The Wicker Man

[uvanimon]

uploaded it for a friend, thought i'd offer it to those who are interested:

The Wicker Man (1973) (IMDB)

anyone else love this movie?

[istaros]

i sure do

[Todessehnsucht]

It's one of my favorites. One of the few movies that actually touches on pagan religion in a tasteful, honest way. The soundtrack/score is excellent, along with the actors' performances. Has a really genius plot to boot. I cringe everytime I remember they remade this film and completely butchered it.

[My AIDS, Your Arse]

uploaded it for a friend, thought i'd offer it to those who are interested:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G3N9BYPU

anyone else love this movie?

Thank you for posting this! I've only been able to watch the first half of it because of torrentAIDS.

[lyc]

Yes, great movie with a unique atmosphere! I've been re-watcing some Christopher Lee movies lately and I had forgotten that one...
I'm gonna see it again. I was lucky, I found a really cheap DVD of that movie few years ago.

[KiSSy]

This movie is a turd. I fail to see the appeal. It's a bitter, kneejerk reaction to Christianity and, despite previous comments, is NOT complimentary to pagan religion. Wait, I just described most metal...

[ASBO]

It seemed very liberal to me.

"Woe is me, in a perfect world, these pagans would be in charge, but instead we have the callow reactionary Authority Figures who damn all our fun, and if we just overthrew them, life would be easy."

A self-help book? Then again, I skimmed it. I'm thankful to the original poster who uploaded it, because I had been very curious. Also I hate all but a handful of movies so I'm a very bitchy audience.

[Alexis]

The Pagan perspective on sexuality and love, which are the main themes in this movie, are quite liberal compared to the Orthodox Christian POV.

I like this movie a lot for its aesthetics, atmosphere, and playful narrative. It suffers from some knee-jerk, 70's revolutionary nonsense, but the essence is positive and uplifting. Very touching, if you're in the right mood.

[ASBO]

You mean the liberal hippie neo-pagan perspective, don't you?

The ancients weren't sluts. They knew that making choices is what defines the individual.

The neo-Pagans, being liberals who think it would be neat to be pagan, have this "liberal perspective on sexuality" that most people seem fond of...

But I have seen nothing good come of it.

[Alexis]

The ancients, at least if we limit the discussion to Germanic pagans, had very strict social codes when it came to marriage etc. Reading Tacitus gives us a good glimpse of this. But we also read that most women walked around with very light clothing, lots of rituals involved nudity, and eroticism was part of the concept of love. The ancients weren't moral hypocrites about their own sexuality. All of this would be a big no-no for the Christianity to come, and would remain so up till the decline of the same. Then we got the hippie revolution and the neo-pagan nonsense, which is not really paganism.

To the movie, I'm not sure it promotes hippie paganism, but it clearly flirts with the idea.

[ASBO]

The ancients, at least if we limit the discussion to Germanic pagans, had very strict social codes when it came to marriage etc. Reading Tacitus gives us a good glimpse of this. But we also read that most women walked around with very light clothing, lots of rituals involved nudity, and eroticism was part of the concept of love.

None of this is incompatible with Christianity.

Of course eroticism is part of the concept of love... but not the ONLY concept. Meaning, you need to have several concepts operating at once, like friendship, respect, eroticism (which is actually: genetic compatibility).

I mean, what is love but a type of friendship that has breeding potential?

Rituals and public art involving nudity are common sense. Beautiful bodies should be shown.

But this is different than say modern Scandinavian sexual practices, which are degenerate.

[Devamitra]

To put the movie in context, it is not that far from the satanic/witch cult type of movies that were fashionable in the 60's and the 70's. It is a Christopher Lee horror film so no-one would expect it to have a religious or ideological sentiment in it but it is a proof of the power of the movie that it tends to raise these debates anyway. It's grand reputation might hurt the viewing experience, as it would be best seen alongside something like "Blood on Satan's Claw".

Both the Christian upholder of morality and the imaginary Pagans of the movie are shown to be driven by superstition up to the logical conclusion of their cat-and-mouse game; it's never implied that the sacrifice will have any effect on the crops of Summerisle so one can choose to see the Pagans' belief as laughable even though the animistic mystery and reckless sexuality of theirs is titillating and attractive.

Even Christian ritual is shown quite movingly, as in the early brief scenes of Howie taking communion in his home church, or Howie desperately forming a crude cross from scraps of wood and laying it on a grave just to leave some small mark of the Christian God there to protect the dead. I don’t think we are to take away that all of this is in service of evil, or is just useless. Rather, the film resonates with a sadness that we as a species can’t live up to the beauty of our rituals, our music, our poetry—that all this has no bearing on the fact that we are an immoral scourge on the earth. Everyone is so full of faith, and still they can’t be bothered to just be nice to everyone else. The outlook for humanity is bleak.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/thewickerman/

[KiSSy]

Why The Wicker Man is a shitty movie.

[Dylar]

The ancients, at least if we limit the discussion to Germanic pagans, had very strict social codes when it came to marriage etc. Reading Tacitus gives us a good glimpse of this. But we also read that most women walked around with very light clothing, lots of rituals involved nudity, and eroticism was part of the concept of love. The ancients weren't moral hypocrites about their own sexuality. All of this would be a big no-no for the Christianity to come, and would remain so up till the decline of the same. Then we got the hippie revolution and the neo-pagan nonsense, which is not really paganism.

To the movie, I'm not sure it promotes hippie paganism, but it clearly flirts with the idea.

Of course, the degree to which we can really trust Tacitus is always in question.  There is altogether too much of the 'stock' barbarian in Tacitus' writings about the Germans for me to be entirely comfortable with his accuracy.  When you account for the second-hand nature of his sources rhetorical purpose of the Germania (which is to subtly contrast the 'noble savage' Germans with the decayed and degenerate Roman nobility under the Judeo-Claudian emperors), I don't think you can express too much confidence in the reliability of his details.  Some of his statements about German dress, for instance, are clearly derived from Caesar's Commentaries, which almost certainly overstated the 'barbarism' of German customs and dress for a Roman public that implicitly believed that the uncivilized peoples on the northern fringe of their empire were howling, naked fanatics.  The idea that Germans habitually went about in a state of near nudity is absurd on its face: then as now, Germany proper was distinctly at the colder, wetter end of the temperate spectrum, not a place where people were likely to spend much time lightly clothed or unclothed entirely.

[ASBO]

I'm really sorry to inject reality in here but --

Do not expect profundity from movies. Movies are the ultimate distillation: 90 minutes of action, with very little in-depth dialogue supported, which means every ideal of the story must be super-simplified into a partial truth.

Movies and TV are good for the same things pulp novels were: mysteries, violence, adventure, big-breasted women and men with six-packs, gunfights and explosions.

They are not good for any kind of truth, which requires a more in-depth look only afforded (barely) by a novel or (more substantially) by non-fiction writing.

Movies are how they keep the proles occupied so they don't burn down Oakland every week.

Do not fall into the modern trap by taking information from movies, music or TV as "reliable" -- see it for what it is: symbolic entertainment. It is not reality. It does not describe reality. In fact, it is the opposite. It is alternate reality for those who find reality too painful because they're stupid losers.