Quote Originally Posted by Malbec View Post
Actually I'd recommend almost all of Clint's modern stuff. I've heard mixed things about American Sniper but want to see it to make my own mind up. Most of the stuff he's done including and since Unforgiven has been worth watching IMO, complex plots, murky morals and a focus on violence which is a world away from Hollywood blastfests. He likes looking at the type of personality that is drawn to it and especially the impact it has on the people that get involved who are internally scarred for life.

Gadjo, I'd also recommend Terence Mallick's stuff though whether you'd consider him as 'mainstream' I don't know.
Malbec, mon sewer, Malick !!!!! No not mainstream.... Not in same ocean as whatever stream runs into it..So facinated with his treatment of the great James Jones
Here's wiki's intro:
The Thin Red Line is a 1998 American ensemble epic war film written and directed by Terrence Malick. Based on the novel by James Jones, it tells a fictionalized version of the Battle of Mount Austen, which was part of the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Pacific Theater of World War II. It portrays soldiers of C Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, played by Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas and Ben Chaplin. Although the title may seem to reference a line from Rudyard Kipling's poem "Tommy", from Barrack-Room Ballads, in which he calls foot soldiers "the thin red line of heroes",[2] referring to the stand of the 93rd Regiment in the Battle of Balaclava of the Crimean War, it is in reality a quote from the book which reads "they discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad... and the living from the dead..."

A man who returns to filmaking after 20 years 'in the wildernesss" cannot be at all mainstream.

The subject in "The Thin Red Line" was maybe especially interesting to me having of course read Jones' novel years earlier and having had a good friend who was a Marine who fought there--and lost his right arm from bad wounds that became horribly infected....I would roll certain funny, fat cigarettes for him which were then illegal, but now in my enlightened State are finally legal And as i rolled he talked about Guadalcanal, and we talked about movies.....John Ford's great ones, and war movies--he was an academic so the point of view was about the creation of the Mythos ---which is about as close as most Americans get to war.....
And interestingly we predicted that when we lost the stupid war America was then fighting--once again in the jungles---that there would be some real crap movies glorifying the people as heroes because you could possibly make on critical of the policies...

Looks like it is once again the era of paeans to individuals, without serious context of what they were doing.