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The time of this film is the mid 60s. In real life, this was prime time for me. Lots happening that the movie brought back with a vengeance. I was never lower middle class, but much of my milieu was. If real-life recollection means anything, this flick caught it in spades. Not everything that happened hung together, which is how life REALLY unfolds. Lots of unhung-together stuff happens, and your awareness gets pulled all around from thing to thing. Only thing that's consistent is that it's all happening to you.
Of course, not everybody lives a complex life--particularly not one where their awareness must skip from one realm to an unconnected other realm. But back then mine was indeed like that. I lived a lot of things, in many different circles, all occurring quite suddenly in close temporal proximity to each other. When that happens, just living becomes very stressful. Most people blink out the temporaneously incongruent . . . give themselves the illusion that things happen in a unified stream of events . . . unwanted intrusions from incongruent events just don't seem to be there in their awareness and recollections to interfere with each other. For example, all their friends are white, of the same class, in a perpetually congruent cultural context (they don't even see the black cop directing traffic, the Hispanic busboy, the Chinese English professor with a thick accent, the gay barber). But if you travel eyes-wide-open in a lot of circles that typically exclude each other, these circles will intersect in more accidental than thematically coherent schedules of bumping into each other. Like a couple of hours in the bumper cars. Nobody in the other bumper cars has any specific designs on bumping you off your course. They've each got their own thing in mind, and the bumper happens in an accidental time/logic of its own. If you value every experience-- like if you were to value every bump in the bumper cars-- you start to feel constantly distracted. But over enough time and sufficient events, the whole starts to make some kind of for-the-moment sense-- while all the time random events take place all around you.
So, here's Tim Robbins--playing a white deceased cop's son who feels he might have stumbled (through hearing a Martin Luther King speech at an accidentally extra-propitious moment in his life) into actual enactment of a philosophy of love rather than boundaries-defining hate--trying to hold together several divergent currents in his life (some for which he had a past, others quite new). The bumper car temporality of it all for sure makes this movie. We see working class/lower middle class Carroll O'Connor ALL IN THE FAMILY life, with its penchant for ignoring things right under the nose that might make one more uncomfortable than one already is, displayed in all its famed insensitivity to otherness. A plainclothes cop on stakeout dies horribly and insignificantly inside a street phone booth crashed into with great disregard by the villain's car running into it in a bad version of emergency parking-- and when a uniformed cop is asked by a sleepy detective where the stakeout is, the uniform says carelessly (while pointing to the underneath of the car), "He's under there." No spirit of funeral ceremony for the thin blue line. Only the working class penchant for seeing self and others in terms of things that things unexplicably happen TO--a defensively blase attitude which careful research has shown causes cops to get into so much trouble when trying to handle the complexities of emotional events and interpersonal conflicts.
This is what Tim Robbins is trying to grow beyond as much as he can--and the course of the plot sets some harsh parameters regarding how far Tim is ever going to be allowed to get in this effort. In the middle of this high drama, some kid gets back with his girlfriend at the mention of their some day having kids together (totally unaware of the drama involved in the car that almost ran into a high-speed head-on crash into the car he and his girl are in), and the movie ends with a Black guy who had an intolerant encounter with Tim in the dinner probably coming to Tim's house to tell him (after all that happened right here in the Bronx) that he has been accepted to go to Mississippi.
What I'm trying to get at here is the suggestion that WHAT THIS FILM LOSES IN THEATRICAL COHERENCE IT GAINS IN REAL-LIFE DISPARATE FLOW. As a psychotherapist doing a lot of professional in-service training and supervision, I object strongly to the use of films to portray mental illness. Theatrical drama-logic requires a degree of plot evolution coherence and motivational reasonableness that are simply missing in genuine diagnoses of mental illness-- in fact, such fragmentation is often the point of mental illness. In the case of this film, however, I immediately purchased it for use in showing how the progression of real life wily nily sweeps together otherwise disparate flows of events. And I'm not using this to raise the consciousness of one-to-one psychotherapists, but of social workers who must do the magic of therapy on the run, in context, while catching life in real time out in the field (as opposed to in the comfort of a make-believe life milieu of the office). I started my career doing street gang work in the then murderous New York City Lower East Side at around the time this movie depicts, so the memories aroused in me by this film are hardly just theoretical.
As a European immigrant, I find myself enjoying more and more PBS travel shows (like Rick Steve's 30 minutes travel pieces through Europe). So I can't help wondering if a movie like this one doesn't require a travel guide for even the experienced to fully appreciate. That doesn't mean a movie critic (for whom I have only the greatest respect and appreciation), but someone who has lived the sort of life processes reflected in this film, and who has had to reflect on that living through to some depth.
