Victim of Circumstance
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
directed by Milos Forman
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix
When I'm not sure how I should feel about a film from the seventies, I imagine the same movie made forty years earlier under the direction of Frank Capra or Preston Sturges. Is the "common man" angle I like so much in You Can't Take it With You appealing to me only because of the movie's age? Is my affection for Sullivan's Travels a double standard in light of the superficial melodrama of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?
The thing is, if I went forward in time another fifteen years, wouldn't Dead Poets Society be the closest point of comparison? Or Forman's own Man on the Moon? And wouldn't I laugh Sean Penn out of the room in the wake of his Oscar for a portrayal of a sane hero committed to an asylum?
If you told me that there was a film from 1975 in which Brad Dourif, Jack Nicholson, and Christopher Lloyd play the Three Stooges opposite a deaf and dumb Indian as the straight man, I'd watch it immediately. If instead, you tried to sell me a movie my parents liked that addressed mental illness more generously than it had been treated by movies they'd seen in the past, I'd put it at the end of my queue and make sure a rainy day never caught me with a short list. It's fun to witness Jack mimic masturbation while trying to impress his insanity on observing psychiatrists, but the same could be said for anything he's been in, and a lot of the rest are better.
directed by Milos Forman
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix
When I'm not sure how I should feel about a film from the seventies, I imagine the same movie made forty years earlier under the direction of Frank Capra or Preston Sturges. Is the "common man" angle I like so much in You Can't Take it With You appealing to me only because of the movie's age? Is my affection for Sullivan's Travels a double standard in light of the superficial melodrama of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?
The thing is, if I went forward in time another fifteen years, wouldn't Dead Poets Society be the closest point of comparison? Or Forman's own Man on the Moon? And wouldn't I laugh Sean Penn out of the room in the wake of his Oscar for a portrayal of a sane hero committed to an asylum?
If you told me that there was a film from 1975 in which Brad Dourif, Jack Nicholson, and Christopher Lloyd play the Three Stooges opposite a deaf and dumb Indian as the straight man, I'd watch it immediately. If instead, you tried to sell me a movie my parents liked that addressed mental illness more generously than it had been treated by movies they'd seen in the past, I'd put it at the end of my queue and make sure a rainy day never caught me with a short list. It's fun to witness Jack mimic masturbation while trying to impress his insanity on observing psychiatrists, but the same could be said for anything he's been in, and a lot of the rest are better.
posted by NPK at 12:39 AM
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