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Thread: Stu Presents, Genre Deconstruction In Film: A Crash Course!

  1. #51
    Quote Quoting Skitch (view post)
    Spot on, I agree. I think it's why it (hur) blew up.

    I dont know if I'd call it a deconstruction, but there is also the mention of Vietnam, a common action movie theme at the time.

    Just like fuckin Saigon!
    I was in junior high, dickhead

    Do you have any idea how many direct to video gung ho Merica vietnam movies from 80s I've found since I started collecting VHS? Its crazy
    While there are more explicitly deconstructionist films I'll be tackling in this project (such as my next entry...) Die Hard isn't too far off either, due to the Rambo, Schwarzenegger, and Vietnam reference you just mentioned, in addition to all the other points I listed in my write-up. Plus, you have to consider the deconstructionist tendencies of McTiernan's work both before and after it, and, while Die Hard may not feel like an obvious deconstruction since it still functions as a serious example of the genre it's deconstructing, rather than say, a satire of it, I still feel it's a deconstruction nonetheless (plus, it's a good thing that it's not a parody anyway, if the results of The Last Action Hero are anything to go on). It's just one of those things that you feel instinctively, that you don't need the director to show up onscreen in order to confirm to you personally, you know? At any rate, a fun fact I found out about Rambo II wannabes is, James Cameron's original screenplay was floating around Hollywood for so long, they were ripping it off before it had even come out!: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss...lm)#Production
    Last edited by StuSmallz; 03-18-2021 at 04:47 AM.

  2. #52
    The Pan megladon8's Avatar
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    I loved reading your Die Hard write-ups, Stu.

    How do you think action movies today would have been different if they had ended up casting Arnie or Sly as John McClane? I think (and you do, too, based on your writing) that Willis as McClane changed action movies forever.

    Also, the fight between him and Karl remains one of my favorite fight scenes of all time. It still feels brutal, and like they're really beating the shit out of each other.
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  3. #53
    Quote Quoting megladon8 (view post)
    I loved reading your Die Hard write-ups, Stu.

    How do you think action movies today would have been different if they had ended up casting Arnie or Sly as John McClane? I think (and you do, too, based on your writing) that Willis as McClane changed action movies forever.

    Also, the fight between him and Karl remains one of my favorite fight scenes of all time. It still feels brutal, and like they're really beating the shit out of each other.
    Aw, thanks meg! As for your question, there's obviously no way for anyone to know exactly how the genre would've evolved with Schwarzenegger, Stallone or any other more "typical" 80's action star as McClane, but if I had to speculate myself, I'd say that the film probably wouldn't have been as good without Willis (because who can picture anyone else as McClane?), so we obviously would've gotten less "Die Hard on/in a ___" wannabes in the subsequent decades. Besides that, I think the market for everyman action heroes wouldn't have gotten as big in the 90's and beyond in a result, so we may not have seen the rise of actors like Keanu, Matt Damon, and Tom Hardy in becoming action stars as a result. Again, there's no way of knowing how things would've been different for the genre, but Die Hard is obviously one of the most influential Action movies of all time, so there's no denying that something would've changed without Willis in it, IMO.
    Last edited by StuSmallz; 03-19-2021 at 05:03 AM.

  4. #54
    Unforgiven (Eastwood, '92)



    Genre: Western

    Background: Generally popular from the early days of modern narrative film, the Classical Western tended to offer audiences a sanitized vision of the Old West, one that had a fairly black-&-white moral dichotomy between the hero and the "bad guys", as the central men of action fought with various outlaw elements or hordes of "savage Indians" (glossing over the genocide that was committed against them in the process), and where, despite the genre's reliance on using shootouts to settle the landscape's conflicts, there usually wasn't much moral reckoning with the justifiability of that violence on the part of the "good guys", even in films that built up to such reckonings for their entire runtimes (like The Searchers), and the bloodshed was still often portrayed as just a tragic necessity at the worst. Because of that, it seemed like a genre that was stuck in the past (partly because it literally was), which is why it needed the shot in the arm that the sub-genre of the Revisionist Western gave it, particularly during the 60's with the popularization of the Spaghetti Western, when West met East(wood), which resulted us a far grittier, more morally ambiguous vision of genre than Hollywood tended to present. This continued into the 70's, the decade in which the screenplay for the film in question here was written, before the aforementioned leading man was finally ready to make it, during something of a revival of the genre in the 90's, as one of the greatest icons of the Western returned to the genre one final time, not to send it a cinematic love letter, but to bury the myths of the genre once and for all.

