Movies that Capture Turnings Well

[JasonBlack]

What movies accurately capture the dynamics of their respective turnings?

[JasonBlack]

Ex: I just finished watching The Iron Giant for the first time, come to find out it took place in the last 1T (1957). It's likely the director, Brad Bird (boomer) pulled from his own childhood and interactions with other generations
- The main character Hoggarth is a boomer: imaginative, passionate, optimistic and interested in trying to get people to see the world in new ways.
- His mom and the main love interest are sensible Silent Gen-ers
- agent Kent Mansley and the rest of the military are stereotypical law-and-order GIs.

[pbrower2a]

I'll start with Casablanca. It gets the most dangerous time of a 4T perfectly. To be sure, it is my favorite movie for its script (if Shakespeare had been a screenwriter, then this is what he would have written). The world has divided between two polarized camps of mutual hostility and exclusion and in literal war. The one definitive participant that can change everything (the United States of America) might not yet be at war, but anyone with any brains knows that such is inevitable. The fascists are arrogant about recent victories, and even getting certain about their role as some Wave of the Future. Anyone in the way in Greater Hitlerland is in immediate peril of death and must sell out to survive if "given" the chance at the cost of freedom and conscience if granted the dubious privilege of selling out.

OK, just watch the movie.

[sbarrera]

The High - Rebel Without A Cause

The Awakening - Animal House

The Unraveling - The Big Lebowski

[Eric the Green]

In a negative way I guess, Steve LOL

[sbarrera]

(10-12-2022, 01:42 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: In a negative way I guess, Steve LOL

What are their "positive" mirror movies?

[Eric the Green]

(10-12-2022, 03:01 PM)sbarrera Wrote:

(10-12-2022, 01:42 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: In a negative way I guess, Steve LOL

What are their "positive" mirror movies?

You are the expert; I'm a novice. You tell me!

I could give it an inadequate try.

4T The Wizard of Oz
1T any Doris Day movie, such as Please Don't Eat the Daisies
2T The Graduate
3T Being John Malkovich
"In retrospect, it seems the perfect film for the very dawn of the Internet age when other people’s lives would become our own like never before"
https://www.timeout.com/film/the-50-best-90s-movies

[pbrower2a]

Some others:

3T Sunrise, The Jazz Singer, Metropolis (1927)... Home Alone, Spirited Away
4T It Happened One Night, Angels with Dirty Faces, Modern Times, Snow White, The Great Dictator, Mrs. Miniver, really any WWII movie from the time in the UK or the USA. Lincoln. Star Wars IV/V/VI Done later: The Sting, The Sound of Music, Patton
1T Giant. How to Get Ahead in Business Without Really Trying Done later: Back to the Future From the past: The Searchers.
2T Fiddler on the Roof (suggesting the previous 2T in another country). Ragtime.

Transitions:

4T/1T Drums Across the Mohawk, Gone with the Wind, It's a Wonderful Life. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
1T/2T American Graffiti, The Right Stuff, Cheaper by the Dozen.
3T/4T 1776, Some Like it Hot, Star Wars III, Cabaret

[pbrower2a]

Despite plenty of comedy and catchy tunes that usually mark a successful upbeat comedy (and it was successful), I found How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying completely unwatchable as America went into the neoliberal era. Millions of Americans were consigned to economic failure despite crack-the-whip management as nearly all opportunity for advancement for anyone not born into the privileged classes disappeared. 

One of the perquisites the large number of crappy, servile jobs that replaced manufacturing and administration was that one show the big, bright "Happy to Serve You" smile despite hating one's overall life of poverty. Services were incredibly cheap for those who still held good jobs, but those who held those crappy, servile jobs (often two of them to survive) paid the great human price. Many current adults are approaching retirement age having spent their entire adult lives in that time are destitute because they never experienced anything other than jobs whose pay was a travesty.

[JasonBlack]

1T: Grease*
2T: Sing Street
3T: Pulp Fiction
4T: Lord of the Rings**

*specifically, coming-of-age idealists just starting to shake things up near the end of the 1T. I might suggest this for pbrower2a's turning transition list
**one of the reasons I like Lord of the Rings is that it has heroic examples of all the archetypes: Idealist Gandalf, Reactive Gimli, Civic Aragorn, Adaptive Hobbits (Aragorn is probably cusp Civic/Reactive. he has many traits of both)

[Eric the Green]

I was thinking the movie representing a turning should be a movie from that turning, and a product of its times; whether right or wrong I don't know but that's what I think.

