Subj: It's both satire and straight-faced at the same time ...Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 11:17:31 pm EST (Viewed 407 times)
| Reply Subj: Heh... I agree with VV's assessment of the flick...
Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 10:25:35 pm EST (Viewed 4 times) |
... To the point that Al Pacino, who has since become something of a self-parody himself, has said that, while the Godfather films were the best movies he was in, Scarface was, in his opinion, the most fun movie he was in.
> What's especially fun to me in watching "Scarface" is trying to guess how much of the bad taste on display was intentional as a comment on the main character, and how much was just an echo of the excesses that drip from every frame of that motion picture. It being a product of the 80's makes it very hard to tell.
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You could say the same of a lot of the '80s aesthetic, including Michael Mann's Miami Vice, which was a genuinely groundbreaking crime drama at the time, but which can't help but come across almost as a commentary upon itself nowadays. To me, what's telling about Scarface is that Oliver Stone wrote it while he himself was deep in the throes of a cocaine addiction, so in a similar sense, he was taking aim at a scene that he himself was very much a part of.
> Some fun reflections from the new face of villainy! You did a nice job of opening the door to a possible Vixen double-cross by having her work so hard to sell Doorman's place on the Purveyors... It does lessen the threat of that ticking time-bomb, however, if CSFB--the only person around who should naturally trust Jay--simply doesn't. But seeing as that bomb is about to go off anyway, I'll just see what happens.
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Actually, my idea is that Velcro Vixen is speaking for the rest of the team when she tells CrazySugarFreakBoy! that she sees Doorman as simply being too harmless to be a traitor. After all, to them, Jay is just the latest in a series of former loyalists to the Moderator, including Dream himself, to switch sides. Besides, within this story, it gives Vicki one issue about which to be wrong (believing Jay can be trusted) to balance out another issue about which she's right (believing Dream isn't really a supervillain).
More importantly, it illustrates what the loss of his memories has done to Dream, since if he saw himself as a supervillain, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any reasons why he'd feel especially friendly toward such a strait-laced superhero. Dream is an incredibly memory-driven superhero - think of all the comics, cartoons, sci-fi, fantasy, pop culture and other media that he consumes, and how many of his decisions are determined by his readings of the same - whose other key source of strength is his "family," both biological and chosen, of loved ones. Take away both his memories and his family, and Dream becomes someone who's wrong for the right reasons (incorrectly assuming he's a supervillain because he correctly recognizes how opposed his chaotic nature is to law and order) and right for the wrong reasons (correctly considering Jay a risk because he incorrectly falls for Jay's pure-hearted facade).
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