My Movies, My Thoughts: The Deer Hunter Not for the Lighthearted

My Movies, My Thoughts: The Deer Hunter Not for the Lighthearted: #53 The Deer Hunter 1978:  I just kept thinking, this movie is so noisy! Steel-town trains. A loud Greek wedding. Bombs. Yelling. And, the s...

The Deer Hunter Not for the Lighthearted

#53 The Deer Hunter 1978:  I just kept thinking, this movie is so noisy! Steel-town trains. A loud Greek wedding. Bombs. Yelling. And, the sound of gun shots...in the mountains...in Vietnam. I'm not sure that if this movie hadn't been on the AFI Top 100 Movies List, that I would have ever watched it. 

There are moments of poetry, when Mike, played by Robert DeNiro, stops to apppreciate the "sun-dog" or when he stalks the deer in the mountains, and when the hunting party pauses to listen to the piano music in the bar. But, for the most part, I found the movie very brutal, both visually and audibly, and although poetry is an observation of the real, I tend to like my poetry to take me away to happier places. And, I guess the subject of war should be brutal, expressed in the gory and loud poetry that can only be experienced in the sights and sounds of the big screen. This movie is no Russian roulette...there is a bullet in every scene. Robert DeNiro plays the tough guy, deep thinker poet well.

For me, this one was a tough one to get back into my movie watching/blogging, as it required a great deal of emotional energy and patience. I may have to move the "Sound of Music" up just to balance it out!