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I recently watched one of my favorite movies, Dave, with Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. A fun movie that has a lot of the political pundits of that era (1993) making cameo appearances as themselves. A lighthearted comedy, but it also makes you think about the kind of person you'd like in the White House. Someone who thinks more like an average middle-class person, rather than as a ruthless politician. Another I recently re-watched was Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), that struck me seeing again, for how cynical it was of Washington politics, even in that principled and more reverent era. For all its folksy Norman Rockwell-esque Americana. Another from that era, also directed by Frank Capra, Meet John Doe (1940) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper, that despite being a fantastic movie is somehow overlooked in listing Capra's masterworks. Somehow eclipsed by Mr Smith Goes to Washington and his other widely praised classic, It's a Wonderful Life. Meet John Doe Is about a reporter (Barbara Stanwyck) who is being fired from a newspaper, but has to write one more column for her final paycheck, and writes a fake letter to the editor from a man who threatens to commit suicide in protest to dirty politics and the state of civilization, signed "John Doe". It starts such a political firestorm that she is immediately re-hired at a higher salary, and the paper sets about hiring a fake John Doe to pose as the one who writes what becomes a regular column. It explodes into a nationwide "John Doe movement" that is a benevolent pseudo-Christian organization, until others seek to exploit it for political ends. One of my favorite movies. And a warning about political wolves in sheeps' clothing.
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A Face in the Crowd is a good one from Elia Kazan. Though not 100% about politics, it is about the cult of personality and how it bleeds over into everything including politics.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet." Our Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man said: "no, the doctor's right. besides, he has seniority."
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Another I saw recently was The Dead Zone, a Stephen King adaptation (1983), Starring Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen. A teacher (Walken) after a car accident gains the power to see images of the future by touching people. At a political appearance, he shakes hands with a presidential candidate (Martin Sheen) and sees a vision of him in the White House, a fanatic who will unnecessarily start a nuclear war. This is for me one of the best King movie adaptations (along with Needful Things) with very sympathetic and well-acted characters. And a beautiful and suspenseful musical score. In a different way than the movie Dave, it makes you think about the kind of person you want in the White House.
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A Face in the Crowd is a good one from Elia Kazan. Though not 100% about politics, it is about the cult of personality and how it bleeds over into everything including politics. That actually sounds like a great flick. I'll have to look for it when it comes on TCM again. With Patricia Neal, who starred in Day The Earth Stood Still. The plot sounds familiar, I may have watched it a long time ago, but so long ago I don't recall the details. I'm often impressed by some of the sophisticated narratives in movies from what is perceived as a less complex era.
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Officially "too old for this shit" 15000+ posts
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A Face in the Crowd is a good one from Elia Kazan. Though not 100% about politics, it is about the cult of personality and how it bleeds over into everything including politics. Also known as "the Glenn Beck story." I'd recommend. "advise and consent," a film about the DC confirmation process. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055728/"The Best Man," a movie about a contested political convention is another good one one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057883/?ref_=tt_rec_tt
Last edited by the G-man; 2016-07-18 2:00 AM.
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A Face in the Crowd is a good one from Elia Kazan. Though not 100% about politics, it is about the cult of personality and how it bleeds over into everything including politics. Also known as "the Glenn Beck story."  The Next Man I've seen and enjoyed. Directed by Franklin J. Schafner, who also went on to fame directing Planet Of The Apes (1968), Patton(1970), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), all of which won and/or were nominated for multiple Academy Awards. And The Boys From Brazil (1977).
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Caddyshack. Mement--er....
Orson Welles' The Trial is one of my all time favorite movies. Nightmarish, but thought-provoking. I also like Soderberg's Kafka, which gives a warm fuzzy every time I watch it.
Disclosure and Sphere are pale imitations of Crichton's books, but offer some decent (if watered down) aspects of his social commentaries as they were originally conceived in paper.
Primer didn't make me think philosophically or politically, but it bent my brain so much that I felt compelled to sit down and make a flow-chart just so I could properly understand it. Same with Triangle.
Harry Brown, surprisingly enough, managed to climb higher on my movie rankings than Death Wish. It portrayed the criminal problem, along with society's response to it, more poignantly in that it visually demonstrated that the people of a given society are themselves more fit to deal with its problems and riff-raff than the unaccountable and impersonal long arm of the law.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Wonderful talkie. Gary Oldman at his finest.