    How Unforgiven Deconstructs It:

    By embracing moral ambiguity and the demythologization of the Old West as its central themes, since Unforgiven scrutinizes the kind of consistent violence that defined the Western as a genre; this makes its choice of leading man all the more perfect, since, although his roles in the Dollars trilogy were career-defining performances which came in films that were certainly darker than the typical traditional Western, Leone's movies still often portrayed its quick draw duels (a element that Unforgiven lacks entirely) as exciting, or even "fun" to watch, with no lingering emotional effects left on The Man With No Name in their aftermath.

    On the other hand, Unforgiven begins decades after that film, and most other Westerns, for that matter, would've ended, with the kind of protagonist most of them would've had as "the baddie" (mirrored by an antagonist who would've been the good guy in a traditional Western to boot), as Will Munny is no badass gunslinger, but a weary old man struggling to run his pig farm, one who nearly dies from a "mere" fever (instead of a bullet) at one point, who's forgotten how to shoot, and who expresses severe emotional torture, both by the memories of the late wife who tried (possibly in vain) to mend his ways, as well as by the tremendous spiritual toll that killing men, women, and children takes upon someone, making Munny feel like he could be an older version of Blondie, one who's grown tired of the killing that helped him prevail over his foes in the past. However, this doesn't mean he's left that violence behind him for good, as, despite his continual protests that he's not the way he used to be, he's still the one to spill the blood when both the older and younger generations of outlaws prove they aren't up to it, as it's Munny who pulls the trigger when his old partner loses the stomach for such bloodshed, as well as when the unjustifiably braggadocious "Schofield Kid" immediately loses the knack he claimed to have for killing as soon as he actually shoots a man for the first time.

    In this way, there are no real good or bad guys in the film, as the "villain" of the film, Little Bill, is a man of the law, one who tries to achieve a good end (preserving the peace of his town) through brutal means, and, coming in the year of the Rodney King riots, he transcended the film's historical setting in order to reflect contemporary outrage over modern police brutality (in more ways than one, since Hackman reportedly based his performance off of then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates). Unforgiven is also about as explicitly deconstructionist as anything else I'll cover in this project, as demonstrated through the sub-plot of English Bob, a gunslinger who builds his legend by feeding wildly inaccurate "eyewitness" accounts of his own exploits to W.W. Beauchamp, a writer of the type of cheap, sensationalistic dime novels that established the romanticized cultural image of the West in the first place. However, when Bill takes the two men into custody (after first unnecessarily beating Bob to an utter pulp, that is), he destroys those myths entirely, informing Beauchamp that Bob didn't shoot a fellow gunslinger (and his six henchmen, as a book portrays it) for "insulting the honor" of a beautiful woman, but as a petty, spur-of-the-moment revenge for the other man placing his reportedly massive manhood (which was the real reason for his nickname "Two Gun") in a French lady that Bob had an eye for, although Bill repeatedly emphasizes the point that he missed his first few shots because of how drunk at the time.

