Saturday, April 11, 2009

The Deer Hunter

#30 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List

If you like to feel happy, then as your physician I have to recommend against seeing this movie. It's a great, depressing epic about a bunch of friends from a small steel-mill town who go to Vietnam and consequently get their lives ruined in a variety of ways. I can't listen to "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" by Frankie Valli without becoming tense and filled with dread thanks to this movie. This also marks the fourth out of a total five movies John Cazale ever acted in to make it onto my top 100 list, and the fifth is Dog Day Afternoon, so that ain't no slouch either.

RATING: 92%

2 comments:

John said...

I heard it was good. We started watching it, but we decided we weren't really in the mood to watch an atrocity film at that time. Not like the time we watched Hotel Rawanda right before we went on a romantic Han river cruise.

*Snoot snoot* I simply can't stand it when the Rawandan genocide casts a shadow on my Sunday evening plans.

Timmaaay!!! said...

Wow. Only one comment? How many people have seen this film?

I'll echo part of what John said. I like the term "atrocity film", and I also typically can't just slip into one like an old pair of shoes. I'm sure there are exceptions, but The Deer Hunter is definitely an I've-REALLY-Gotta-Be-In-the-Mood-For-It kind of movie.

I like The Deer Hunter a lot, but I always want to like it more, if that makes sense. That damned wedding sequence at the beginning, while largely necessary, is pretty tedious. I do admire that about 1970s cinema, though. People weren't afraid to take their time to tell a story.

(Possible spoiler) I cannot believe there's actually a film for which I can say this, but I love the use of the song "God Bless America" at the end of The Deer Hunter.