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quietprofanity Oct. 19th, 2008 03:23 pm)
quietprofanity Oct. 19th, 2008 03:23 pm)"I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt ‘till I traveled in America." – Charles Dickens, 1842
"I have many friends in America, and feel a grateful interest in the country. To represent me as viewing it with ill-nature, animosity, or partisanship, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one; and which I have disregarded for eight years, and could disregard for eighty more."
- Charles Dickens, 1850
I wasn’t going to watch this movie. It was the bad critics’ reviews that made me do it. Not because I use the supposed out-of-touchness of critics as a barometer against what I would like or anything like that. It was because they used words that said things about my hero.
Michael Moore? Nah, Charles Dickens.
Like Roger Moore from The Orlando Sentinel:
One hundred and sixty-five years after Charles Dickens called for civic reform, compassion, humanity and charity to be watchwords in human life with A Christmas Carol, Hollywood's most rabid conservatives have rallied to make An American Carol, a comedy that equates dissent with "treason," that presents Bill O'Reilly as a model of political restraint and offers us Kelsey Grammer as the ghost of General George S. Patton.
Yeah, when I think "Blood and Guts," I think Frasier.
Or like Prairie Miller from News Blaze:
Kicking off the theatrics with a thud, is Leslie Nielsen as a senile grandpa cooking up inedible burgers at a Fourth of July picnic. When his grandchildren gag on the grub and demand a story instead, Grandpa conjures up a tall tale about a pompous, obese and unpatriotic eating disorder liberal moviemaker named Michael, uh, Malone (Kevin Farley), who hates America so badly that like Scrooge at Christmastime, he wants to abolish the Fourth Of July holiday. He also wants to get famous so badly, that Malone accepts funding for his next movie from Al Qaeda. Ha ha.
If Charles Dickens isn't rolling over in his grave by now, there's more.
Makes Dickens roll in his grave? I haven’t heard that phrase since the 1998 Great Expectations movie. Intriguing ...
But what interested me more was Roger's quote. Why bring up Dickens' "civic reform, compassion, humanity and charity" in a way that implies this movie works against or betrays those principles? It’s almost as if Roger Moore feels like the movie has stolen something from American liberals by using Dickens' story structure as a loud bullhorn for hawkish American conservatism.
So, has it? Well, that's a long story.
Full disclosure time. I'm a liberal. I'm 24-years-old but I've always been a liberal, and unless the conservative movement in America somehow suddenly becomes pro-gay rights and pro-women's rights and comes up with some awesome economic plan I doubt I'll ever switch sides.
I used to watch Michael Moore’s films but don’t anymore. The reasons for the latter are complicated. Part of it is the debate over the alleged inaccuracies, but I also got sick of a lot of the kids on my campus who went on about how news wasn’t trustworthy but Michael Moore’s films totally were. (I was a journalism major and this was a major morale-killer.) As someone who was a teenager during the Columbine shootings I liked Bowling for Columbine because it made me feel like someone was at least trying to analyze the problem from beyond a "those damn kids and their damn violent TV/movies/music" standpoint, but I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was kind of lame and veered between "I already know this" to things that sounded too conspiracy-theory for me.*
That being said, I do think those who call Fahrenheit 9/11 anti-American and Bowling for Columbine anti-gun are wrong. Fahrenheit 9/11 was an attack on George W. Bush. Bowling for Columbine was an analysis of school shootings, and at no point in the film does it ever call for a repeal of the second amendment. To call them anti-American and anti-gun are fundamental misinterpretations which say more about the people making them than about Michael Moore himself.
But I don't like David Zucker much either, even before his conversion to conservatism. It may be because I'm young, but with the exception of a few scenes, I found Airplane! really unimpressive and dated. I remember enjoying the bits of the Naked Gun movies I saw on TV, but those were back around 1995 and I don’t feel my life has been reduced in any way because I haven't seen them in full. Don't ask me about the Scary Movie sequels. I don't want to think about it.
I do, however, love Dickens. That gives me a bit of a limitation as an objective critic on this. One of the appeals of Charles Dickens' writing is that he speaks to the audience in the voice of a friend. He also understands what it's like to feels wretched or like an outsider. The moment I fell in love with Charles Dickens was the scene in Great Expectations where Pip kicks a wall as he realizes Estella hates him even as he's hopelessly in love with her. As a 14-year-old getting over the sting of unrequited love, that scene made me feel like someone really understood me. There could be in me a drive to want to believe Dickens would inherently side with me and reflect my political beliefs because of that.
