Oh Captain, My Captain.

Rating: 8/10 (6 November 2019)

Long before I had seen this film I knew of the most famous scene, that being the "Oh, captain, my captain" scene, and I've seen the phrase 'Carpe Diem' scribbled on whiteboards ever since I was a wee little lad in grade school. This film was ingrained in our culture before I entered the world (I know, I'm so young!), so I've never known a world without the ideas presented by so brilliantly and succinctly by John Keating (Robin Williams, "The Fisher King"). If I had seen this film probably ten years ago, during the days of my youth when I was still searching for authors who could better put into words how I felt about the world, this film probably would've been a five star movie for me, but now, in the post-#Me Too era there are a few issues that come to light, and I also found there was a bit too much melodrama in the third act for my taste.
As a whole however, this film is a wonderful work of art that has themes that I so agree with that I could sing about them from the top of a mountain. I've often quoted Franz Kafka on the TMM Podcast, specifically one of his more famous quotes, which is: "A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us," meaning that good fiction should chip away at us, soften us, make us reconsider our own thoughts and ideas... I think that the same quote could be ascribed to films as well (or any art form, for that matter). Great films challenge me, and this film tries its darndest to do just that. I think this film that, thirty years after its release, just falls short of being Peter Weir's masterpiece (you just can't beat "Picnic at Hanging Rock", in my opinion).