Game - The 5 Elements

Oh yes, l completely agree. Also lntolerable Cruelty, and maybe Burn after Reading. The Ladykillers remake was downright Very Bad Cohen though. Also, l never got all the love for O’ Brother; and l first thought A Serious Man was minor Cohen too; l completely changed my mind after a second viewing, and l now love it.

I agree with Burn and O Brother (haven’t seen Cruelty or Ladykillers but neither seems to have left much of an impression on the world).

I didn’t feel a strong connection to A Serious Man but I’m sympathetic to the idea that it’s major Coen. It certainly appears to be the most forthrightly philosophical of their films.

Indeed!

Ha, forgot about that.

No nibbles after 12 hours? Time for the next clue.

  • Faces and floors

Also.

  • a spectacularly reflective orb

I’m stumped, even when translating the terminology into less loaded/more neutral or modern terms. Nothing clicks.

If it helps, it is not the Adam Sandler vehicle “Click”.

I’m going to go zany and say Saturday Night Fever from clues 5 and 7.

That’s a good guess.

West Side Story.

Nice, I bet that’s right

Close but wrong decade and borough.

It might be zany, it might be a madcap rush through the week, heedless of the consequences, but it’s also correct — it is Saturday Night Fever.

Saturday Night Fever was, as you may know, based on an article in New York Magazine called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”. It was written in a kind of faux-anthropological style as the author followed Italian kids much like John Travolta’s character as they clung together in little gangs. They were always working for the weekend, much as Loverboy sang about just a few years later, working in dead end jobs, getting in scraps with their racially incompatible neighbors, pursuing unfulfilling fornications, and finding a moment of respite in the thumping rhythm of the disco floor and their fabulous vestments.

It’s kind of funny that a few decades later, the writer came clean. He made most of his article up. Saturday Night Fever came a little bit from what he saw in discos, but was even more based on the mods he knew back in England. So if anyone wanted to remake Saturday Night Fever, they could do so but set it in working class Great Britain, and it would be closer to some kind of truth. Maybe writer Nik Cohn took Ringo’s words about whether he was a mod or a rocker too closely to heart: he’s just a mocker.

  • vagabonds warn of a conflagration, lettered men implore passersby to caper around

The Trammps sang about a Disco Inferno

and the Bee Gees said you should be dancing, yeah!

  • two bridges: one leads to despair and death, the other leads to a better life

Kind of a red bridge/blue bridge choice, but main character Tony and his chums wax poetic about the Verrazanno-(sic)-Narrows Bridge, at that time the longest bridge in the world, where (spoiler!!) they horseplay around and pretend to fall off and the guy under the most stress actually does fall to his death. But Tony ought to focus on the Brooklyn Bridge, where he can follow in his unrequited love’s footsteps into a wider, more fulfilling world. (Also, hey Staten Island, vaffanculo, right? Manhattan is where it’s at!)

  • a raid on a neighboring tribe seems successful, but…

In a sign that Tony’s friends are all assholes, even though he’s one of them, he and his crew beat up a quasi-rival quasi-gang of Latins in revenge for them beating up one of their guys. But then (spoiler!) it turns out that their guy that got beaten up badly enough to go to the hospital might have been making up the whole thing! What is this, a Twilight Zone episode? Sto’ cazzo!

  • a former holy man can’t help but be sought out for spiritual counsel

Tony’s brother Frank Jr. drifts in and out of the movie. He was a Catholic priest, and their parents loved their golden godly boy. Then he quit for unexpressed reasons (though an allergy to celibacy is the prime suspect), and it’s another sign that existing institutions are breaking down. But Tony’s friend can’t help asking Frankie if maybe it’d be okay, Catholicism-wise, if his girlfriend got an abortion. Confession is good for someone’s soul, if not the ex-priest.

  • Faces and floors

Faces is a thing from the bullshit article mentioned above, and is also mentioned in some easily missed dialogue, but Tony and crew call themselves “Faces” as if they could be called “braves” or “rakes” or “goodfellas” or “3rd level rogues” or something — guys that spend a lot of money and time on looking good and are relatively loyal to each other. And the floors, of course, are the well-lit disco dance floors that must have seemed like science fiction to anyone from a previous generation.

(The name of their favorite discotheque is the 2001 Odyssey, which is a cool name for a club in the mid '70s. Hey, anyone want to grab drinks at Edge of Tomorrow? How about we go dancing at the 2049 Blade Runner? Or maybe go snort something at the Mad Max Road?)

  • a spectacularly reflective orb

And above the dance floor is the disco ball.

@dtolman, do you find that life’s goin’ nowhere, somebody help me, somebody help me please? Just stay alive — and choose the next movie!

As always, hoping I do the film justice… here are your 5 elements

-Major film debut!
-Unclear rules of engagement
-Treasure map
-Interrogation
-A fortuitous room full of loot

Three Kings?

Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Edit: oh yeah, Three Kings!

LOL - didn’t even last 5 minutes :)

-Major film debut! Of Spike Jonze (director as an actor/the 4th wheel) and the Illustrative Special Effect stolen and made even more famous by TV Show CSI
-Unclear rules of engagement Are we shooting? Mark Wohlberg’s character asks in the beginning of the film
-Treasure map The film’s gold heist sparked by a literal treasure map
-Interrogation A sympathetic Iraqi interrogates Wohlberg about among other things, WTF is going on with Michael Jackson?
-A fortuitous room full of loot Wohlberg is thrown into a room full of looted cell phones - which he uses to call his wife at home

If anyone hasn’t seen it - HIGHLY recommended. The movie is pure gold in terms of acting, writing, cinematography, and direction. There is stuff in this movie that I still haven’t seen the like of (the insane shoot out that caps the first act for one)

Go ahead and have another go.

Nah - you earned it for that crushing victory :)