Sing Street is a 2016 musical, not from the 2T, and its story takes place in the 1980s, not in the real 2T. Grease is a late 2T film about the disco scene, which is also 2T, although not the real 2T. It represented nostalgia for the 1950s but that was a 1970s phenomenon. The site I saw listed Pulp Fiction as the best film of the 3T (or at least the 1990s), but does it represent the life and times of the 3T?

American Graffiti is more like what Jason might attribute to Grease; a 3T movie appealing to 1950s nostalgia.

[pbrower2a]

Biopics usually have someone reaching adulthood in a time other than that of birth. Counting out only infancy, one biopic stands out for expressing only one turning: The Diary of Anne Frank. She lived only in a 4T. Anne Frank of course never quite achieved adulthood.

Mobsters are freaks, so I could not quite place Goodfellas. It follows a clique of organized criminals from the 1950's to the 1980's. It says little about normal life -- the sort that does its job, pressures its kids to get ahead by getting a solid education, and taking on adult responsibilities. Henry Hill and his lot may reach chronological adulthood but never truly come of age ... well, mobsters never really grow up. They steal, they deal drugs, they loot, and they kill. Occasionally they get caught and do time, but otherwise they never get beyond the teen male-bonding phase of life They are out only for themselves, and most businesses insist upon subordination that nearly obliterates self. If employment isn't bad enough, slumlords ensure that one has practically no room for consumerism in America, at least for the last forty years. Once evangelical-fundamentalist religion became the norm for the bulk of American Protestants, this religion offered consumerism as an economic ideal based upon complete subordination to the economic structure that American elites wanted: suffering with the pretense of joy despite real and pointless deprivation. Many of Generation X worked two near-full-time jobs just to survive, and as one can expect such ultimately is not good for productivity. People simply worked longer for less.

Remember: as early as the 1930's the consensus was that people needed only forty hours, at least in industrial work, to meet the basic human needs of the time. About fifty years later Since then workers have found that the unbridled greed of shareholders, slumlords, and executives is the only permissible objective in life.

Creating an attractive movie about the gritty realism about X life in which some ill-paid worker whose working life begins at age 20 or so in the Awakening-Unraveling transition and ends in a 4T in a destitute retirement before the current 4T is resolved (or is resolved too late to do that wretch any good) with no that does not become an unrelieved sob-fest that few audiences want to see. The celebrity circus was at least entertaining, but the celebrities are something of an elite that can transcend the dictates that apply to sweatshop workers. The sweatshops of the neoliberal era went from manufacturing places to restaurants and stores, and workers had to dress up to work in many such places, only to live down to crowding, food insecurity, and numbing boredom off the job. Meanwhile the elites live like sultans.

If you think that this language borders on Marxism, then in a way you are right: the economic elites of America are mostly mirror-age Marxists, the sorts of people who endorse the social and political nastiness that full-blown Marxists condemn. These are the people who want pre-revolutionary conditions of economics and pervasive fear of the elites to be maintained through the ages, to be enforced if necessary through state terror -- and fascism often does the trick before it implodes in apocalyptic wars that the fascists seek because war is highly profitable. Mirror-image Marxism and fascism often merge because they share cruelty and greed as their moral basis. Just look at Nazi Germany, where workers became serfs.

[JasonBlack]

(10-13-2022, 12:23 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I was thinking the movie representing a turning should be a movie from that turning, and a product of its times; whether right or wrong I don't know but that's what I think.

Sing Street is a 2016 musical, not from the 2T, and its story takes place in the 1980s, not in the real 2T. Grease is a late 2T film about the disco scene, which is also 2T, although not the real 2T. It represented nostalgia for the 1950s but that was a 1970s phenomenon. The site I saw listed Pulp Fiction as the best film of the 3T (or at least the 1990s), but does it represent the life and times of the 3T?

American Graffiti is more like what Jason might attribute to Grease; a 3T movie appealing to 1950s nostalgia.

I was asking for either. I'm actually hoping for some examples of turnings outside of living collective memory (ex: Reconstruction, The American Revolution, etc).

[pbrower2a]

I felt the need to include at least one Western or samurai epic. Medieval times are hard to fit.