    And throughout the entirety of Unforgiven, it refuses to come to any sort of moral conclusion about its characters, retaining its ambiguity in that regard all the way to the end; was the prostitutes' vendetta against the cowboy justified at all, in light of the light punishment he recieved for his mutilation? Was there any validity in Bill's tactics, considering the relatively wild, rough landscape he was trying to tame? And what kind of a man was Munny; was he still the same bloodthirsty outlaw he seemed to be in his youth, or was he an old man genuinely trying (albeit momentarily failing) to move on from his violent ways? Like the bookending text says, there was nothing on Claudia's grave to explain to her mother why she had married "a known thief and murderer", just like there's nothing in Unforgiven to give us an answer about Munny, or anyone else in the film; that's what it's so great, and makes it feel like a "Western to end all Westerns", so to speak.

    And, even after obtaining his revenge at the end, there's little satisfaction to be had for Munny, as, while at least The Wild Bunch got to go out in one final, spectacular blaze of glory in their film, Munny is instead faced with the spiritual emptiness of such vengeance, going on to linger in life with a career in dry goods in San Francisco, a fate hardly benefitting a legend of the Old West, although the film itself has avoided such a mediocre fate, instead, winning a richly-deserved Oscar for Best Picture, becoming a cinematic legend in its own right, and one of the greatest examples of the very genre that it deconstructed, once and for all.
    Last edited by StuSmallz; 06-17-2023 at 05:23 AM.

  5. #55
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting StuSmallz (view post)
    Thanks, Skitch! I didn't realize how much DH deconstructed 80's Action movies until I really studied it, but, considering how good a job McTiernan and company did with the film otherwise (like smartly changing the politically-motivated terrorists from the book into "common thieves" in order to lighten the mood), I like to think that, once leading men like Schwarzenegger & Stallone were out of the running to play McClane, and Willis was in, they really leaned into the deconstructionist elements as a result, since his natural screen presence was so different from the typical "man of action" at the time, you know?
    This was really apparent to me after a recent rewatch of the franchise with my wife. If the first film came out today, it definitely wouldn't be highly praised and probably not a blip on anyone's radar. It's getting past the buddy cop era AND the indestructible one man army era. Throw some schmo in an action film and that's die hard. This is why number 4 and 5 are so bad. They creators totally lost sight of what made die hard, die hard.
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  6. #56
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting StuSmallz (view post)
    While there are more explicitly deconstructionist films I'll be tackling in this project (such as my next entry...)
    I was referring to my comment, not your write up.

  7. #57
    Quote Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
    This was really apparent to me after a recent rewatch of the franchise with my wife. If the first film came out today, it definitely wouldn't be highly praised and probably not a blip on anyone's radar. It's getting past the buddy cop era AND the indestructible one man army era. Throw some schmo in an action film and that's die hard. This is why number 4 and 5 are so bad. They creators totally lost sight of what made die hard, die hard.
    Oh yeah; over time, the Die Hard series really became increasingly "Flanderized", and more and more like the kind of excessive, ridiculously over-the-top Action movies that the original film was deconstructing in the first place, either being more generic sequels like Die Harder, more ridiculous like Vengeance, or both, as in the case of Live Free Or Die Hard. Plus, they lost a lot of the personality that the original had, to the point that, by the fourth film, it's become such a generic Action movie that the only thing that distinguishes itself as a Die Hard is McClane's presence in it (which didn't add much anyway), and by the time John's surviving a fall down a 15 story building with nary a scratch and fighting to stop the theft of nuclear weapons in Russia in A Good Day, it might as well be a fucking Bond movie.
    Quote Quoting Skitch (view post)
    I was referring to my comment, not your write up.
    Okay; while I have no idea personally of the filmmakers included the line about "Saigon" in the movie as an intentional jab at the obsession a lot of 80's Action-ers had with that conflict, I like to think that's the way they meant it, since it makes for such a good companion piece to Gruber mocking McClane with the comparison to "Rambo", you know?

  8. #58
    Got another two-parter for this one...