Alas, the logic by which I give this gem five stars may seem quarky to some, so I'd very much like to hear what you think--AFTER you buy and look closely at this much underappreciated film, of course.
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This disc doesn't include any pair of 3D glasses and it can be viewed on any DVD or Blu-ray player (it doesn't have to be a 3D Blu-ray deck). It can work only on 3D monitors and television screens with both passive or active glasses. You just need to adjust your 3d Television to side-by-side view. Here is a link and a list of 3D monitors compatible with this disc:[...]LG 55LW9800 55"LG 60LW9500 60LG 55LW9500 55"LG 55LW6500 55"LG 47LW6500 47LG 55LW5600 55LG 47LW5600 47LG 60PZ950 60"LG 50PZ950 50"LG 60PZ750 60"LG 50PZ750 50"LG 60PZ550 60"LG 50PZ550 50"LG 50PW350 50"LG 42PW350LG LD920 or LD360LG 55LX6500LG 47LX6500LG 42LX6500LG 47LX9500 seriesLG 55LX9500 seriesLG 50PX950 seriesLG 60PX950 seriesMitsubishi WD-92840Mitsubishi WD-82840Mitsubishi WD-73840Mitsubishi WD-82740Mitsubishi WD-73740Mitsubishi WD-73640Mitsubishi WD-82838Mitsubishi WD-73838Mitsubishi WD-65838Mitsubishi WD-60738Mitsubishi WD-73638Mitsubishi WD-65638Mitsubishi WD-60638Mitsubishi WD-73C10Mitsubishi WD-65C10Mitsubishi WD-60C10Mitsubishi WD-60C10Panasonic TC-P65VT30Panasonic TC-P55VT30Panasonic TC-P65GT30Panasonic TC-P60GT30Panasonic TC-P55GT30Panasonic TC-P50GT30Panasonic TC-P65ST30Panasonic TC-P60ST30Panasonic TC-P55ST30Panasonic TC-P50ST30Panasonic TC-P46ST30Panasonic TC-P42ST30Panasonic TC-L37DT30Panasonic TC-L32DT30Panasonic TC-P50GT25Panasonic TC-P42GT25Panasonic TC-P65VT25Panasonic TC-P58VT25Panasonic TC-P54VT25Panasonic TC-P50VT25Panasonic TX-P65VT20Panasonic TC-P50VT20Panasonic TC-P42VT20Philips 52PFL8605H/12Philips 46PFL8605H/12Philips 40PFL8605H/12Philips 37PFL8605H/12Samsung UN60D8000Samsung UN55D8000Samsung UN46D8000Samsung UN40D8000Samsung UN60D7000Samsung UN55D7000Samsung UN46D7000Samsung UN60D6500Samsung UN55D6500Samsung UN46D6500Samsung UN40D6500Samsung UN55D6400Samsung UN46D6400Samsung UN40D6400Samsung UN32D6400Samsung PN64D8000Samsung PN59D8000Samsung PN51D8000Samsung PN64D7000Samsung PN59D7000Samsung PN51D7000Samsung PN59D6500Samsung PN51D6500Samsung PN51D490Samsung PN43D490Samsung UN55C9000Samsung UN46C9000Samsung UN65C8000Samsung UN55C8000Samsung UN46C8000Samsung UN55C7000Samsung UN46C7000Samsung UN40C7000Samsung LN46C750Samsung LN40C750Samsung PN63C8000Samsung PN58C8000Samsung PN50C8000Samsung PN63C7000Samsung PN58C7000Samsung PN50C7000Samsung PN50C680Samsung PN50C490Sharp LC-60LE835USharp LC-52LE835USharp LC-46LE835USharp LC-40LE835USharp LC-52LE925Sharp LC-60LV3Sharp LC-52LV3Sharp LC-46LV3Sharp LC-40LV3Sony BRAVIA KDL60EX720Sony BRAVIA KDL55EX720Sony BRAVIA KDL46EX720Sony BRAVIA KDL40EX720Sony BRAVIA KDL32EX720Sony XBR-60LX900Sony XBR-52LX900Sony XBR-52HX909Sony XBR-46HX909Sony KDL-60NX810Sony KDL-55NX810Sony KDL-46NX810Sony KDL-55HX800Sony KDL-46HX800Sony KDL-40HX800Sony KDL-40NX710Toshiba 65UL610UToshiba 55UL610UToshiba 46UL610UToshiba 55TL515UToshiba 47TL515UToshiba 42TL515UToshiba 32TL515UToshiba 55WX800UToshiba 46WX800UVizio XVT3D650SVVizio XVT3D554SVVizio XVT3D474SVVizio XVT3D424SVVizio E3D470VXVizio E3D420VXVizio E3D320VXVizio XVT3D554SVVizio XVT3D474SVVizio XVT3D424SVWestinghouse W47S2TCD
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