Film Summary Bundle II (Soylent Green / The Outsiders)

 

Sometimes I have to wonder. Did Francis Ford Coppola make a greaser film because George Lucas made his own Greaser film 10 years previously. 
I know that might sound shallow and stupid but one always has to wonder. These rich people are always trying to one-up each other with their stupid hobbies, their artistic expression or whatever. 

Anyways The Outsiders. 
Still a great film. 

It has phenomenal acting, simple but effective sets and really realistic environment. 
Like you can tell it's a slightly romanticized view of the 60s but it still comes off as believable.

Lots of Mickey Mouse imagery too. I wonder if that was Coppola sticking it to Disney. Maybe he had some sort of deal with them I don't know. One thinks you can't have any sort of Disney trademark in your film without paying the piper something.

Really what I've always loved about The Outsiders is its ability to skirt the line between professional movie actor kid and genuine childlike personality. 

You can almost believe that these are real children but they still talk and act in such a way that you can  really enjoyed their performance. 

It's almost impossible to have genuine child like characters in your movie and not have them be extremely annoying. 

Unless you're the Florida Projects. They did that really well.

But yeah it's a heart filled emotional story. That occasionally has fist fights between groups of idiot children caught in the world they don't understand.

Do you want to watch a movie about the horrors of humanity being transferred into its own food. 

Well you'll get that with Soylent Green but that's not the majority of the film. 

Most of this is about a security guard working for the wealthy Elite and falling in love with a piece of furniture. 

Said Furniture is lady who literally comes with the house whenever you buy it. 

And the two of them have odd little parties, taking advantage of all the rich people's excessive drugs, food (unprocessed) and clean drinking water. 

While the rest of the world is pretty much falling apart.

There is a massive plot revolving around assassinations and our security guard having to investigate the problem to figure out what's going on.

But it does feel almost secondary to the party Apartment that the leads to spend so much time in. 

The actual Soylent Green Revelation is only hinted at in the last 10 minutes of the movie. 

After the unfortunate death of Edward G. Robinson's character. Which was absolutely depressing by the way. 

This poor old man trying to relive some shattered Memory of a world once clean and undestroyed. 

It was downright depressing. 

Makes me wonder if we'll have our own experiences of that in the future.

When much of our own environment has been destroyed by time and lack of care. 

So this is where I'm going to sound kind of like a Debbie Downer. 

I think humanity is heading for a pretty crappy place in the future. 

Where not gonna end up like Mad Max where humanity is practically extinct and we're just running around killing each other with the last remnants of oil and weapons. 

But I could definitely see a Soylent Green scenario. 

The world's toxic, the environments completely fallen to the wayside. People are living in absolute squalor and the hyper rich are still around doing things and the economy still exists in one form or another. 

Personally I don't think we're going to go quite that far. 

I think we'll end up in more of a Taxi Driver* A dirty rundown world filled with poverty and problems but still functioning as we know it today. With consumer goods, 

advertising, junk food, luxury items that you probably won't be able to get. 

Maybe more crime. 

You'll still have stock markets, people will still putter around wasting their time on meaningless crap, maybe we'll still have something like a YouTube or blogs. 

It just won't be as nice as it is now.

*It doesn't have to be Taxi Driver necessarily. Think of any movie that revolves around poor living environment sore people struggling with financial issues. Movies about the downtrodden and all that.