| You know what the problem with Hollywood is?
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| They make shit.
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| Unbelievable, unremarkable shit.
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| Now I’m not some grungy wannabe filmmaker
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| that’s searching for existentialism
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| through a haze of bong smoke or something.
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| No, it’s easy to pick apart bad acting, short-sighted directing,
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| and a purely moronic stringing together of words that
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| many of the studios term as «prose».
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| No, I’m talking about the lack of realism.
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| Realism; |
| not a pervasive element in today’s modern
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| American cinematic vision.
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| Take Dog Day Afternoon, for example.
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| Arguably Pacino’s best work,
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| short of Scarface and Godfather Part 1, of course.
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| Masterpiece of directing, easily Lumet’s best.
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| The cinematography, the acting, the screenplay, all top-notch.
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| But… they didn’t push the envelope.
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| Now what if in Dog Day, Sonny really wanted to get away with it?
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| What if — now here’s the tricky part — what if he started
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| killing hostages right away? |
| No mercy, no quarter.
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| «Meet our demands or the pretty blonde in the bellbottoms
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| gets it the back of the head."Bam, splat!
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| What, still no bus? |
| Come on!
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| How many innocent victims splattered across a window
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| would it take to have the city reverse its policy on
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| hostage situations? |
| And this is 1976; |
| there’s no CNN,
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| there’s no CNBC, there’s no internet!
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| Now fast forward to today, present time, same situation.
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| How quickly would the modern media make a frenzy over this?
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| In a matter of hours, it’d be biggest story from Boston to Budapest!
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| Ten hostages die, twenty, thirty; |
| bum bum, one after another.
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| All caught in high-def, computer-enhanced, color corrected.
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| You can practically taste the brain matter.
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| All for what? |
| A bus, a plane?
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| A couple of million dollars that’s federally insured?
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| I don’t think so. |
| Just a thought.
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| I mean, it’s not within the realm of conventional cinema but what if? |