Sharkbait101

I’m not so sure about “Her”. While a great movie in and of itself, it does fall trap to a very hipster trend that could easily be reflected in films made decades ago that have fallen flat due to now non-existent cultural trends. Just like some movies from the 80s are seen as “yuppie” and some movies from the 60s “hippie”, “Her” can easily fall into the category of hipster that future audiences will not find as strong of a connection to or respect for.

Both this movie and “The Way Way Back”, made by the same producers, deal with strong themes of mental health in suburban American families. We’ve grown up in a society of the picket-fence family ideal. However, the reality is that no family, no matter how they look, are perfect. “Little Miss Sunshine” is a great example of a deconstruction of that.

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” feels like an end-of-an-era type of Western. John Wayne was seen as a cultural hero of an American myth that never was. To me, this movie represented the unveiling of that myth. All previous John Wayne movies, for the most part, had him as the proud hero who won the girl in the end. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is the ultimate subversion of all this. With John Ford behind the helm, the subversion is even more pronounced. The idea of the Western, where a man could “make his own code and live by it” to quote Joan Didion, was mere wishful dreaming. At the end of the 60s, the guise of this American Dream was disappearing. American audiences simply no longer believed it or began to doubt it. This movie was the final reveal. The Western was nothing but a myth built upon exaggerated truths that will die with the men who spun them.