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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2474 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 31, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Last week while discussing Ridley Scott's ham-fisted commentary on the Iraq War in Kingdom of Heaven, @ABigGuy4U mentioned that one of his favorite things about historical epics was how they acted as double period pieces, saying as much about the period they were made in as the period they depict.

That got me thinking, what are some of your favorite unintentional time capsule movies that are more interesting about what they tell us about the time they were made than the time they depict?

The original Shōgun was released in 1980 when Japan's technology was putting it on the international scene. The bubble wouldn't inflate for another six years but it was no longer "just" a former enemy that Americans could crack camera jokes about. It was still very foreign, but had an edge. Still you made sure you put the san after anjin(pilot) when you addressed Richard Chamberlain's character.The perspective was that of a stranger in a strange land.

Meanwhile the remake was right in the midst of woke. The white man was an unrepentant degenerate capitalist and had zero qualities as protagonist other than courage. His moral code is seen as corrupt. The Japanese translator Mariko is now a fighter (a physical, naginata-wielding fighter) and arguably the real main character. Her emotional backstory that now is tied to another woman instead of a foreign Japanese honor culture. Strangeness and the darker sides of Japanese culture were buried (or at least deemphasized) in favor of beautiful setpieces. Catholicism is still denigrated but protestantism gets no reprieve in anyone's mind as it perhaps arguably did in the first.

The fact that Everything Everywhere All at Once won a bunch of Oscars is a fun little time capsule from that short lived time period after "Stop Asian Hate" became the new progressive virtue check, but before it became too clear where most of the Asian hate was coming from, and they had to rapidly deploy a collective update patch to memory hole the whole thing.

Mulan, because even the originals work as capsules of the times they were written, so the historical inaccuracies and presentism in Disney's version was, in its own way, quite authentic!

The original Michael Bay Transformers is exactly this type of period piece. It encapsulated everything about that era of early-2000s American culture; military dudebro Call of Duty aesthetics, jingoistic patriotism, frat boy humor, etc. That type of theming was dead and buried by the 2010s, but is maybe making a resurgence now. I remember hating it at the time, but it does feel nostalgic to see now with how different everything became.

God, the Linkin Park!

Less a movie and more a television series, but I can bet a decade or so from now, people are going to be writing sociological essays on the development of the Star Trek.

You could probably do that now anyways, but given how dark and bleak the latest stuff has gotten(or so I've been told), yeesh...

You can also bring in Star Trek influenced works.

Battlestar Galactica is a direct response to Voyager, 9/11 and the Iraq War (the New Caprica arc with an outright suicide bombing insurgency especially feels dated) and is progressive in a very particular way that is both familiar and distinct from how things were done post 2020.

Chinatown was made in 1974 and set in the 1930s, and with its themes of public corruption, it can easily be read as a commentary on the Watergate scandal.

Its spiritual successor from 1997, LA Confidential, was set in the 1950s. With its narrative about corrupt police officers, police brutality, institutional racism and muckraking journalists, it's easy to read it as a reaction to the beating of Rodney King, the subsequent riots, and the trial of OJ Simpson and surrounding media circus.

I remember seeing LA Confidential but I can't recall any narrative about institutional racism.

I forgot: during the interrogation, Exley learns that the three young black men have abducted and repeatedly raped a Mexican girl named Iñez Soto. After the police rescue her, she testifies that the three men left her in time to be at the Nite Owl for the killings. She later admits that she lied in her testimony because she wanted the three young men dead, and reasoned that the public wouldn't care about three black men raping a Mexican girl, but would care if these three black men had killed the six white people at the Nite Owl.

Impossible to talk about this without spoilers.

Dudley and his men murder Stensland and the other customers in the Nite Owl coffee shop. Dudley's original plan was to frame three young black men for the murders, which he planned to do by having his men surreptitiously plant the shotguns used in the murders in their car, then have his men shoot them dead in their apartment. Dudley reasoned that no one would bat an eyelid if three young black men were killed "resisting arrest". However, the plan goes awry when Exley and Vincennes arrive at the apartment building at the same time as Dudley's men and arrest the three men unharmed. During interrogation, Exley ignores the three men's consistent pleas of ignorance about the Nite Owl killings, and ultimately all three men are eventually shot dead by the police anyway, as Dudley had originally planned.

Additionally, there's the opening of the film in which a squad of white LA police officers viciously beat up a group of Mexicans in their prison cell, which was directly based on a real event and which has obvious parallels to the beating of Rodney King.

I see. Thanks. It was a long time ago that I saw it.

This is a sort of pet interest of mine. I remember reading a book on the French revolution where the preface had a similar sort of comment: that every history of the French Revolution was really itself more a commentary on contemporary politics. It's an interesting way to go about looking at past media.

