in agony).

In this movie, you are still deliberately not shown what exactly Medellin is doing: you see the water jug, the Ultimate Wet Willy, but you don't see what he's doing to Jon Bernthal to make him really afraid, and you don't see what he does to Guillermo at all. However, what you do see in both scenes is an odd look of pleasure, almost like nostalgia on Matt's face. In both scenes, he's intimately close with the subject of the torture. With Jon Bernthal, he's doing something in his lap. With Guillermo, he's standing in a sexually dominant position over the sitting man, hands on hips with his cock in his face.

When he talks to Kate, he's tender with her until she gets out of line and does something he doesn't like, and even puts two in her to keep her away.


Speaking of "The Counselor", by the way, I like the touch of rumpled suit he wears throughout. The guy's no more a Mexican Prosecutor than Matt is a DOD Advisor.

Terrorist Fistbump
Jan 29, 2009

by Nyc_Tattoo

themrguy posted:

I don't really see where people are getting the reading of the cartel being not a real threat from. They kill more than 40 people on US soil, and have American police officers senior and respected enough to be buddies with FBI agents totally under their control. Not to mention the sophisticated money laundering and counter intelligence that they get up to (they have a tame cop investigating the task force less than a day after the money is confiscated.) They're very much a real and powerful threat. The fact that their gangbanger minions get stomped whenever they go against the best trained special forces in the world isn't really that big a check against them in my view. If anything it makes them kind of more frightening, because they aren't an enemy you can point a gun at and kill, no matter how hard you try.

The importance is in the contrast between what is shown in the United States and Mexico. A house full of hidden bodies is nothing compared to dismembered corpses hanging from an overpass. A bomb that kills a few careless cops is far less a threat to civilians than the routine fighting that engulfs Juarez at night -- we see what appears to be air defense cannons and anti-tank missiles in use during the "fireworks". Ted is just a lone local cop who the cartels recruit as an informant, but the Mexican police are so fully infiltrated at all levels that they are essentially agents of the cartels. Mexico is Their World -- a fallen, chaotic, violent narco-state; America is still Our World -- a liberal-rational society where crime is an aberration and the darkness is at the fringes.

Matt and his team, and indeed most of the agents of the federal government that we see, constantly use language that suggests if we don't embrace the ideology of Their World, Our World is at risk of being destroyed. Kate and her partner reject this position even as they dig deeper into the true intentions of Matt's operation, and are beaten down the more they become aware of the blackness of their motives and methods. The irony here is that Matt has brought Their World into Ours by embracing the wrong ideology -- by the end of the film, Arizona is the "land of wolves", as Alejandro puts it, in a very real way for Kate, and she truly has no place there.

Chairman Capone
Dec 17, 2008

Quasipox posted:

I also want to say holy poo poo that score. The bit that really wowed me was the helicopter shot with that droning noise. It was unsettling in a perfect way. There's not much I can say that hasn't been said, but this is assuredly one of my favorite movies this year.

This movie really did have one of the best scores of any movie I've seen in the last year or two, at the least.

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Cross-Section
Mar 18, 2009

Quasipox posted:

I went and saw this again with my brother and I don't know if anyone else had this happen, but there were some weird reactions in the audience the second time. I don't want to sound like I'm saying people watched it wrong, but there were a lot of chuckles and murmurs of agreement during some of the scenes that I had a completely opposite reaction with.

The interrogation of Guillermo, when Matt and Alejandro are questioning the corrupt cop, when Reggie gets thrown down and threatened, etc.

It was weird and a little unnerving to be honest. Hell, maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

Audience I saw it with had similar reactions, with a few added :wtc: moments like a person outright giggling at Alejandro forcing Kate to sign the waiver at gunpoint. The naive part of me wants to imagine that's just a coping mechanism for all the tension, but seriously, I haven't been this dismayed at audience reactions since Captain Phillips.

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