George Orwell noted this as a phenomenon:
When [G.K.] Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as 'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as Chesterton would have put it).
Liberals like me would like to believe Charles Dickens is one of us, because we like to believe we’re champions of the underdog. Some of his positions in his lifetime, like his anti-slavery position, his eventual turnaround on the issue of anti-Semitism, his critiques of poor houses and factory conditions and his critiques of the idea of male supremacy in marriage make him someone liberals would want on their side.
But, like Norrie Epstein says in "The Friendly Dickens" while Dickens was in some ways ahead of his time, in other ways he wasn’t. He was anti-women's suffrage (his mistress was a member the Anti-Suffrage League) and thought blacks were intellectually inferior. He also has some outright conservative views. He was anti-union and became pro-capital punishment later in life, although he hated the spectacle of public hangings.
But saying Charles Dickens was not a liberal is a far cry from turning him into a hawkish neo-con, which is the general conceit of An American Carol.
Did any of you watch The Daily Show's coverage of the conventions? Remember when Jon Stewart said, "Democrats have to prove they love America. Everyone knows Republicans love America, they just hate half the people living in it."
Well, THAT IS THIS MOVIE. Period. I am not exaggerating this. This movie genuinely believes that liberals are awful people who "hate America and hate God." And I know that because the film outright says it. On many occasions.
In my initial conception for this review, I was going to compare the movie unfavorably to other movies which have managed to tackle issues from a liberal point of view but still show a fundamental understanding of the other side.** But, honestly, there’s not much of a point in doing that. The movie wears what Fred Clark calls "the paradox of the persecuted hegemon on its sleeve." Show what liberals think? But liberals are traitors and appeasers of terrorists! And liberals have the rest of Hollywood. This is for us. This is for the REAL America, as country singer Trace Adkins says when he points to his audience at his concert for the troops. Or as Leslie Neilsen says over the closing shot, "Hollywood thinks people wouldn’t want to see a movie that shows the good things about America." You can insert your own "wink wink" at the assumed audience of conservatives. ***
In other words, the movie isn't interested in convincing. Liberals who try to argue with it are wasting their time because when the movie shows Bill O'Reilly as the voice of reason, fending off a Rosie O'Donnell clone who screeches, "Radical Islam isn't the same as terrorism!" and "Radical Christians are just as dangerous as Radical Muslims" and shows a video where people at an airport have to go through invasive security checkpoints due to radical Christians … well, what can you do? You could maybe throw up your hands and scream, "That's not what we're saying!" but the movie doesn't give a shit. It's already decided you’re a dangerous traitor.
The movie is remarkably single issue: The Iraq War is good and absolutely justified because Islamic terrorism is the largest threat to the world since Nazism. Anything other than military action is appeasement and a show of strength is absolutely necessary and the only thing that works. The U.S. military is made up of saints who all want to fight due to an unwavering belief in the glory of our country. Anyone who suggests they shouldn't be there is an appeaser, a traitor and wrong. If they need to violate the Geneva Conventions, SHUT UP YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WAR!****
The film is really crazy militaristic. I feel like conservatives have been able to use perceived troop-bashing as their "Get out of Criticism Free" card on many occasions and this film uses it like full-scale body armor. It's interesting that for a film that's in many ways a supporter of the Bush administration's foreign polices, the president is never mentioned. On the most basic level, the film casts JFK as Marley, Gen. George S. Patton as the Past Ghost, Gen. George Washington as the Present Ghost and country singer Trace Adkins as the Future Ghost. But it actually spends 50 percent of the movie with Patton being the primary "voice of reason."***** JFK tells Michael Malone that war is sometimes necessary, George Washington says if you believe America's foreign policy had anything to do with 9/11 you're going to hell, and Jimmy Carter shows up to have his idea that Israel is an apartheid state mocked (one of the few positions in the film I agree with) but other than that, politicians are remarkably absent in a political film.
Taking a Dickens story and turning into a pro-war treatise is kind of bizarre. While Charles Dickens wrote two novels about revolutions (Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities), he never wrote about full scale war.