    Batman Returns (Burton, '92)



    Genre: Christmas movies

    Background: Becoming popular post-World War II, the Christmas film became a relatively small, though still fairly reliable Hollywood staple in the following decades, reflecting the "peace on Earth, good will towards men" spirit of the holiday, and generally functioning in a family-friendly style, seeking to warm people's hearts during the final few months of the calendar year (while also using it as an excuse to squeez some money out of moviegoers' pockets at the same time). And, while most of the truly iconic Christmas-related media of the 60's came in the form of various TV specials during that decade, the 1970's and (especially) the 80's saw a number of films across various genres use the holiday's setting as an ironic contrast to their more subversive content, whether they be Horror (Gremlins), Comedy (National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation), and Action (with the aforementioned Die Hard), as these films put a new, darker spin on the Christmas film, with Tim Burton's Batman Returns serving as a continuation (and maybe even the climax?) of that trend upon its release in the early 90's.

    How Batman Returns Deconstructs It: By both absolutely drenching itself in seasonal references and traditional Yuletide imagery, from the various Christmas trees, lights, and the omnipresent snow that covers Gotham City like a soft white blanket throughout, while at the same time finding ways to utterly turn those elements on their heads, and twist them into the darkest directions at every possible turn. I mean, the very first line in the film is literally "Merry Christmas", wished towards a husband & wife as they rush to chuck their disfigured monstrosity of an offspring (The Penguin) into a dark, dank sewer! It's an act that sets the tone perfectly for the ironic intersection of Christmas cheer and Burton-y darkness that the film will continue to operate at throughout, as gangs of killer clowns pop out of giant presents to terrorize ordinary citizens, a man is blackmailed by being "gifted" a stocking that has a former co-worker's severed hand stuffed inside, and Gotham's equivalent of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree gets lit when a woman gets pushed off a skyscraper (and to her death) onto the button that turns it on, in full view of an already demoralized public.

    Of course, even coming in the wake of the darker X-Mas films of the previous decade, many were still shocked by these juxtapositions of seasonal setting with the violent, even perverted content of Returns, the kind of content that definitely pushed the limits of the PG-13 rating at the time. Still, it's not really a surprise considering the man who directed Returns, since, similar to Shane Black, Tim Burton had obviously made a career motif out of making non-"traditional" Christmas films, whether they be Edward Scissorhands just prior to Returns, or The Nightmare Before Christmas just after (although contrary to popular belief, he only produced that one; give Henry Selick his credit, people!). Anyway, while the gothic auteur being granted full creative control after facing significant interference while making '89 (hello, Prince soundtrack!) resulted in an even darker effort here, you can't give all the credit (or blame, depending on who you ask) for Returns' nightmare-ish take on the Christmas film to just Burton alone, as its screenwriter, Daniel Waters, had already proven particularly apt at genre deconstruction with his screenplay for Heathers just a few years earlier, which absolutely savaged the 80's "Brat Pack" film, so it's no surprise to note his attachment to BR as a result.

    Anyway, Returns also deconstructs the Christmas film by being set during a season that's defined by togetherness, even though the film itself is very much driven by the loneliness of its main characters, whether it be The Penguin's vendetta against the "respectable" bourgeoisie of Gotham City, as a symbolic revenge against his own, upper-class parents for casting him out of their mansion all those Christmases ago, or the way that Bruce really can't function as a normal human being outside of his batty persona, or the doomed, star-crossed romance he tries (and fails) to cultivate with Selina Kyle, a fellow lonely, tortured soul who, like Bruce, deals with a life-shattering trauma by creating a costumed alter ego, a similarity that is both the reason why the two are so drawn to each other outside of those personas, but also why it ultimately isn't meant to be for them, due to the diametrically-opposed goals they have they're actually inhabiting those alter egos.
    Last edited by StuSmallz; 03-25-2021 at 04:51 AM.

