Siskel and Ebert had a good week this time, three of the best films of 1990. Cyrano De Bergerac in particular is a goddamn classic French masterpiece. Loved Depardieu in it! My favourite French film ever.
To be honest I was about 8 or 9 years old when I saw the lethal weapon movies. Lol. Kids were probably seeing these back then but mostly from home video.
@@ricardocantoral7672 It's a little known fact that Kathy Bates and James Caan were in Dick Tracy. When they did that Stephen King film. Even Kathy Bates was in Men Don't Leave and White Palace.
Were people really taking children to see "Lethal Weapon 2?" I was a child at this time, and I never saw anything like that until I was considerably older.
I saw Alien when I was about 8 or 9 on VHS. Also Robocop, and all the old Bond films. I can tell you that I was seriously traumatized from a few of those films. Surprisingly enough, adult themes do tend to traumatize me at the time, I remember being especially scared to see anything related to dystopian future or crime violence/gore. However, I'd say that the worst offenders in terms of actually desensitizing children of violence are those shoddy crime TV dramas, like Hunter and A-team in the 80s. I mean those actually made me feel that cops being ultra violent was just routine and even attractive.
Where do they get off at 13:00 ? Robocop was a hard R and so was the sequel, Lethal weapon is R, Total Recall is R. None of those movies were marketed to kids except Robocop, and that was only after the franchise had been around for 6 years and they made the 3rd movie PG-13 and released a cartoon series.
They're right about Wilkes' sweetness and vulnerability. She watches game shows with her pet pig, and said she wanted to drink *Don Perrig Non* with him before she kills them both. Oh yeah, that last part wasn't so sweet. These guys NAILED that description over the matter of 3 minutes. Her line of intelligence is the best part. The way she reacted to his plot hole about bringing Misery back was priceless. This movie also didn't waste a minute; the car crash happened basically during the opening credits. Great, great movie. Better reviews here.
It's funny looking at old Siskel and Ebert and seeing them continually missing the point about why children are attracted to _dark_ entertainments. I think they must have had very sheltered, suburban, as-advertised, typical post-WWII American childhoods. (You'd more or less have to to be entertained by Lassie!) They don't seem to understand that urban children of the 1980s weren't attracted to dark dystopias. Rather these dark worlds are a good proxy for how scary the real world feels, when you're small, powerless, and allowed to understand next to nothing about adult behaviour. And children don't glorify violence for its own sake. Rather the violent heroes are a power-fantasy that someday it might be possible to have control and agency over all that scariness. Maybe one might even be able to feel safe in the big, bad world - if only one could train as a ninja, or get bitten by a radioactive spider. God knows, we needed something quicker than waiting to grow up! Being a child of the generation they're referring to, I'm particularly irritated by their selections of _quality_ childrens' entertainment - _Crusoe_ and _The Bear._ (Not to mention _The Black Stallion._ ) While I'm sure there were some kids who loved them, I was bored senseless by stories about the natural world, and especially about characters deprived of human civilization. What did wild animals have to do with me? They weren't cute - they were imponderable and terrifying. They'd probably maul me or eat me on sight. Being in nature, you can't be important to your world, or achieve honour and recognition. You're just alone for an eternity in the merciless elements and unchanging scenery. No stories are possible, except for the hunter and the hunted. You'll wait around forever in a cold and empty hellscape for something to happen. And when it does, it'll likely mean your death by predation. Now that's what I call dark!
