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User Reviews for: Vice

toliman
CONTAINS SPOILERS2/10  5 years ago
TLDR ? This movie is Disingenuous. At best, it's a Ghoulish dark satire of the republican party during the Bush/Cheney era. Except, they forgot to insert comedy or satire. As a result, it's grim and insulting, the parody is often at the expense of the audience being too stupid or uncaring, or religious. Large chunks of american history are deleted, omitted or filtered so that the movie can focus on the death toll of the war, or the "Wazzup" meme, etc.

large chunks of Dick Cheney's history don't make it into the movie, or are stylised / exagerrated / spoofed.

It is a well made disaster of a movie. Care went into making this.

But, it's as bad as Holmes & Watson, Star Trek Discovery, The Last Jedi or Ghostbusters 2016. It's deeply unlikeable at times, and it is actively trying to rewrite history as it goes. I'm not a republican or a conservative, i don't follow politics, this is a highly deranged film that is deceptive at times, and I doubt that any of the events took place, as a result of the ham-fisted effort at painting Cheney as some mastermind villain, working in the shadows. It's only missing that villain laugh track during the more hammy moments.

The most sanguine part of the movie is that they treat the WTC bombing and 9/11 properly, but they draw an enormous bow throughout.

[spoiler]part of the movie hinges on the use of executive power being wielded by Dick Cheney through the Bush Presidency, to the degree that they'll infer it becoming part of the reasons why Cheney brought the war from Afghanistan to Iraq, and that he also used the position to secure oil reserves in Iraq before the war started, as well as ignore questions / receive kickbacks from Haliburton contracts, and infer that he brought a lawyer into the emergency/control room during the "crash" period of 9/11 post-pentagon collision, as airline flights and air corridors were shut down, airports were being closed, and private/civilian aircraft were being tracked and landed in airports, etc. So that he could wield this Executive Power without asking the senate or the Congress or the President for approval.[/spoiler]

It walks the line of defamation, and yet, apparently it's from the guy who made Anchorman 2 and Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Other Guys. Brad Pitt and Will Ferrel financed this movie, i think. Their companies are in the titles.

All of the Actors do a great job. I even like Annapurna for their video game productions (Donut County, Gorogoa, Edith Finch, Florence), and i've seen a handful of Annapurna movies, like Phantom Thread, Her, American Hustle, and Sausage Party...

I went in with no preparation, and assumed it would be a dark comedy with political overtones, because, politics and Steve Carell, and I can see Aquaman later on. It can't be that bad, it's Christmas week.

This movie has the unfortunate effect of making you hate theatrical movie releases and critics, and perhaps all movies.

Yet, it's so well made, it has style, artistic credibility, and it's directed, shot and lit perfectly, the sound is on point, the acting is sometimes forgettable, But it's similar in style to other "moral" drama films, like "The Big Short", leading into the Global Financial Crisis where they pander heavily on people's motives and actions of "we're getting away with it", sic. The pandering is incredible.

It is a better political movie than most, but it's utterly manipulative and disingenuous at it's heart, and nothing can make that funny or amusing.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 is unhinged and deranged, while Vice, is just powdercoated hatred and bile, trying to hide under progressive and democratic ideals. it's more like an upmarket youtube political conspiracy movie talking about Hilary Clinton's "SECRET Brain surgery", George Soros, the Koch brothers or the Jewish conspiracy movies you get recommended after watching "The Young Turks" or "David Pakman".

They even sink low enough to include a "Ghostbusters 2016" poke at the audience in the end credits by lampooning the partisan nature of the film, in an attempt to skirt criticism and outrage

[spoiler]A sideplot about an hour in, has a series of scenes in a focus group with the same strangers. The marketer/political consultant asks the group to raise their hands to choose between climate change or global warming. Another time, it's a choice between Estate Tax or Death Tax, inferring that marketing & political think-tanks, along with Fox News, used politically correct language in the 90's and 2000's to make conservative ideas palatable.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]At the end of the movie, Cheney is in a cross-chair interview, after just having had a heart replacement. As the interview starts, the scene pauses, and Cheney/Bale instead, turns away and lectures the audience directly (invoking Frank Underwood's, stylised yet sociopathic 'lectures' in House of Cards) , saying he did what was best for America, despite the cost and the lives lost in the war(s) sic. It's just on the borderline of "helping make america great again" and a typical Frank Underwood self-justification, we fade to black, get a terrible americana/Fly Fishing title credits to the music of West Side Story's Puerto Rican version of "Coming to America" and we return to the Focus Group, mid-credits. The final scene has the consultant ask what people thought about the movie. A member of the group, complains that the movie insults conservatives, while the neighboring person insists it's factual, with the first man then calling it liberal propaganda, and then calling the other a libtard, sic. and hits him, both getting into a fist fight, while the camera turns away, to another woman, who turns to her neighbour in the room, and says she's going to enjoy the next Fast and the Furious movie (sic). [/spoiler]

The implied comment is that they did the research, and had to improvise the story in-between, because nobody would speak about Dick Cheney's history or family to set the record straight. When/If you see a biography of Barack Obama in a few years, [spoiler] attending child brothels with kevin spacey in indonesia, ~~receiving oral sex from a pansexual transvestite, while he's snorting a line of cocaine off a preteen boy~~ [/spoiler], while another person is handing Barack a membership form for the Democratic Party ... Vice, is going to be the movie that they quote and use dialogue from.

