August makes me romantic, and look at this beautiful steaming mess I wrote for you that I can’t even include among the counter-comments. That’s enough, though, it gets boring otherwise.
Here one keeps saying Rome, and the other replies toma... but it’s fun nonetheless. Simmons is definitely not more complex than Sergeant Hartman, and not even in his dreams. And I think we can all agree on that. Gunny? Present, right, Gunny? Good. Gunny is also Karate Kid, and Whiplash. And we can say, with the utmost serene bliss of reason, that Gunny would tear off Simmons’ head and crap down his neck. Right? I knew you’d agree.
"Here the path is, in reality, a spiral downward, towards alienation." It’s still towards a goal set by the protagonist... I repeat: it seems to me you’re saying that this film is better than "pinco" because it’s more "and here you can put whatever term you want." Like Deep, but Deep doesn’t work. And I’m telling you that its being more "and here you stick the term you chose earlier" doesn’t change a jot about the story’s structure or how it is represented. So it might be "whatever you like," but in that field, it stays to play. And I’m not saying it’s better or worse than "soldier fatball vs the Thursday night underwear of Master Miyagi," but I’m saying that if someone started making comparisons with Rocky or "stick it up the cross of Master Iceman’s ball," they weren’t entirely wrong. I understand your point of view; you should try to understand the other side too because one doesn’t exclude the other; both are correct, they just say different things. They don’t exclude each other. Well, one is a subjective opinion, the other an objective fact; the thing is, they aren’t two opposing opinions.
Well: they don’t exclude each other unless you saw in the film’s ending some form of judgment on Andrew’s choices, and consequently some kind of moral... Honestly, I didn’t see that; I found it cold and detached (as were the film's characters) from beginning to end. I mean, at the end, I didn’t see a: "if you sacrifice everything for your goal, be careful because the best you’ll save of yourself will be the single moment of your success." Nor a "who cares about everything; you must sacrifice everything to achieve what you want so that you will be happy," or anything else.
Then again, maybe the fact that it’s a movie that I found mediocre before it didn’t tell me a damn thing doesn’t make me the most reliable source on the work, but I swear: Rocky and Whiplash? Yes. It doesn’t mean they’re the same, but they are certainly the same kind of film, which is not the genre "the kid learns to grow up," it’s the genre "pump up the testosterone in the room and show the punches." Which, after all, is the only reason that could justify the dirty bloodied skins; seriously, maybe they wouldn’t have made me scream, "holy crap what the hell is this crap???" at 16 in front of a Death SS video... Though to be honest, I probably would have found them embarrassing even back then and even in that context.
