u/Local_Prune4564

Genuinely, If you notice a familiar shitpost that's been stolen by a bot account, do your duty and report it as Spam. Its the least you can do, and it'll help slow the slop invasion that seems to have been infecting this sub recently.

Can we please just go back to Sopranos/Peaks posting?

Long and short, I really enjoyed this movie.

Great performances from most of the cast; Dustin Hoffman makes for a great everyman protagonist, Lawrence Olivier managed to be both deliciously hateable and genuinely terrifying at points, and I really enjoyed seeing Roy Scheider in the charming super-spy role. I've never seen him act this suave in a movie before, but he was incredibly charismatic every time he was on screen. I also find it really funny that this was the film on which Olivier said "My Dear Boy, have you not tried acting!" in response to Dustin Hoffman's approach of Method Acting to get in character.

It was also great to see character actors who I recognised from other great 70s movies in supporting roles, particularly Richard Bright, who plays one of Olivier's henchman and also played Al Neri in the Godfather films.

The only weak-link in the cast, at least in my opinion, was Marthe Keller, who plays Hoffman's love interest. She comes off as incredibly stiff, and this isn't helped by the fact that she's obviously dubbed through most of the movie.

The Script for the film is also great. I expected that going in, given it was written by William Goldman, who also wrote The Princess Bride and co-wrote All the President's Men, but the script still stood out as a highpoint. The pacing of the film is great, the characters all feel distinct, and the way the film explores the complicated nature of being Jewish in America was really interesting and clever.

I know its incredibly cliche to call something "Kafkaesque", especially given how diluted and basically meaningless the term has become, but the form of paranoia explored in this film reminded me a lot of Franz Kafka's The Trial; the idea that no matter how much you assimilate and become a cog in the machine that oppresses you, they'll still come after you.

Tonally, this film feels like if you combined the glamour and espionage of the early Bond films with the suspenseful set pieces and "Innocent person wrongly pursued" plot-line of a Hitchcock film, all the while adding a layer of "New Hollywood", 70s grit. And as someone who loves Bond, Hitchcock and gritty 70s movies, it almost felt like the movie was made for me specifically.

But along with that, the formal elements of this film are also incredible. The Cinematography is gorgeous and makes great use of long lenses, the editing is slick and keeps the pace up, the music is minimal and eerie, which contributes to the constant building dread throughout the first act, and the set-pieces are both nailbitingly suspenseful and ferociously exciting to watch, with the film making brilliant use of real-world locations in both New York and Paris.

Overall, this film really impressed me. I haven't seen any of John Schlesinger's other films, but based on this, I would love to check out Midnight Cowboy, which seems to be his other most famous movie and also stars Dustin Hoffman. If anyone here has any recommendations for other films in his filmography, I'd love to here them.

Overall, I'd give this film a 9/10

Where a character or element is so disliked that it becomes a lazy shorthand to explain why something sucks.

Jar Jar Binks - The Phantom Menace

The Bat Nipples - Joel Schumacher's Batman films (But especially Batman and Robin)

Sophia Coppola - Godfather Part III

Russel Crowe as Javert - Les Miserables 2012

Obviously its not extreme as what the book described or even what the show achieved, but it does looks decently disturbing, so its strange that it looks so barely noticeable in the final film. At what point in the pipeline did this go wrong?

Vravo