This is the kind of movie that Alex Jones and infowars would make of Hilary Clinton & Barack Obama, by selectively omitting pages from a biography, and denigrating the characters and roles they undertook. The excuse would be, they couldn't confirm the story, so they took liberties and stuck with the facts, being transcripts, police records, licenses, marriage dates, etc.

I'm Australian, I genuinely don't care about the politics, but the smearing of the republican party is like a sledgehammer at times.

There are several Saturday Night Live level 'jokes' or skits/scenes that don't even make you cringe, they're just deeply unsettling attempts at humor or levity. Care went into the timing to paint several scenes as 'dark', or darkly funny at the expense of others. I expect people would laugh at them, it didn't connect with me, or the other 5 people in the theater.

It's not quite Fahrenheit 11/9 levels of insanity, on the contrary. It walks the line of parody, conspiracy and defamation neatly in a lighthearted attempt to skip 20 years of context, in a 2 minute conversation.

There's an early moment, perhaps 40 minutes in, where Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld is ruminating to a younger Dick Cheney in a random hallway of the oval office, about the imminent bombing of cambodia while Nixon is talking with Kissinger in a spare room of the Oval Office to avoid recordings. Mid-lecture, you hear Carell while we see a village about to be bombed mid-lecture, a typical cambodian/indonesian forest village, women and children sitting around, before explosions occur, and the scene changes back to Carell & Bale, unphased.

This kind of manipulative sledgehammer is used, repeatedly to invoke... satire? outrage ? compassion ?

This occurs about 5 or 6 more times, with even less subtlety.

Alfred Molina's "restaurant" scene, [spoiler] Molina's character offers Cheney and 3 seated guests at a restaurant table, Extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay as menu options [/spoiler], is ham-fisted, but it's executed darkly and humorously, similar to say, Aaron Echkhart's Thank You For Smoking scenes, lampooning Tobacco, Firearms and Alcohol lobbyists.

It's the kind of movie where you could let things slide if you were a lifelong US democrat, because it tries to tell harsher truths of the political and military consequences, overtly, by flashing to bombings, drone strikes, torture, rendition, deception and greed, during the more infamous moments of nixon's career and Bush's presidency.

And it profoundly relies on Fly fishing to represent Dick Cheney, as other movies do (2007's Shooter) to the point where they use [spoiler] gaudy Americana as Fly Fishing decorations (rockets, drones, Oil Rigs, missiles, the white house, Surveillance cameras) [/spoiler] in the end-credits.

There's element's of Zero Dark Thirty in the invocation/flashes of torture, waterboarding, confinement, exposure, even the Abu Ghraib incident/leak with a prisoner being dragged by a Dog Collar by Lynndie England (the "work safe" versions) appears here. and rendition scenes along with the "Shadow government" themes of Dick Cheney's role as Vice President during George W Bush's tenure. It is highly implied several times that Cheney set himself up as the Executive, the CEO in charge of the war by undermining George Bush and, being responsible for the birth of ISIS, hiding reports from the president, etc.

They walk the line when it comes to defaming the Cheney family, there's also an implication of Lynne Cheney's father, Wayne Vincent [spoiler] murdering his wife in an argument by drowning, and of Lynne Vincent, being raped by her father Wayne in an over-edited and dubbed scene that was heavily muffled to avoid the censor noticing. Wayne, is seen pointing to his daughter during a muted, abbreviate shouting scene implying alcoholism and frequent domestic violence. [/spoiler]

It extrapolates the most defamatory versions of people, and highlights that absurdity.

