He wrote the original story, wrote the screenplay, he produced it, he edited it and he directed at least the final twenty minutes of the film. He also funded it via Lightstorm. The film was Cameron’s in nearly every technical way. And it’s a masterpiece, but it flopped and is destined to become a lost classic.
Well I think it flopped because people just didnt understand it like they would today. Its somehow both ahead of its time and very anachronistic with the Year 2000 trope.
It was also delayed and the advertising sucked. It was set for a summer release and they pushed it to October and marketed it as a straight-up sci-fi-movie and it simply isn’t that. “Urban Noir Action-Thriller” is how I would describe it. It predicted VR would be the new rage (it wasn’t), that voyeurism would become an obsession (check) and that police would become pseudo-military (they have).
Yeah, I forgot about that whole thing. Im not sure why that was even a plot element. It would have made more sense that she was afraid of Buffalino if she had witnessed him committing a crime or something. It was just a really creepy interaction. I wonder of Scorsese was trying to recreate the type of scene he had in Taxi Driver where Bickle is buying black market guns in a hotel room. The dealer is all calm and cooler from Travis's perspective because he wants the guns but when he starts talking about other goods hes dealing, hes all frantic and creepy. I guess this could have been a similar thing of Frank's perspective of Buffalino vs a normal person's. Who knows.
I’ve been WAITING for someone to bring this up as I just saw this like a month ago. I honestly didn’t know how much material Quinton Tarantino lifts for content in his films. So that gun dealer from Taxi Driver was just this crazy guy Martin Scorsese knew. Scorsese did a whole documentary on him where he just interviewed him and had him talk non stop for 2 hours back in the 70s. In the doc the guy relates this story of how he brought his girlfriend out of an OD coma with a shot of adrenaline. Word for word, his mannerisms and everything were copied directly into the famous scene in Pulp Fiction. Eric Stultz basically replays the scene from the documentary. I mean I know he’s copied styles and remade scenes shot for shot cinematography wise but I didn’t know he lifted whole lines and ideas straight from other material.
You've never seen the documentary "Who Do You Think You're Fooling?", have you. Check it out; it's on YouTube.
That is literally your current avatar, because that face and line is BURNED into the minds of whoever watched it. I get a shudder from looking at it. Requiem is a movie everybody watched once, but not many watched twice. It belongs with movies like “Passion Of The Christ” and “Irreversible”.
Irreversible was pretty fucked up, but that was kind of the point, which makes it a little silly. It same thing with Man Bites Dog (which I think is worse) and other movies like that. The whole beating-with-a-fire-extinguisher scene was something I hadn’t really seen the likes of before, at least not until The Walking Dead.
Actually, for the longest time I thought 'Kahn's avatar was Robin Williams; he made that his avatar right around the time that he died, so I thought he did it to pay respect. Then one day a few months ago, I asked him about it, and he told me who it really was. I couldn't have been more wrong. That was a great movie; all of Aronofsky's work is on-point.
Man Bites Dog is a satire, I mean... it has to be. Either that, or it is the sickest joke that a filmmaker has ever played (the director played the film’s “subject”) because movies simply do not get more hardcore than that. It reinvented the wheel on “sensationalism” while driving spikes into it as well. A Serbian Film..., I cant rate that or classify it. It’s like “Pink Flamingos”, it’s not a movie, it’s a..... thing..... of some sorts. A thing that the people who have resisted watching should thank themselves for not doing so. Do NOT fucking watch it.
I dont get the "you don't watch Requiem more than once or twice" it's a really well done movie. A score that transcended the movie, visual style, and a multitude gem roles for great character actors and top billed alike. All the negative energy is around the ending sequence* seems to be it, even that I mean it crescendos beautifully even though it's deep on the dark side. Ive seen it at least half a dozen times. *The only part that bugs me is they use the Electric Shock Therapy in the negative movie trope. Never had it but apparently the real world version is a lot less dramatic and really beneficial in certain situations. They sedate the patient and Ive heard dont feel anything during the current.
I think it definitely satirizes the charismatic serial killer trope. The whole point of it is to manipulate the audience into thinking he's funny and charming in the beginning and then make you feel sick to your stomach by the end. I think it probably also is a critique on how the media can sometimes transcend reporting into encouraging and creating things that happen. I have seen the main character in other things before, and he's really good (and a fairly popular actor in Belgium). I would say, content aside, its a really good film. Its post-modernism to the extreme. Serbian Film, Salo, Begotten, etc. are all art projects from directors who aren't really good at what they do. Those fall into a different bucket for me. Just gratuitous trash. Yeah, no shit. shock therapy is legitimately used all the time. I have a psychiatrist friend who said its used more than people think, its pretty safe and patients are unconscious when they get it. That movie is extremely heavy-handed, but still really good. And yeah, the score makes the whole thing. One of the best ever.
Any “real movie fan” loves Requiem. But the people who simply demand entertainment, who want happy endings and not close-ups of injections into infections—- DO NOT like that movie. I personally love it when movies end the way that it did. That’s LIFE, motherfuckers: If dreams came true there wouldn’t be so many Pontiac Sunfires on the road. Another reason people don’t like it is how uncomfortably real things are in it. It is an epic of Rock Bottom and people who have been there say the film gets under their skin to a frightening degree.