Patlabor: The Movie 1 & 2. Beautifully animated suspense, intrigue, and social commentary, Mamoru Ooshi style. Warm fuzzies all around. I suppose I should also give an obligatory mention to his Ghost in the Shell films, which are renowned for their existentialist commentaries.
Suspect Zero and The Descent are my two sleeper "think" films. They come across as more action-driven movies, but they have hidden layers that make them far more subversive and viscerally challenging than other such films--although I completely disagree with Aaron Eckhart's character's concluding lines in Suspect Zero, but other than that it was great.
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We're allowed to list documentaries?
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Well, from what I know about the Anthony Weiner documentary, it's more a reality-show style type of storytelling. I was thinking more of feature films, but in this case, there's enough "infotainment" in these two picks by G-man that maybe they offer a unique perspective beyond more conventional documentary film-making. I haven't heard of ANY of the picks in you guys' last two posts, stuff to explore. Two more to add to the list (a film that covers some of the same behind-the-scenes as the Weiner documentary that G-man listed) is The Candidate (1972) starring Robert Redford. Where Peter Boyle is a professional campaign strategist who moves from one campaign to the next. His next project is running against a Republican Senator who is considered unbeatable, and just to fill his time, he approaches a young activist lawyer (Robert Redford) to campaign, with the assurance Redford's character can't possibly win and won't have to actually hold office. It gives behind-the-scenes about shaping political image in stump speeches, political TV ads, fielding attacks and gaffs, televised debates and other aspects of running a campaign. The scene at the end where Redford says to Boyle: "This wasn't supposed to happen, what do we do now?" is a scene that went through my mind on election night in 1992 when Bill Clinton won! Another great one by Redford was All The President's Men (1977) that mostly factually portrays Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) over a roughly 2-year period breaking the story of the Watergate break-in of the 1972 Democratic National Headquarters, and "following the money" from the five burglars to the Nixon campaign officials, and into the Nixon White House staff. The movie ran a few weeks ago again on TCM, and the commentary after said that Redford was friends with Carl Bernstein, and encouraged Bernstein and Woodward to write a book of their story, because it would be easier to option it into a movie if there were a book. So Redford was the catalyst that made them write their Pulitzer-winning book, that later became a movie! Redford is a quintessential example of a Hollywood actor who has used his celebrity to have a profound influence on politics.
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Kind of an aside on the Redford movies I listed, is his relation, along with several other blacklisted Marxist-affiliated actors of the 1950's, to an actor named Jeff Corey: Blacklisted[edit]
Corey's career was halted in the early 1950s, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Corey refused to give names of alleged Communists and subversives in the entertainment industry and went so far as to ridicule the panel by offering critiques of the testimony of the previous witnesses. This behavior led to his being blacklisted for 12 years. "Most of us were retired Reds. We had left it, at least I had, years before," Corey told Patrick McGilligan, the co-author of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (ISBN 978-0-31-217046-2), who also teaches film at Marquette University. "The only issue was, did you want to just give them their token names so you could continue your career, or not? I had no impulse to defend a political point of view that no longer interested me particularly ... They just wanted two new names so they could hand out more subpoenas."
During his blacklisting Corey drew upon his experience in various actors' workshops (including the Actors' Lab, which he helped establish[3]) by seeking work as an acting teacher. He soon became one of the most influential teachers in Hollywood. His students, at various times, included Robert Blake, James Coburn, Richard Chamberlain, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Michael Forest, James Hong, Sally Kellerman, Shirley Knight, Penny Marshall, Jack Nicholson, Darrell M. Smith, Diane Varsi, Sharon Tate, Rita Moreno, Leonard Nimoy, Sally Forrest, Anthony Perkins, Rob Reiner, Robert Towne, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams.