[pbrower2a]

(10-13-2022, 01:12 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(10-13-2022, 12:23 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I was thinking the movie representing a turning should be a movie from that turning, and a product of its times; whether right or wrong I don't know but that's what I think.

Sing Street is a 2016 musical, not from the 2T, and its story takes place in the 1980s, not in the real 2T. Grease is a late 2T film about the disco scene, which is also 2T, although not the real 2T. It represented nostalgia for the 1950s but that was a 1970s phenomenon. The site I saw listed Pulp Fiction as the best film of the 3T (or at least the 1990s), but does it represent the life and times of the 3T?

American Graffiti is more like what Jason might attribute to Grease; a 3T movie appealing to 1950s nostalgia.

I was asking for either. I'm actually hoping for some examples of turnings outside of living collective memory (ex: Reconstruction, The American Revolution, etc).

I edited as post to add two Westerns. One can't miss two of the most prolific actors (John Wayne and Clint Eastwood), can one? 

I love Butch Cassidy and the Sunset Kid, but... they are outlaws and they can't pretend to any high principles as would stars of a 2T flick.

[JasonBlack]

(10-13-2022, 03:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I felt the need to include at least one Western or samurai epic. Medieval times are hard to fit.

I've got one, but it's an anime
Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal takes place during the 4T of the Meiji Revolution
Rurouni Kenshin takes place 10 years later during the 1T of the Meiji Restoration

Both seem to reflect the saeculum skip that happened during the Civil War (The Meiji Revolution and American Civil War happened around the same time), with battles fought primarily by Reactive rising adults, Adaptives being children and Civics being skipped altogether. Kenshin, our protagonist, fits the Adaptive archetype even though he fought in the revolution, because he was just 14 when he began fighting, and never really developed a particularly "heroic" demeanor. He is a gentle soul who was torn apart by the war, making a vow never to kill again and taking up a reverse blade sword which he only uses for defense.

In addition to an unusual take on the hero's journey, it's a good representation of some of the darker aspects of the 1T: shadows of the defeated remnants of the old order still looking for vengeance or a chance to regain their former glory.

In short, I know y'all are a buncha old timers, and the art style might feel a bit ridiculous to you, but it's really worth watching if you have the chance.

[pbrower2a]

Yes -- I could not quite place Rashomon or Seven Samurai in time.

[JasonBlack]

(10-13-2022, 07:44 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Yes -- I could not quite place Rashomon or Seven Samurai in time.

Yeah, I've only seen the latter (the original and an anime adaption), which is more of a singular event rather than fleshing out a period of history, so I see why you didn't include it.

[pbrower2a]

Another 3T period piece: Thoroughly Modern Millie. It catches the spirit of Lost women making it (with the aid of some seduction) in the business world of the 1920's. The 1920's are one of the most sordid decades in human history that did not involve a horrific war (aside from the Russian Civil War) for intellectual and economic depravity. The reputation of the Roaring 'Twenties for moral sleaze is well deserved.  

Trailer:

 



I have one big problem with the movie: particularly vile anti-Chinese stereotypes. However fun and technically excellent this movie is due in part to excellent performances by Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Channing, you do not want to show this to anyone who might be of any East Asian ancestry or might be connected by marriage to someone of East Asian ancestry. A hint: I would rather be in Chinatown in Chicago than in some "methed-up" rural areas in which child abuse is rampant. Chinese-Americans are among several Model Minorities in America that I more trust than most of my fellow white Christians.

It could be remade soon, as it is a highly-successful Broadway play fifty-five years after the original was made. (Hard to believe, but Julie Andrews is nearly ninety and both Carol Channing and Mary Tyler Moore are deceased). I'd take out the white-slave stuff in a remake to be ethnically decent. 

Still. I have to love the Art Deco style.  (It was about as much Missionary as Lost)

A vignette of the musical from NBC's Today:

h

[pbrower2a]

Now that I think about it, this one (Eight Men Out) gets the "Black Sox" scandal of in which eight players on the sure-thing 1919 Chicago White Sox got enmeshed in the scandal of throwing the World Series on behalf of gamblers who took long odds against the mediocre Cincinnati Reds.  Definitely 3T.





Well done, and it exposes the exploitation that was the norm in professional sports. It also entertains. A hint: after this scandal, major league baseball teams started paying their stars such as Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Walter Johnson, et al. Team owners had to be sure that a star had a stronger incentive to play to win than to throw a game for pay from gangsters.