The long setup could definitely have been trimmed down, I don't buy at all that this character would need to be told about the existence of Green Card scams about a half hour in. This is definitely a Brackett/Wilder script though, just mean enough to make you feel smart, so you don't feel like a total dope when it turns out it was Nice all along. Boyer very good in the role of "Lubitsch protagonist in a world where consequences…
The Hills Have Eyes for that part of the 90s where every single movie had to be about how a middle-aged guy would actually do much better than you'd think in this situation. They made one of these for kidnappers, aliens, tornadoes, asteroids, and kidnappers while you are The President, so it makes sense that they also made one where the situation is hill people who own several cars. Final beat is great.
If this is about actual historical Nazism, it’s a failure because of its insistence on projecting the stock euro arthouse depiction of emotionless bourgeoisie onto the Holocaust; bureaucracy and indifference were essential parts of the evil of the Nazis, but so were active dehumanization and gigantic hate rallies where everyone was on meth. The intimations of the perpetrators’ quiet guilt and the hushed tones of their rare overtly hateful words ring false.
If this is instead a commentary on the…
For years now, the main mode of online film discourse has been about whether or not various blockbusters are subtextually woke (good) or subtextually unwoke (bad), so it's funny and refreshing that the first deliberately woke studio product takes pains to quote "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" multiple times. Moving the skeleton of Vineland to the present day demystifies the cliche of the sixties as a magical time where The One Revolution *almost* happened in favor of a more…