Many of his acting students are collectively a who's who of the Hollywood Left. Jeff Corey appeared with Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. My favorite role by Jeff Corey was in the "O.B.I.T." episode of the Outer Limits, and despite his politics, I also remember him fondly for other roles in episodes of Perry Mason, Wild Wild West, Star Trek, Six Million Dollar Man, Night Gallery, Night Court and his role as one of the governing mutants in the movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
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The Best Man is on TCM tonight at 8 PM ! Another good film, Fail-Safe (1964), starring Henry Fonda as a president who attempts to recall a nuclear bomber and prevent a nuclear war, and has to make complicated executive decisions on the advice (and against the recommendations) of his advisors, aired last night on TCM.
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I was just going through my collection of DVD's, and came across Dick, a comedy where two high school girls, in Forrest Gump style, stumble onto the Watergate burglary, and into a friendship with Nixon where they hang out in the White House on a regular basis and influence major historical events in the Nixon years. One particularly funny scene has the two girls at the Lincoln Memorial, where one girl exclaims to the other how much she loves Dick. People around her think she's talking about... something else...
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Well, from what I know about the Anthony Weiner documentary, it's more a reality-show style type of storytelling. I was thinking more of feature films, but in this case, there's enough "infotainment" in these two picks by G-man that maybe they offer a unique perspective beyond more conventional documentary film-making. I haven't heard of ANY of the picks in you guys' last two posts, stuff to explore. Two more to add to the list (a film that covers some of the same behind-the-scenes as the Weiner documentary that G-man listed) is The Candidate (1972) starring Robert Redford. Where Peter Boyle is a professional campaign strategist who moves from one campaign to the next. His next project is running against a Republican Senator who is considered unbeatable, and just to fill his time, he approaches a young activist lawyer (Robert Redford) to campaign, with the assurance Redford's character can't possibly win and won't have to actually hold office. It gives behind-the-scenes about shaping political image in stump speeches, political TV ads, fielding attacks and gaffs, televised debates and other aspects of running a campaign. The scene at the end where Redford says to Boyle: "This wasn't supposed to happen, what do we do now?" is a scene that went through my mind on election night in 1992 when Bill Clinton won! Another great one by Redford was All The President's Men (1977) that mostly factually portrays Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) over a roughly 2-year period breaking the story of the Watergate break-in of the 1972 Democratic National Headquarters, and "following the money" from the five burglars to the Nixon campaign officials, and into the Nixon White House staff. The movie ran a few weeks ago again on TCM, and the commentary after said that Redford was friends with Carl Bernstein, and encouraged Bernstein and Woodward to write a book of their story, because it would be easier to option it into a movie if there were a book. So Redford was the catalyst that made them write their Pulitzer-winning book, that later became a movie! Redford is a quintessential example of a Hollywood actor who has used his celebrity to have a profound influence on politics. Another Redford movie I failed to mention is Three Days of the Condor(1975). About a modest CIA reader/researcher who unwittingly stumbles into an assassination hit on a branch of the CIA. It reveals that there is internal power struggle by a "CIA within the CIA" (before the existence of the term "Deep State", or another revived current term "Praetorian Guard"). Not dealing with the President as a character in the movie. But it is a commentary on the danger of individuals in powerful federal agencies who have the ability on a whim to start wars, orchestrate assassinations, launch disinformation to hide their tracks, and crush anyone, either average person or V.I.P., who gets their way. It echoes the rogue elements running wild over the last 2 years in FBI, DOJ, NSA, CIA, FISA court, and possibly on up into the Obama White House as well. It certainly included players in the DNC (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile), and Hillary Clinton herself. That it is being suppressed from even being investigated is alone chilling, and testament to just how powerful this government-within-the-government truly is.
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Enemy of the State(1998) is another movie in the same vein, that could be seen as either a sequel or a remake of Three Days of the Condor. With the advances in surveillance technology updated in this version. In 1998, the surveillance tracking might have still been fantasy over-reach, but from the time of Edward Snowden, it is clear that level of surveillance is now possible, and then some. And again an example of the Deep State (not yet called that in 1998) that pursues its own agenda rather than that of the people or its elected leaders. The assassination at the beginning of the movie of someone who stood in the way of their legislation was quite disturbing. I recall back in 1996 when a former CIA director died in a boating accident, and I wondered at the time if the accident was in truth an assassination. Certainly with events in recent decades, it makes one think twice about such occurrences.
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On TCM today, at 3:30PM, in about 30 minutes.
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