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Cape Fear
or How To Coast in Respectability As The Greatest Director™
There are movies that are Great Movies™ and there are movies that I
Need To Say Are Good Movies™. Cape Fear(1991) feels like a 30-year-old movie,
because it is. Back then, movies didn’t have to compete with Twitter, or your
Bird App friends. You could sit and watch a movie. Playing with a phone would
have been strange, because it was just a phone! All it did was call people!
Imagine! The horror!
Cape Fear is a slow-burner of a movie. Think
CSI: Nondescript North Carolina Beach Town but longer. Nick Nolte, pre-brain-damage,
plays a lawyer who didn’t adequately defend a scumbag. Less than believably played
by Robert DeNiro.
All I gotta ask
is
HOW?!
How did DeNiro find Nolte once he was
released? Nolte had recently relocated from Georgia where DeNiro had committed
the crime. It’s a big world! The internet wasn’t around! Not even dial-up! How
did he find them! How!
Explain, Scorsese! You made Good Fellas! Do
Better! Smash edits aren’t enough to build tension anymore! You can’t transition
your way to an Oscar! This isn’t Taxi Driver! The men see each other in a
theater. Ok. What? How did he know he was going to be there with no search history
to hack?
Gah! This why White-People-Can’t-Cook-Twitter™
is so much more compelling! Marty, ya gotta be better than that blonde lady
doing a step-by-step montage of pan-seering dry spaghetti wrapped in raw ground
beef in a star burst reduction! It ain’t 1991 anymore!
Cape
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