It takes what should be parody or simulacra, a 'bad saturday night live' sketch comic scene, and extrapolates moments as their cheapest moments. It's also high budget, they take Sam Rockwell's version of President Bush, Governor Bush, and rotoscope him into the more infamous moments of Bush's Presidency, i.e. the mid-war "Mission Accomplished" presentation on the Carrier Deck.
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Reply by Shubniguroth
5 years ago
@toliman For someone who cares so much about "facts," it's interesting to note that you did not use "(sic)" properly /even once/ in this long ham-fisted soliloquy.
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Reply by toliman
5 years ago
@shubniguroth One "could" imagine that if **every** usage (ie the three times I used it) is flawed, there are (at least) 3 reasons. <br /> <br /> Either that: #1. I don't understand, #2. You did not, and #3. that there's a reason, subtext or point being made that was not understood.<br /> <br /> Facts aside, the film is terrible IMO. Feel free to disagree, but arguing for "grammar" makes you look irrational, retributive resentful, bitter and angry. At least talk about the film.<br /> <br /> My lackadaisical/carefree use of grammar is intended, to make a larger point later on.<br /> <br /> The film is trying to develop a conceit that people will personally accept, or reject by allowing a slippery slope. <br /> <br /> If I/you didn't have any knowledge of Cheney, and I don't, I'd probably believe the film was accurate in some ways. The Opening Quotes go that far as to say it's interpreted from biography and history of what was available. But the intent is to create "Post-Truth", a dramatic and compelling fiction based on emotions. <br /> <br /> This Post-Truth is akin to what people with Borderline Personality Disorder experience, subjective reality being distorted by their own emotional dysphoria, never recalling or storing accurate events, only emotional events that become eroded and jaded with time because their memory is overloaded by dysfunctional emotional regulation, regressive memories being reinforced with fantasies and interpreted versions; "feeling" true, rather than being true. <br /> <br /> Vice's perspective is clearly in the Post-Truth version of reality, in which Subjective drives Objective. The emotion is more important than the object, method or measured Truth. Vice, tried. It had great aspects, the film is a monument in some ways, but it's also terrible, for many of the reasons I posted when it was in theatres, and you had to pay to see it.<br /> <br /> You could have disagreed.<br /> <br /> Honestly, It does not matter. It's an opinion on "the internet", and it's grammatical consistency doesn't change the argument as it was made, ~9 months ago as a post-mortem soliloquy / diatribe / screed in cathexis for the film's waste of time, money and energy.<br /> <br /> I can appreciate that you didn't like aspects, few people appreciate opinions that aren't theirs, or have enough time/effort/wisdom to reflect before reacting. Hence, Engagement and Click-Bait's ego-driven leverage over people's emotions relies on "takes", etc.<br /> <br /> If your benevolence and altruism allows for introspection or imagination, when reading an internet comment... then #1, #2 or #3 would be valid. <br /> <br /> But, if you can't imagine or give someone "on the internet" any altruistic reading or intent, <br /> Then, #1 it's because I don't understand grammar.<br /> <br /> But, if #2, and one could be benevolent and/or that imaginative...<br /> <br /> Why would you be wrong, when Occam's Razor would point to the most reductive; i.e. #1 That I don't understand the usage of sic as a semantic reference, providing an exact quote to a movie's dialogue and script as an exact context. If you proceed with this emotive line of thinking, you can also point to the fact that I also don't use quotes properly either, and that I rely on strange tangential arguments to make an emotional metaphor, poorly. <br /> <br /> And, It's just horrible writing.<br /> <br /> It also reinforces the argument that "I don't have any idea what I'm doing", and you can thus, use this logical parry (Argument from fallacy) to dismiss all of my opinion and arguments, and ignore everything written that you disagree with, having "won" internet points in dismissing my screed. <br /> <br /> And, yes it is a screed, and perhaps Conservative Agitprop, given the content. Eh.<br /> <br /> As long as you're right.<br /> <br /> However, there's still point #2 and #3<br /> <br /> #3, I used sic, and not [sic] or (sic) as a reference or quote. <br /> <br /> Sic. has more than one context.<br /> Especially when it's deliberately not appropriate. <br /> Especially in post-modern ironic and meta-contextual semiotics, words can have their opposite intent, or act as a semiotic / referential / symbolic meaning, especially in a culture that uses verbs as brands and nouns, language and meaning can be redefined by context(s) or have multiple and parallel contexts. <br /> <br /> e.g. a "Hot Take" being a symbolic reference of grasping, or in reference to media/journalism, a sliced moment from a whole that is consumed/removed, that is "Hot", in the reference of being inflammatory in nature, but also served/prepared as if it were "heated'. <br /> <br /> Two words that can have an abundance of meaning in it's use and overuse, and meta-contextual usage, that a "take" is often removed or omitted opinion, derived to "grok", a digest /interpretation of someone's opinion or motives from a thin slice. so when you have someone's "Take"; it's often a strange or false interpretation, or a disingenuous interpretation that benefits the POV of the writer, not the reader. <br /> <br /> That context comes from its usage, and all of the other allusions, meanings and contexts of Take, i.e. theft/removal, etc. are also applicable when using Take.<br /> <br /> TLDR, everything is ironic. Even when it's not supposed to be. <br /> Especially if it's not supposed to be.<br /> <br /> Sic, without the brackets, isn't supposed to be literal. It is detached. And, being detached and used inappropriately, it is being used 'stupidly' / 'ironically' to juxtapose that it's not an actual quote, the meaning is inferred and substituted as a simile or figure of speech, that it's being used as a figure of speech. <br /> <br /> Especially when it deliberately **does not quote** a third party, and is an allusion or reference, thus being an ironic transposition or inversion of accurate reproduction. Especially because __sic erat scriptum__ is not being semantically or contextually used to quote actual dialogue or points made.<br /> <br /> Perhaps.<br /> <br /> The intent of using sic. Poorly. was to create a different semantic meaning of "Exactly" to "Inexactly", which would transpose/ridicule the intent of providing a quote, as an in-joke to the loose transcription of Cheney's biography through the film. <br /> <br /> Especially... when in the context of this review, frequent "quotes" highlight moments of poorly transposed meaning, is also a reference to Cheney's biography being opportunistically dismantled in the most alienating and least humanising way to represent someone's life.
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Reply by spdemon91
4 years ago
@toliman Thank you for saving me 2 hours of my life. Love all these actors but suspected the agenda. Fake news movie!
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