  9. #59
    Batman Returns, Part Two

    This also contributes to the undercurrent of seasonal affective disorder running throughout Returns, an undercurrent that's made explicit when Bruce asks Selina if she has the "holiday blues" (a question she responds to with a jittery, unconvincing shake of her head), with the festive decorations, happy Christmas tunes, and cheerful masses of people masking the individuals within those crowds who are feeling anything but jolly. This is seen when the characters are on their own, like when Bruce is shown sitting all alone in his study, doing nothing but brooding, having basically shut down as a human being until the Batsignal shines through the window, and temporarily gives him a reason to come to life, or when Selina returns to her pathetic pink apartment, which holds nothing but a single pet cat (one that doesn't even live there full-time, apparently), a non-existent husband she verbally longs for, and answering machine messages from her mother nagging her to come home for Christmas instead of languishing in Gotham as a "lowly secretary", an off-screen boyfriend who breaks up with her via phone, and a preemptive reminder from herself that she has to trudge all the way back through the snow because she forgot something back at the office, during the last season where anyone wants to work overtime.

    It's a movie that begins with Bruce on his own, his dual identity having driven Vickie Vale away at some point after '89, and ends with two main characters dead, one of them falling victim to his own lust for revenge, with the other being killed by someone else's desire for vengeance, one that she embraced after cruely rejecting the aforementioned Bruce, leaving him in the same exact place he was at the start; all alone, with his dream of living "happily ever after" with the love of his life having been abruptly snatched from him after it briefly (but oh so tantilizingly) held such futile hope for him. In this way, Returns goes noticeably farther than something like DIe Hard in subverting our traditional expections of a Christmas movie, as, for all its carnage, at least McTiernan's film still has a happy ending once it's over.

    Besides that, the religious connotations of the Penguin's sub-plot must also be noted, with his Moses-style origin story, unveiling to public prominence a conspicuous "thirty three years later" (just like, let's say, a certain Biblical figure), and his final scheme of indiscriminately slaughtering all of the first born sons of Gotham drawing a further connection to the nominally Christian holiday the film features, the one that's become increasingly hijacked by a grotesque capitalism that cynically exploits the season for maximum profit, the kind that the film intently focuses on instead of just brushing by. This leads into the other big villain of the film, the Trump-ish real estate mogul Max Schreck, a man who's literally described as a robber baron at one point, as a man who represents that force of greed, as he seeks to literally steal power from Gotham with his fradulent "power plant", to cause utter chaos in the streets to further his own political goals, and is repeatedly shown to be willing to murder (or at least attempt to, as witnessed in one rather noteworthy example) anyone who could possibly get in his way, even if that person is his own late wife, as implied in a particularly chilling line at one point.

    He's the avatar of the kind of capitalism that seeks to profit as much as possible off of a holiday that was inititally created to celebrate the birth of a man who would go on to rail against such greed at multiple times in his life, like Catwoman when she destroys a department store in a sort of "overturning the money changing tables" moment. It's the same system that would later lead to stores promoting the disgusting, occasionally even deadly Black Friday shopping sprees of the 21st century, with a riot just outside of Schreck's titular department store in the film sort of accidentally foreshadowing such feeding frenzies, with the broad grin of the Cheshire Cat-like mascot on the windows serving to mask the greed of the man behind it in a manner Micky Mouse himself would be proud of.

    As a result, it's not hard to imagine these anti-capitalist overtones, the film's aggressively anti-mainstream sensibilities, and overall glum take on the holiday resulting in the film making less money at the box office than its predecessor. Turns out, if you make a Christmas movie that ends up making people feel bad, they won't want to see it that much; who know? But regardless of its reduced success, and the somewhat divisive response in inspired, but more compelling effort than its predecessor, one that's refreshing in its admission that Christmastime isn't always a happy time for everyone, especially not if you're a grown man dressed up like a bat.
    Last edited by StuSmallz; 03-26-2021 at 07:46 AM.

  10. #60
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    Hmm. I never thought about it in that manner. Good points.

