The widescreen to video transfer on this puppy was annoying as all hell. A lot of the film relies (perhaps too heavily) on long shots, and the aspect ratio for VHS was not kind to this director's choice. Sometimes the main action would be cut off and other times, there will be an overtly apparent aesthetic crop that would overwhelm the on screen narrative for purposes of silly concision. It made me relieved to live in the world of DVD, but not any bigger a fan for this movie.
In addition, Pakula made the questionable move of moving the soundtrack back along with his camera in the long shots, making high-energy scenes bottom out against leaps of contrasted volume levels.
The film itself does not delve that far, though it keeps one intrigued the whole way. You get the sense that Pakula, who would go on to Direct All the President's Men, was attempting to say something, but those pesky conventions of thriller cinema kept thwarting him as if he were drowning in his own little Hollywood conspiracy.
At the time of the film's release, America was still reeling from the duplicity of Kissingerian power politics. Political assassinations were still taking place both in Washington and across Latin America. Thankfully, we've become critical enough as a culture to question the motivations behind suspicious deaths (wall street journal, meet vincent foster) and the Johnson-era gamut of creepy intelligence "dissapearings" has slowed...at least in the homeland.
However, this film never presupposes any systematic executive level conspiracies in the course of its storyline. Despite the fact that all the targets of assassinations appear to be ambiguously "rogue" progressive senators with electoral wet dreams, the killing machine comes in the form of a mysterious mercenary corporation called Parallax. There's some pretty silly elementary psychology involved, assuming that angry anti-socialites with no apparent agenda other than ending poverty will sign up simply for the warmth of feeling "needed" and being told that there's nothing wrong with them. To recruit these barbound chair-hurlers, there's a neato multiple choice test and Clockwork orange-style voluntary film screening, which merges and flashes a series of words like "Mother" and "Country" to try to synergize an insecure upbringing, misplaced patriotism, and vitriolic fantasies of revenge.
On the corporate angle, The Parallax View may have hit the mark. When Coca Cola hires paramilitary units that assassinate union leaders in Columbia and The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation is coordinated like a holding company that imports proto-fascist dictatorships in or around the equator, it appears that running some archangelic bloodwork from the hands of NAFTA-protected big business is the only angle that still works (discrediting Novak-style press leaks about former ambassadors's wives).
As the row of judges at the beginning and the end of the film deliberate like animatronically programmed waxworks and the 9/11 commission wraps up its investigation with many unanswered questions still brewing, films like this one and JFK ask us to keep pursuing beyond the official statements of the hegemony. Overall, this film is a 40-minute overrun of a sloppy X-Files episode, but its desire to raise your eyebrows and examine the innards of a mechanistically violent culture stem from the proper ideals, even if the answer it comes out with is; if you keep questioning, you'll probably wind up dead.
In addition, Pakula made the questionable move of moving the soundtrack back along with his camera in the long shots, making high-energy scenes bottom out against leaps of contrasted volume levels.
The film itself does not delve that far, though it keeps one intrigued the whole way. You get the sense that Pakula, who would go on to Direct All the President's Men, was attempting to say something, but those pesky conventions of thriller cinema kept thwarting him as if he were drowning in his own little Hollywood conspiracy.
At the time of the film's release, America was still reeling from the duplicity of Kissingerian power politics. Political assassinations were still taking place both in Washington and across Latin America. Thankfully, we've become critical enough as a culture to question the motivations behind suspicious deaths (wall street journal, meet vincent foster) and the Johnson-era gamut of creepy intelligence "dissapearings" has slowed...at least in the homeland.
However, this film never presupposes any systematic executive level conspiracies in the course of its storyline. Despite the fact that all the targets of assassinations appear to be ambiguously "rogue" progressive senators with electoral wet dreams, the killing machine comes in the form of a mysterious mercenary corporation called Parallax. There's some pretty silly elementary psychology involved, assuming that angry anti-socialites with no apparent agenda other than ending poverty will sign up simply for the warmth of feeling "needed" and being told that there's nothing wrong with them. To recruit these barbound chair-hurlers, there's a neato multiple choice test and Clockwork orange-style voluntary film screening, which merges and flashes a series of words like "Mother" and "Country" to try to synergize an insecure upbringing, misplaced patriotism, and vitriolic fantasies of revenge.
On the corporate angle, The Parallax View may have hit the mark. When Coca Cola hires paramilitary units that assassinate union leaders in Columbia and The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation is coordinated like a holding company that imports proto-fascist dictatorships in or around the equator, it appears that running some archangelic bloodwork from the hands of NAFTA-protected big business is the only angle that still works (discrediting Novak-style press leaks about former ambassadors's wives).
As the row of judges at the beginning and the end of the film deliberate like animatronically programmed waxworks and the 9/11 commission wraps up its investigation with many unanswered questions still brewing, films like this one and JFK ask us to keep pursuing beyond the official statements of the hegemony. Overall, this film is a 40-minute overrun of a sloppy X-Files episode, but its desire to raise your eyebrows and examine the innards of a mechanistically violent culture stem from the proper ideals, even if the answer it comes out with is; if you keep questioning, you'll probably wind up dead.