The Deer Hunter

No thread?

this seems like the type of lauded/revisited and castigated/ambiguous/racist movie that we could talk about

saw it again over the weekend

i) wtf is mike doing in the russian roulette den first time round?

ii) he couldnt just have looked nick up in the hospital?

iii) idk, whatever else you think yourself

scenes of drunkenness otm

UK Region 2 DVD contains an exclusive commentary track by Cimino where he lays into producer Michael Deeley, who is also slagged off by Christopher Lee on the commentary track for The Wicker Man

fwiw

is that admissible in 6 degrees of kevin bacon

The scene where they sing the Frankie Valli song is maybe my favourite scene about getting drunk ever. It builds beautifully, and (from memory) ends with a perfect group shot when they get to the first "I love you, baby..."

This is one of my Top 10 films of all time.

re (i), do you mean the Russian roulette den in the war zone or the one in Saigon? And what don't you get about Mike in it?

with the relative upsurge of Cimino's rep in recent years, I think this is now considered one of his 2-3 worst films.

I agree the wedding opening is best; I liked it better when it was The Godfather.

(xpost) Is that true? I can maybe see liking Heaven's Gate better--I certainly don't, but I can see where someone might--and I've never seen Thunderbolt & Lightfoot. But Year of the Dragon's just entertaining junk (and maybe even cruder on race), and Desperate Hours is a cipher. I didn't realize anything else he'd done had any standing at all.

Always thought the this-is-this back and forth would be right at home in a Scorsese film.

I don't think it'll embed, but here's the Frankie Vallie scene.

http://vimeo.com/33836721

The Deer hunter and Heaven's Gate are the only Cimino films that are regarded, at all?

Anagram- in the war zone!

Thunderbolt, Dragon both have fans

He's ramping up the game to get more bullets in the gun so that he can shoot more of the soldiers

I kind of hate this movie

Its 'hilarious', that's for sure.

it's ponderousness feels ultimately unjustified

one of RoboStreep's best performances. She's so fresh.

sorry, i meant after they've escaped, walken is attracted to the shack where the game is going on for money, the french guy talks him into possibly doing it, and all a sudden deniro comes out of the crowd

whats deniro doing in there?!

De Niro went back there with the specific intent of finding Walken; he figured he might find him in one of these games.

Gotta disagree that there's any hint of or pointer to that tbh.

Second time round yeah he knows what he's lookin for alright

It's been a few years since I last watched it. I thought De Niro only went back the one time--does he go back twice?

Nah he's there the first time and goes back the once

Its his being there that struck me as a 'heeeyyy wait' moment this time

It's a small point, but if De Niro only goes back once, I disagree with half of what you say. I don't question him being in that room; just checked an online transcript, and when De Niro visits Savage in the hospital, and finds out about all the money he's been getting from Saigon, he says "It's Nicky, Steve"--he figures out immediately that it's Walken who's been sending the money, realizes how he's been getting the money, and (without actually saying so) decides to go back and look for him.

But the odds of De Niro actually finding Walken, yeah, a little too convenient...the roulette games are a fictional construct anyway, so it's impossible to even calculate the odds.

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/deer-hunter-script-transcript-cimino.html

on a related note, the John Cazale docu is brilliant if you haven't seen it/heard about it.

wait, no one answered the question about Mike being in the roulette den the FIRST time, when Nicky wandered into it. We hadn't seen Mike in a bit and there he was in the crowd.

bump

hey

watched it again tonight and i guess DeNiro just stuck around in Vietnam, and that him and Walken got separated at some point before Walken ended up in the VA hospital.

i love the way this movie plays with time and incredibly abrupt tonal shifts (going straight from piano in the bar to helicopters flamethrowers being the most obvious example). one of the people i was watching it with had to leave when that North Vietnamese soldier threw the grenade in the bunker full of innocent people. An hour in, these huge jumps in time keep happening - suddenly they're POWs, suddenly Walken is in the hospital, suddenly DeNiro is back, etc...

