In all seriousness, what movie did you watch? Because there's no way that you're talking about the same movie that I watched. Literally
none of this has anything to do with
Good Time. In line with
@Yotsuya, I would argue that this movie is almost apolitical. It's entirely fueled by emotionality, there's almost nothing of intellectual substance here on the theme or message level. But the funniest part is that if you
really dig and you try
really hard to extract
something political, the only thing that you're going to find is anathema to anything even resembling a right wing or libertarian position/ethos, specifically in the scenes first with Connie and Crystal watching
Cops and Connie showing his three-years-too-soon righteous indignation at cops taking crazy people off the streets - the only thing lamer than a lowlife career criminal rooting against the cops is acting like doing so gives him the moral high ground - and then with the "mean" cops who "don't have time for this shit" showing up at the amusement park and taking Crystal away. The only thing missing to situate this movie on the left side of the aisle is a giant BLM protest for Connie to run through, scored of course to loud faux intense synth "music."
As for the Jordan Peterson comment, I'm just going to ignore that because nobody who's read a single line of his writing or watched a single video of his in full would think that any of the morons in this movie exemplify anything that he's ever talked about.
Finally, to your comments about Connie's "high degree of intelligence": You mean the guy who broke the wrong person out of the hospital? That highly intelligent individual?
Now that you've put an actually good movie on the table for discussion, I'm going to have to step in and defend it. Leaving aside the reasonable and entirely plausible "character motivation" explanation - a cab is quicker, easier, and cheaper than a limo or a car service, especially given Cruise's characters limited information and given that he couldn't have possibly expected that he'd be walking into
that - there's also the more intriguing "thematic" explanation. To the degree that
Eyes Wide Shut operates like a Kafkaesque nightmare, the fact that everything, down to his mode of transportation, would betray Cruise follows perfectly the trajectory of a nightmare. Exposed in front of everybody, almost being made to stand naked before your tormentors, it's literally the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Haha, one of my favorite "culture shock" moments when I was with my Lithuanian ex was learning this Adidas thing. In my homeland of Chicago, that's just jock attire, but in her world, it's low class Eurotrash attire.
She legit had a hard time dealing with me wearing Adidas. In response, I of course taunted her endlessly with my three stripe style
It
could've worked as a dark comedy. This could've been a good Coen Brothers style,
Raising Arizona/
Burn After Reading-esque nonsense trek. Hell, Chad Feldheimer would've been a great partner-in-crime for Connie.
Unfortunately, the intelligence, the inspiration, and the skill weren't there to pull something like this off. If you got enjoyment out of it by laughing at the idiocy, great, but don't give the filmmakers credit for crafting some brilliant dark comedy. You're the one doing the heavy lifting here,
europe. Keep the credit for yourself