Os Cangaceiros
6th September 2014, 22:51
I know that bcbm did a thread about these movies a while back that got me interested in watching the first one, but now that I've seen the second one recently I thought I'd make a thread about it...
The movies are about a French criminal named Jaques Mesrine who was a bank robber and general ne'er-do-well. People who are familiar with the left-wing politics of the 1960's and 1970's will really like these films, though, as they are surprisingly steeped in the political culture of the day; in the first film, Mesrine allies himself with a top operative in the FLQ in Quebec, and in the second film he abducts a wealthy businessman in the name of the "Palestine Liberation Front", threatens to blow up every maximum security prison with bombs and rocket launchers, and in the end of the film is going to meet the Red Brigades in Italy.
Mesrine as the film portrays him is a really interesting character psychologically. It's like he's insecure with just being portrayed as a simple criminal (no matter how many jams he gets out of) and wants to give some kind of grandiose objective to what he does, portraying himself as a revolutionary and such. I thought that part in the second film where he starts to strangle that reporter ("I'll show you how we did it in Algeria!") was hilarious, with his communist friend saying that "we're not fascists, just shoot him", as if killing him by gunfire was more ideologically pure than strangling him.
The ridiculous police tactics of that era are pretty hilarious, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesrine_(2008_film)
The movies are about a French criminal named Jaques Mesrine who was a bank robber and general ne'er-do-well. People who are familiar with the left-wing politics of the 1960's and 1970's will really like these films, though, as they are surprisingly steeped in the political culture of the day; in the first film, Mesrine allies himself with a top operative in the FLQ in Quebec, and in the second film he abducts a wealthy businessman in the name of the "Palestine Liberation Front", threatens to blow up every maximum security prison with bombs and rocket launchers, and in the end of the film is going to meet the Red Brigades in Italy.
Mesrine as the film portrays him is a really interesting character psychologically. It's like he's insecure with just being portrayed as a simple criminal (no matter how many jams he gets out of) and wants to give some kind of grandiose objective to what he does, portraying himself as a revolutionary and such. I thought that part in the second film where he starts to strangle that reporter ("I'll show you how we did it in Algeria!") was hilarious, with his communist friend saying that "we're not fascists, just shoot him", as if killing him by gunfire was more ideologically pure than strangling him.
The ridiculous police tactics of that era are pretty hilarious, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesrine_(2008_film)