Saw it the other day thanks to a one-off screening as part of Alamo's 1979 series. For finally seeing the one Cazale performance I hadn't, and on a big screen, yeah, worth it. (The one Cazale I've now not seen on a big screen is Dog Day Afternoon -- one day hopefully.) Good moments and stretches throughout, won't argue, but the whole construct falls apart more and more the film continues; learning after that the whole Russian roulette idea was a separate script about Vegas entirely that was then adapted into a Vietnam framing explained a lot. But also -- especially almost fifty years on, having lived and known so many folks from Vietnam or of Vietnamese background -- the whole sense of 'life is cheap to them over there' that results really makes a poisonous end result, it's kinda unwatchable as a result by the end. At no point did I buy this whole game framing as something realistic when the movie is putatively aiming for realism otherwise.

The Vietnam Era was a prolonged nightmarish tragedy. The 'Vietnam Movie' Era was just annoying, facile and bad.

I remember being really disappointed with it. I grew up in the 1980s, when the Vietnam War was way cool. There were a tonne of documentaries about it on the television and of course "19" was the bee's knees back then. The Vietnam fad was particularly odd in the UK, because we didn't participate. Harold Wilson just didn't have Tony Blair's lust for power. He didn't have Blair's desire to carve his name in the history books. He did not want to stand next to Lyndon Johnson while pointing at something in the middle distance. He was a weak man, a small man. Not a great man.

"But he built motorways and expanded the NHS" - maybe so, but did he fire an explosive arrow at a Viet Cong guerrilla, causing him to explode? No, he did not. Did he storm Hue with bare arms and a machine gun, shouting GET SOME? No, he did not. Harold Wilson did none of those things. Did he lead a flight of helicopter gunships against a Viet Cong stronghold? No. He was a weak man. His prostate did not crave the throb of battle.

I was disappointed with The Deer Hunter because it was neither fish nor fowl. For me the Vietnam War has always been a fantasia of helicopters firing rockets, men with bare arms firing machine guns, Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Charlie's in the red" etc. There was a dearth of awesome war spectacle in the 1980s, so Vietnam films took up the slack even though they weren't supposed to be exciting war films. But they were. And then Saving Private Ryan and the Second World War revival came along. The Deer Hunter has elements of spectacle but feels as if Cimino was too self-conscious to make a battle action film. The Russian roulette sequences fell out of place because that kind of thing never really "stuck" as part of the mythology of the war, and shorn of any kind of historical basis the prison sequences just feel like filler.

Furthermore I've grown to associate Christopher Walken with crazed lunacy, so witnessing his character succumb to PTSD doesn't have any dramatic power for me, because I automatically expect him to be weird. The Shining had a similar problem, and admittedly that's not really the film's fault, but imagine if that role had been cast with someone like Richard Dreyfuss instead. The other problem is that the characters come across as authentic, but also dull and uninteresting, which is unfortunate because I found it hard to care about them - not because their pain wasn't real but because I just didn't care about them. Instead of seeing bright young sparks cut down in their prime it was like watching a bunch of morose factory workers being transformed into slightly more morose factory workers.

Another issue is that at least from a UK perspective the "generation of kids goes to war, comes back prematurely aged" was by the late 1970s a cliche of First World drama, so the thought of a bunch of comfortably well-off US factory workers doing a short tour of Vietnam and coming back to more or less the same country feels weak in comparison. If they had come back disabled, to a bankrupt wreck of a country that refused to give them the vote, that discharged them onto the street with a single poor-quality demob suit, I might have felt something for De Niro and co. But no.

I had completely forgotten that Meryl Streep was in it. I understand that she insisted the producers keep John Cazale, even though he was at that point uninsurable, which is nice of her. De Niro's jacket was fantastic. It's called a Sierra Designs 60/40 Mountain Parka and Carl Sagan wore it in Cosmos. If you wear it you can go to Mars. The best engine is in the BMW 750IL.

Creedence Clearwater Revival

Curious how many soldiers at the time preferred them or the Doors to Frankie Valli.

The "Cavatina" does a lot of emotional heavy lifting in this film, the images of the film in my memory play on my feelings about the music rather than the dramatic situation.