The only thing I didn't like about this otherwise magnificent production of CYRANO DE BERGERAC is that Cyrano -- in this version -- initially spares the life of the swordsman who insults him in Act 1, despite the fact that throughout the entire swordfight he ends each refrain with the vow to kill him when he reaches the end of his improvised ballade. It's shown here that he instead SPARES the guy initially, and only ends up killing him when the sore loser attempts to stab him from behind, with Cyrano rather reluctantly skewering him. This totally misses a crucial aspect of Cyrano's personality. He had to grow up in a harsh world where he would constantly be the butt of 'big nose' jokes unless he became ruthless in defense of his own honor. In Rostand's play, Cyrano doesn't take any shit from ANYBODY -- and when the haughty jerk, a protégé of De Guiche, DARES to attempt to insult him, Cyrano -- confident in his own abilities as a swordsman -- coldly yet enthusiastically declares that he WILL kill the smug creep on the last line of the ballade he composes as they fight. Why is Cyrano as ruthless as he is prideful? Because he knows that a guy like the one he kills -- in a fair duel -- is handsome enough to be successful with the ladies . . . whereas Cyrano can't hardly imagine any woman -- let alone Roxane, whom he has always secretly loved -- being able to love him, with his enormous nose. It is his NOSE that makes him unlovable (so he thinks), so is it any wonder that he wouldn't shed a single tear for the fools who might dare to make fun of his deformity? He prevents Montfleury from performing on stage because he has seen that wretched actor DARE to blow kisses towards Roxane -- the one woman Cyrano years to be his love. Cyrano threatens to MURDER the actor if he doesn't leave the stage on the count of Three, for f's sake! Cyrano's frustrated passions have spurred him on to be dangerous to ANY man who dares to mock him for his huge nose. Gerard Depardieu does an otherwise great job in the role, but the way that ballade/duel ends isn't true to the original play, or to the true ruthlessness of the man. The ONLY reason Cyrano DOESN'T slaughter Christian de Neuvilette after HE dares to make nose-jokes is because he had given his word to Roxane that he would PROTECT the man -- never expecting, of course, that his first encounter with Christian would be accompanied with witty jokes about his nose as he regales his fellow musketeers with the tale of his one-against-a-hundred adventure the night before. I suspect that the director and/or producers didn't think a modern audience would approve of a 17th Century swordsman so ruthlessly KILLING a man in a duel the way the play portrays it, so they had Cyrano spare him -- at least initially -- only to be forced in an act of desperate self-defense to skewer him, as if such an outcome would make audiences like Cyrano more this way. This was a mistake, I feel. But, other than that one quibble, I did love the film nonetheless.
Siskel and Ebert forgot what it was like to be kids. And they've forgotten this simple fact: Kids have always watched movies with adult themes. Kids have always watched movies with sex and violence. It's just a question of how much movies have been willing to show, how much graphic content the moviegoing public has gotten used to seeing (and how much the moviegoing public has _demanded_ seeing: their dollars have dictated content). The movies have always had just as much sex and violence as they did in the '80s and '90s....it's just that in the old days it was not explicitly shown on screen. In those old Westerns and cops-and-robbers movies, you knew the villain (or the villain's victims) had been shot, stabbed, strangled, or whatever, but they did not show the blood. They did not show someone getting his hand graphically blown off like in _RoboCop,_ but they did show a shot being fired and a body falling. So kids knew somebody had died, and smart kids knew what that meant. And here's another thing: Are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles really all that different from, say, Bugs Bunny? They're both anthropomorphized animals, after all. The only difference is, one's animated and one's live-action. But they're both what I'd call "punks." And what I mean by that is, they're both anti-establishment. They don't fit in to ordinary society. They're not a part of the system, maaaaaan! When Bugs Bunny outwits and beats Yosemite Sam or Elmer Fudd, is it really that different than the TMNT outwitting and prevailing over Shredder? (Shredder doesn't die, mind you, he just gets put out of commission for a while.) For that matter, are the TMNT and Splinter appreciably different from the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion? They're all people in colorful and imaginative costumes and makeup FX, aren't they? I feel like I'm getting close to what I want to say, but I haven't really said it (I'm a little drunk right now). I feel like what I wan't to say is: Children's entertainment did not change from when these guys were children. _These guys_ changed from when _they_ were children. And there you have it.
Very good post. And I would like to add a few more. How is TMNT any different than Star Wars, a film series that they actually like? And more important, did Ebert actually forget that children's books have violent content in them as well? I mean, look at The Brother's Grimm, or L Frank Baum's Oz books. Or did he read any of those? This segment makes no fucking sense.
@@notcardlinsytaccount1355 I'm sure _you_ didn't understand things when you were a child, but I was one of the smart kids. So thanks for your little opinion there and goodbye.
I like these guys but we have major priviledge on parade regarding their opinions on "children" films. Many of which were clearly not children's films.
Speaking as a father, who has raised two boys who were born in 2001 and 2003, I payed a lot more attention to what my boys watched when they were young. I certainly never allowed them to watch films like RoboCop or Lethal Weapon. They watched the animated films and programs like most other kids and it wasn't until they were older, certainly over 10 before they could watch anything that I considered more adult. It is my view that in order for kids to grow up and develop normally, they need to feel 100% secure and safe at home. We all have to deal with the worries of life and the world as we grow up, so why on Earth would anyone want to 'hurry up' and expose their young children to those unnatural stresses at that age??? It makes no sense to me and the fact my two sons have both grown into fine young men with great senses of humor and good, kind hearts, is all the evidence I need that I did it the right way.
Oh these guys. No one was taking kids to see rated R movies. Wow! So many times these guys, who we all liked, just laid big farts. A dumb comparison with the examples they used. I raised my family and I’m now retired. This was not a reality for my family or any family I knew. ☮️
He's a good director. His best films he directed are both Adams’s Family films, Get Shorty, Men in Black 1 & 3 in addition to his great cinematography.