  11. #61
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    There's something about the cold and slick feel off both those films that stayed with me forever. I love snowy dark cold films. The thing, 30 days of night, the grey, the colony, hateful eight.
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  12. #62
    Quote Quoting Skitch (view post)
    Hmm. I never thought about it in that manner. Good points.
    Thanks! And yeah, part of the fun of this project is about more than just discussing the more obvious examples of genre deconstruction (although they still provide plenty of content as well), but digging a lil' bit deeper to discover the ones that might have flown under the rader over the years, you know?
    Quote Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
    There's something about the cold and slick feel off both those films that stayed with me forever. I love snowy dark cold films. The thing, 30 days of night, the grey, the colony, hateful eight.
    I assume by both films, you mean '89 & Returns? Because I'm actually not a big fan of '89, but I've always enjoyed BR to a certain extent, partially due to that cold, wintery vibe you mention in it. I mean, the scene where the camera's zooming through the snowy, abandoned zoo while this tune plays is just pure, vintage Burton:


  13. #63

    Cabaret (Fosse, '72)



    Deconstructed Genre: Musical


    Historical Background: The Musical was born as a natural way to demonstrate the defining technological development in cinema of the early 20th century, that being the introduction of sound (obviously), before helping to showcase the rise of color film later, which is a bit ironic since, as the medium grew closer to reality on a sensory level, the fundamental nature of Musicals meant that they often functioned as an escape from that reality in one way or another, offering audiences brief respites from the back-to-back hardships of The Great Depression and World War II, before joining forces with the Historical Epic, another spectacle-heavy genre, to become one of the most dominant styles of film throughout most of the 50's and 60's. However, by the end of the latter decade, the good ol' days of the genre were coming to an end, as a string of financial failures such as Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, and Hello Dolly! combined with the cinematic revolution of the New Hollywood movement to make the genre seem hopelessly dated, and it seemed as though the Musical was on its way to the grave, not only in the traditional style that Hollywood was known for, but in any other way, shape, or form for that matter.

    How Cabaret Deconstructed It: However, through the direction of Bob Fosse (because who better to deconstruct a genre than someone who helped define it in the first place?) Cabaret helped adapt the genre to the more cynical, disillusioned spirit of American film in the 70's, primarily by taking the defining trait of the Musical (that being the music, of course), and forgoing the accompaniment of any grand, invisible orchestras, instead, choosing to go with an entirely diegetic score, provided by the comparatively small, meager band of the KitKat Club, which in turn provides an on-screen justification for the song-and-dance numbers, instead of having its characters interrupting their spoken dialogue to randomly break out into pre-written tunes, which, while not inherently a negative trait of Musicals, still required a certain suspension of disbelief on our part, a suspension that Cabaret forgoes. Besides that distinction, while previous Musicals often displayed fairly elaborate scenery as a way of showcasing the greater possibilities of film when compared to the genre's stage roots, every single musical number in Cabaret (with the exception of the notorious "Tomorrow Belongs To Me") takes place on an actual stage, no color-drenched sets or on-location shoots on majestic hilltops in sight, with many of the scenes outside the Club taking place in humble, dingy apartments, adding a layer of urban grit, and further helping to keep the film as close to real life as possible

    Finally, Cabaret distinguishes itself from previous Musicals through its overall tone, which contrasts the generally upbeat, feel-good spirit that characterized the genre in favor of a colder, harsher reality, as the central romance ultimately ends in heartbreak, and the film takes advantage of the abolishment of the Hays Code to include more mature content, including a bisexual protagonist, an abortion featured as a significant plot point, and an overall brutally honest look at the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Germany during the early 30's (including a scene where a Jewish woman's dog is killed and dumped on her doorstep by a bunch of goons). And, while Michael York is fortunate enough to leave Germany before the "stuff" really hits the fan, instead of focusing on his escape in order to strike a triumphant note at the end (as The Sound Of Music did with the von Trapp family less than a decade prior), Cabaret instead concludes with a mirror-distorted shot of the KitKat Club's audience being dominated by swastika-wearing Nazi punks, which serves as a cold splash of water on us as viewers, and a reminder that things are about to get much, MUCH worse for the people left behind.

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