Tarantino was asked about that once, and responded that if you don't understand why he told Keitel he was a cop, then you didn't get the movie.

wait, if acting is easy and anyone can do it, why don't they just put american pretty boys in?

I feel like this is secretly Scientology propaganda or something

The movie seems fairly readable as being about toxic masculinity and the death of patriarchy, and grounding that kind of a movie atop a site resulting from one of the larger crimes of the dominant society seems pretty reasonable, to me. It reinforces the idea that Jack is an exaggeration of the norm, and not an…

@avclub-8e1a34fb2a04d0abe810f423b25ca00b:disqus Yes, it was a Hayes code restriction that moral violations always resulted in punishment- which sometimes meant that women would die of cancer for cheating on their husband or whatever, because the Hayes office was not concerned about proportionality of punishment. Lang…

Well, it's a bit later, but the Godfather is perhaps the most popular gangster movie ever, and Michael is never punished, nor does anyone really want him to be- and in Kind Hearts, he (possibly?) gets away with it after all.

It seems very much like a Chaplin inflection of a Wellesian idea- it's not hard to imagine a Welles movie wherein the main figure is an appealing monster, as Welles himself is in so many of his films, but Chaplin's staging and casting and pretty much everything else serve to lessen the monstrosity and heighten the…

The thing is, people were gung ho on going with killers all the time- whatever the Hayes code said, gangsters were always attractive figures, and gunslingers weren't even theoretically people one didn't like. It's easy to get people on board with killing, as long as you make their targets seem like they have it coming.

Keaton's pretty great in terms of contempt for sentimentality- the best part of his College is that after 65 minutes of him trying to get his dream girl, there's a smash cut sequence into marriage/unhappy married life with children/depressed old age/two matched tombstones. It's fucking amazing.

Haha it works as one but I don't think it's meant as one

There's an implied contempt for the poor that's sort of gross (both in his statements and in the whole supporting Romney thing) but I don't think it puts him on par with active hatemonger Orson Scott Card

Believe me, the sentimentality is there in full force in this one- it's not played at all as irony, either

Also, some of the acting is shockingly bad (the family at the beginning) and the movie, outside of a five minute stretch here or there, isn't actually funny.

Ugh, I actually really hated this, despite loving Kind Hearts and Coronets. Chaplin cheats horribly- he gets you on the side of the murderer by making all of the people he murders horrible, stupid, and ugly, and he sentimentalizes his character as someone who wouldn't murder a girl who was nice. His big speech at the…

White only likes De Palma because De Palma is pals with White's dreamboat Spielberg

her philosophy there is 100% consistent. it's just that she was an unutterably horrible person with terrible, pernicious ideas

but he's a very pretty lady

IIRC, she's not supposed to be black, that was just a coloring error- or at least so they said in one of the commentaries

Isn't Josie her biological daughter? I don't remember her being adopted

actually, that's a good point- where's the line for turning? could you get zombie blastocysts crawling around? zombie ova and semen?