In Dickens, Peter Ackroyd does track down Dickens' opinions on the Crimean War:
He had already touched upon [the war] in one of his Christmas stories, where the union of France and England is greeted with some satisfaction; a satisfaction all the more real, of course, since Dickens had learnt at first-hand the pleasures of France and of the French. But now he extended that affection into a public pledge of support for the war: "… if ever there were a time when noble hearts were deserving well of mankind by exposing themselves to the obedient bayonets of a rash and barbarian tyrant, it is now, when the faithful children of England and France are fighting in Crimea." Close to jingoism, perhaps, but also close to Dickens’ real mood; the Russian empire was for him … a cruel autocracy bent upon subduing the smaller states of Europe In that sense it was a force literally against civilisation, a civilisation of which England and France were the two major examples. But he had many private reservations; for one thing the conduct of the war was being seriously mismanaged by that fatal combination of incompetence and vested interest which he observed in the ordinary conduct of affairs. Indeed the phenomenon was being repeated on a massive and perhaps fatal scale; supplies gone astray, equipment useless, medical treatment appalling. Out of an army of 54,000 men so many dead and most of the others unfit for duty.
You can insert your own parallels.
Orwell and Ackryod also say Dickens' attitude toward the revolutionaries in Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities is similarly complex. In one sense, Dickens believes revolution is horrible, and portrays the riots as a blood-thirsty mob with whom are impossible to reason.
But on the other hand, Orwell says Dickens also has contempt for those who started the fire.
But A Tale of Two Cities is not a companion volume to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed, with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc.
Again, how you transpose this onto the current conflict may say more about you than Dickens. Or maybe a whole lot about the circular nature of history and the debates over history. I don’t know.
There are some subplots to this movie. There's this whole thing where Michael Malone is going to make a feature after being jealous because documentaries don't do well but that awful George Mulrooney’s Yes, McCarthy was a Bad Man did awesome, which only serves to show how little the filmmakers know about Moore, given that his he actually made a feature film before the greater body of his work that is considered lesser than his documentaries.
Oh, and then there are the three terrorists who are going to take back their country from its new democracy by making a feature film and getting Michael Malone to direct it and ... something. Other reviewers said they were the only part of the movie they liked, but I tended to zone out and wonder how David Zucker lives with the idea that Islamic terrorists are both the worst threat since Hitler and a threat to everything the America stands for but portrays them as so haplessly stupid they don't realize suicide bombing means death and yet still manages to brush his teeth in the morning.
But I'm supposedly here to write about Dickens, so I'm just going to stick to that.
Next time ... when I do that part of the movie in-depth. I figured I'd give you guys a break. And me a break.
* If you want to watch a really awesome documentary on the Bush administration's doings in Iraq, a much better pick is "No End in Sight." Parts of it, like the government's failure to tell the troops to protect Iraq's museums in the looting after the fall of Baghdad, shocked me so much I nearly cried.
** Teeth (the abstinence-only movement) and Citizen Ruth (abortion) do, for the record. And Team America: World Police (the war on terror) gets points for being more on the conservative side of the fence, but making fun of its own, which An American Carol never does. On the other hand Saved (evangelical Christians) I think is a total preach-to-the-choir, "the left is right and the right is wrong" type of movie.
*** Actually, this is one of the movie’s weirdest contradictions. It goes on and on about how liberals and Michael Moore are an irrelevant minority, but then it also calls their peace protests and wish to bring the troops home dangerous and appeasing. "They don't matter ... BUT THEY MUST BE STOPPED!"
**** These are very close paraphrases of what the Gen. George S. Patton character says throughout the movie, including the bit about the Geneva Conventions. They don't mention Abu Ghraib. I'm actually kind of glad, because I fear they would try to defend it.
***** It makes me wish I knew a little more about the guy. Maybe somebody else can watch the An American Carol and analyze whether the film turning Patton into their personal Gary Stu is appropriate.
"I have many friends in America, and feel a grateful interest in the country. To represent me as viewing it with ill-nature, animosity, or partisanship, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one; and which I have disregarded for eight years, and could disregard for eighty more."
- Charles Dickens, 1850
I wasn’t going to watch this movie. It was the bad critics’ reviews that made me do it. Not because I use the supposed out-of-touchness of critics as a barometer against what I would like or anything like that. It was because they used words that said things about my hero.
Michael Moore? Nah, Charles Dickens.
Like Roger Moore from The Orlando Sentinel:
One hundred and sixty-five years after Charles Dickens called for civic reform, compassion, humanity and charity to be watchwords in human life with A Christmas Carol, Hollywood's most rabid conservatives have rallied to make An American Carol, a comedy that equates dissent with "treason," that presents Bill O'Reilly as a model of political restraint and offers us Kelsey Grammer as the ghost of General George S. Patton.
Yeah, when I think "Blood and Guts," I think Frasier.