One I watched earlier in the year was Minority Report. For those unaware, it's a Spielberg film from 2002 starring Tom Cruise. In the near future bla bla bla, Washington DC comes up with a way to see murders before they happen, and arrest the perpetrators before they kill anyone. The suspects get sort of put into a coma and incarcerated forever. Then of course Tom Cruise gets framed for a murder he hasn't yet committed, and etc etc the program gets shut down.

This is of course was obviously pointed at US criminal justice, and particularly the debate over the death penalty which was a popular cause célèbre at that point. The problem is the film sets up the moral dilemmas very poorly. For one it turns out the "precogs" (who see the future) are never wrong; the film teases you with the notion that they're regularly making mistakes and imprisoning innocent people frequently but it turns out that the grand sum of their errors was literally just two times where the head of the program tricked them. The film tries to play around with this question of "fate"; can you really punish a man for a crime he hasn't committed yet? But because the program has been so successful at extirpating premeditated homicides most of the time they're stopping people who are literally in the act of killing someone in a crime of passion (in the opening sequence, they grab a guy just as he is swinging down to stab his wife for adultery).

So they try to make it out like this whole program is some clear moral wrong when they've actually succeeded in pretty much eliminating murder, and entirely without false positives. It's some real turn of the millennium optimism that the problem with the American justice system is that it is too effective at stopping crime. Easy to imagine this film being much different if it was adapted again today.

Minority Report is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made in the Hollywood mainstream. Atmospheric, gorgeous to look at, intelligent, thought-provoking, emotionally resonant. Spielberg was firing on all cylinders with that one.

Philip K. Dick is famous for writing insane stories that are almost completely rewritten into screenplays for great movies: Total Recall, Bladerunner, Minority Report. I haven't watched The Adjustment Bureau and The Man in the High Castle myself, but I've heard they match the pattern.

A Scanner Darkly, on the contrary, was a faithful adaptation and it was boring despite featuring a great ensemble cast.

The Man in the High Castle

The Pilot was great but the show wasn't. A grade or more below True Detective or Fargo. Gave it up after 1st season.

Interesting to see this and the comment by @FtttG disliking A Scanner Darkly. I don't watch much any more so the odds of me rewatching it (or anything) are low, but I remember it had some incisive commentary about drugs and policing. Perhaps that was boring, though.

And by incisive commentary, I mean as someone who works in the criminal justice system, I found all-too-accurate the film's overall depiction of addicts (including them burning away everything about their personality until they're a hollow shell run by drugs), the drug scene, policing (including undercover work and how it all becomes intertwined with/dependent upon the drug scene), and the parasitic "treatment" industry that has attached itself to the legal system.

All of this was in the novel as well, it's just that the movie was... less than the sum of its parts. It had a great story (it's probably the most personal of Dick's works), a stellar cast, it cleverly used CGI, but it just didn't click together.

In contrast, No Country for Old Men (which I also read as a novel first and watched the adaptation later) is a great movie, despite being a similarly generally faithful adaptation.

All of this was in the novel as well, it's just that the movie was... less than the sum of its parts.

Well put! I have a real soft spot for the movie, which is to say that I think it was quite well done while I also agree that it doesn't really hang together on the whole. In isolation, I love the actors involved and their performances, I love Linklater's vision, I think the animation brings an incredible level of surrealism to the movie, the script hews closely to the book in the best possible way... and yet. It's hard to connect to Bob/"Fred" as a protagonist. The drug fueled ranting and general chaos and insanity is a little too on the nose; it quickly becomes grating. And as good as the climax is, the resolution just feels superficial to me.

Maybe the script could have been better. Maybe the performances could have been tweaked just enough to make the difference. Probably the animation in particular hurt more than it helped, particularly with the emotional beats. Perhaps a different treatment would have done the trick. Regardless, I don't feel the need or desire to see it again.

Have you read the book? I found that all the points in the film's favour that you mentioned came across more effectively in the book. I really cared about the characters in the book, and didn't care about the characters in the movie.

Agreed, I was so disappointed by the film of A Scanner Darkly, especially in light of how it was my favourite of the Dick novels I've read.

In fairness, both Minority Report and Total Recall were based on his short stories, so a certain amount of Adaptation Expansion was unavoidable. TV Tropes argues that, while Total Recall explores themes that aren't mentioned anywhere in its source material, they are themes that Dick returned to again and again throughout his oeuvre. So Total Recall isn't so much an adaptation of the specific short story on which it was based, as it is an adaptation of Dick's work as a whole.

In contrast, the film version of Minority Report takes the basic premise but drops most of the philosophical complexities around precognition and completely inverts the message: in the short story, the guy who murders someone in order to protect PreCrime is the hero. But for all that, I still preferred the film to the short story.

I remember reading somewhere that Blade Runner was the only adaptation of one of his works that Dick saw in his lifetime (well, a rough cut anyway), and he said he loved it.

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