Thursday Movie Picks: Gaslighting

 

For the 12th week of 2022 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. We go into the subject of gaslighting in which people are told certain things believing them to be true when the reality is that they’re being manipulated for someone’s gain. It’s a subject that is becoming prevalent as people are being fed a lot of bullshit and make them believe it is true as it is more common these days for anyone that watches FAUX News. Here are my three picks:

1. Sunset Boulevard

Billy Wilder’s noir-suspense drama about a lowly screenwriter hired to write a film for a fading film star who still believes that her comeback is coming. Yet, the reality is that she is a woman whose time had come and gone while convinced she gets fan mail although it is her butler that is protecting her from this harsh reality of the fickleness that is Hollywood. It is a film that is full of many twists and turns as it is told by the protagonist where the first thing shown in the film is his dead body as it is one of the finest films of the 20th Century.

2. Rosemary's Baby

The second part of a thematic trilogy of films set inside strange apartments, Roman Polanski’s story about a woman who moves into a new apartment in New York City with her actor husband unaware that the apartment is filled with creepy people. People are telling her all sorts of shit as she believes they’re part of a cult devoted to Satan just as she had become pregnant. It is a film that has all of these people lying to this woman who is smart enough to be aware that something is off as it is a pure horror film.

3. Changeling

Based on real-life events during the 1930s, Clint Eastwood’s drama about a woman whose son goes missing until the LAPD claims to have found her son only to give her the wrong boy. The LAPD claims they found her son but she knows this boy isn’t her son where she is sent to a mental hospital for going against the police while people who know her including a minister who has been outspoken against the police. Yet, it is the truth over what this woman learned about her son’s whereabouts is even more shocking as it play into not just the corruption of the LAPD but something far more sinister that involves a man killing children. It is one of Eastwood’s great films during a period from starting with Mystic River and into this film where he was pretty much on a roll.

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