Or like Prairie Miller from News Blaze:
Kicking off the theatrics with a thud, is Leslie Nielsen as a senile grandpa cooking up inedible burgers at a Fourth of July picnic. When his grandchildren gag on the grub and demand a story instead, Grandpa conjures up a tall tale about a pompous, obese and unpatriotic eating disorder liberal moviemaker named Michael, uh, Malone (Kevin Farley), who hates America so badly that like Scrooge at Christmastime, he wants to abolish the Fourth Of July holiday. He also wants to get famous so badly, that Malone accepts funding for his next movie from Al Qaeda. Ha ha.
If Charles Dickens isn't rolling over in his grave by now, there's more.
Makes Dickens roll in his grave? I haven’t heard that phrase since the 1998 Great Expectations movie. Intriguing ...
But what interested me more was Roger's quote. Why bring up Dickens' "civic reform, compassion, humanity and charity" in a way that implies this movie works against or betrays those principles? It’s almost as if Roger Moore feels like the movie has stolen something from American liberals by using Dickens' story structure as a loud bullhorn for hawkish American conservatism.
So, has it? Well, that's a long story.
Full disclosure time. I'm a liberal. I'm 24-years-old but I've always been a liberal, and unless the conservative movement in America somehow suddenly becomes pro-gay rights and pro-women's rights and comes up with some awesome economic plan I doubt I'll ever switch sides.
I used to watch Michael Moore’s films but don’t anymore. The reasons for the latter are complicated. Part of it is the debate over the alleged inaccuracies, but I also got sick of a lot of the kids on my campus who went on about how news wasn’t trustworthy but Michael Moore’s films totally were. (I was a journalism major and this was a major morale-killer.) As someone who was a teenager during the Columbine shootings I liked Bowling for Columbine because it made me feel like someone was at least trying to analyze the problem from beyond a "those damn kids and their damn violent TV/movies/music" standpoint, but I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was kind of lame and veered between "I already know this" to things that sounded too conspiracy-theory for me.*
That being said, I do think those who call Fahrenheit 9/11 anti-American and Bowling for Columbine anti-gun are wrong. Fahrenheit 9/11 was an attack on George W. Bush. Bowling for Columbine was an analysis of school shootings, and at no point in the film does it ever call for a repeal of the second amendment. To call them anti-American and anti-gun are fundamental misinterpretations which say more about the people making them than about Michael Moore himself.
But I don't like David Zucker much either, even before his conversion to conservatism. It may be because I'm young, but with the exception of a few scenes, I found Airplane! really unimpressive and dated. I remember enjoying the bits of the Naked Gun movies I saw on TV, but those were back around 1995 and I don’t feel my life has been reduced in any way because I haven't seen them in full. Don't ask me about the Scary Movie sequels. I don't want to think about it.
I do, however, love Dickens. That gives me a bit of a limitation as an objective critic on this. One of the appeals of Charles Dickens' writing is that he speaks to the audience in the voice of a friend. He also understands what it's like to feels wretched or like an outsider. The moment I fell in love with Charles Dickens was the scene in Great Expectations where Pip kicks a wall as he realizes Estella hates him even as he's hopelessly in love with her. As a 14-year-old getting over the sting of unrequited love, that scene made me feel like someone really understood me. There could be in me a drive to want to believe Dickens would inherently side with me and reflect my political beliefs because of that.
George Orwell noted this as a phenomenon:
When [G.K.] Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as 'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as Chesterton would have put it).
Liberals like me would like to believe Charles Dickens is one of us, because we like to believe we’re champions of the underdog. Some of his positions in his lifetime, like his anti-slavery position, his eventual turnaround on the issue of anti-Semitism, his critiques of poor houses and factory conditions and his critiques of the idea of male supremacy in marriage make him someone liberals would want on their side.
But, like Norrie Epstein says in "The Friendly Dickens" while Dickens was in some ways ahead of his time, in other ways he wasn’t. He was anti-women's suffrage (his mistress was a member the Anti-Suffrage League) and thought blacks were intellectually inferior. He also has some outright conservative views. He was anti-union and became pro-capital punishment later in life, although he hated the spectacle of public hangings.
But saying Charles Dickens was not a liberal is a far cry from turning him into a hawkish neo-con, which is the general conceit of An American Carol.
Did any of you watch The Daily Show's coverage of the conventions? Remember when Jon Stewart said, "Democrats have to prove they love America. Everyone knows Republicans love America, they just hate half the people living in it."
Well, THAT IS THIS MOVIE. Period. I am not exaggerating this. This movie genuinely believes that liberals are awful people who "hate America and hate God." And I know that because the film outright says it. On many occasions.
