The Postman
Friday, November 21st, 2003 03:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerDespite classes being cancelled because of the bombs, we still have to turn up to our unit meeting tomorrow morning, so I was planning to get an early night. The reason I'm still up at 3 a.m. is a combination of Turkish TV scheduling, in which you generally have to calculate the times of films by a complex algorithm adding time progressively through the evening, one of my favourite films, The Postman and the fact that they felt compelled to break it off in the middle to give us more bomb news.
Eyebrows may be raised at my counting The Postman as one of my favourite films, given that it was demolished by countless critics. I'm puzzled at why everyone hated it so much. I didn't like the music much, the American patriotism was a bit lost on me, and I could have done with a bit less Costner and a bit more of the other characters, but apart from that, it's a wonderful feel-good movie with a difference or three. The hero stumbles into his hero's role by accident and keeps trying to escape from it. In a post-apocalyptic world, most people turn out to be pretty decent, and the only major problem is the nutty survivalist militia. In the end, it is less Costner's clumsy heroics than the actions of ordinary decent people that win the day. And how do they win? Not by wielding magical swords or blowing up the power supply of the Deathstar, but by setting up something as mundane as a postal service. That's why I like it, why the author of the original book liked it (despite some major changes from the book) and why, probably, the critics hated it: "Civilisation, decency, comunication ... bah! Humbug!"
Eyebrows may be raised at my counting The Postman as one of my favourite films, given that it was demolished by countless critics. I'm puzzled at why everyone hated it so much. I didn't like the music much, the American patriotism was a bit lost on me, and I could have done with a bit less Costner and a bit more of the other characters, but apart from that, it's a wonderful feel-good movie with a difference or three. The hero stumbles into his hero's role by accident and keeps trying to escape from it. In a post-apocalyptic world, most people turn out to be pretty decent, and the only major problem is the nutty survivalist militia. In the end, it is less Costner's clumsy heroics than the actions of ordinary decent people that win the day. And how do they win? Not by wielding magical swords or blowing up the power supply of the Deathstar, but by setting up something as mundane as a postal service. That's why I like it, why the author of the original book liked it (despite some major changes from the book) and why, probably, the critics hated it: "Civilisation, decency, comunication ... bah! Humbug!"
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Date: 2003-11-21 10:52 am (UTC)