In my initial conception for this review, I was going to compare the movie unfavorably to other movies which have managed to tackle issues from a liberal point of view but still show a fundamental understanding of the other side.** But, honestly, there’s not much of a point in doing that. The movie wears what Fred Clark calls "the paradox of the persecuted hegemon on its sleeve." Show what liberals think? But liberals are traitors and appeasers of terrorists! And liberals have the rest of Hollywood. This is for us. This is for the REAL America, as country singer Trace Adkins says when he points to his audience at his concert for the troops. Or as Leslie Neilsen says over the closing shot, "Hollywood thinks people wouldn’t want to see a movie that shows the good things about America." You can insert your own "wink wink" at the assumed audience of conservatives. ***
In other words, the movie isn't interested in convincing. Liberals who try to argue with it are wasting their time because when the movie shows Bill O'Reilly as the voice of reason, fending off a Rosie O'Donnell clone who screeches, "Radical Islam isn't the same as terrorism!" and "Radical Christians are just as dangerous as Radical Muslims" and shows a video where people at an airport have to go through invasive security checkpoints due to radical Christians … well, what can you do? You could maybe throw up your hands and scream, "That's not what we're saying!" but the movie doesn't give a shit. It's already decided you’re a dangerous traitor.
The movie is remarkably single issue: The Iraq War is good and absolutely justified because Islamic terrorism is the largest threat to the world since Nazism. Anything other than military action is appeasement and a show of strength is absolutely necessary and the only thing that works. The U.S. military is made up of saints who all want to fight due to an unwavering belief in the glory of our country. Anyone who suggests they shouldn't be there is an appeaser, a traitor and wrong. If they need to violate the Geneva Conventions, SHUT UP YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WAR!****
The film is really crazy militaristic. I feel like conservatives have been able to use perceived troop-bashing as their "Get out of Criticism Free" card on many occasions and this film uses it like full-scale body armor. It's interesting that for a film that's in many ways a supporter of the Bush administration's foreign polices, the president is never mentioned. On the most basic level, the film casts JFK as Marley, Gen. George S. Patton as the Past Ghost, Gen. George Washington as the Present Ghost and country singer Trace Adkins as the Future Ghost. But it actually spends 50 percent of the movie with Patton being the primary "voice of reason."***** JFK tells Michael Malone that war is sometimes necessary, George Washington says if you believe America's foreign policy had anything to do with 9/11 you're going to hell, and Jimmy Carter shows up to have his idea that Israel is an apartheid state mocked (one of the few positions in the film I agree with) but other than that, politicians are remarkably absent in a political film.
Taking a Dickens story and turning into a pro-war treatise is kind of bizarre. While Charles Dickens wrote two novels about revolutions (Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities), he never wrote about full scale war.
In Dickens, Peter Ackroyd does track down Dickens' opinions on the Crimean War:
He had already touched upon [the war] in one of his Christmas stories, where the union of France and England is greeted with some satisfaction; a satisfaction all the more real, of course, since Dickens had learnt at first-hand the pleasures of France and of the French. But now he extended that affection into a public pledge of support for the war: "… if ever there were a time when noble hearts were deserving well of mankind by exposing themselves to the obedient bayonets of a rash and barbarian tyrant, it is now, when the faithful children of England and France are fighting in Crimea." Close to jingoism, perhaps, but also close to Dickens’ real mood; the Russian empire was for him … a cruel autocracy bent upon subduing the smaller states of Europe In that sense it was a force literally against civilisation, a civilisation of which England and France were the two major examples. But he had many private reservations; for one thing the conduct of the war was being seriously mismanaged by that fatal combination of incompetence and vested interest which he observed in the ordinary conduct of affairs. Indeed the phenomenon was being repeated on a massive and perhaps fatal scale; supplies gone astray, equipment useless, medical treatment appalling. Out of an army of 54,000 men so many dead and most of the others unfit for duty.
You can insert your own parallels.
Orwell and Ackryod also say Dickens' attitude toward the revolutionaries in Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities is similarly complex. In one sense, Dickens believes revolution is horrible, and portrays the riots as a blood-thirsty mob with whom are impossible to reason.
But on the other hand, Orwell says Dickens also has contempt for those who started the fire.
But A Tale of Two Cities is not a companion volume to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed, with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc.
Again, how you transpose this onto the current conflict may say more about you than Dickens. Or maybe a whole lot about the circular nature of history and the debates over history. I don’t know.
There are some subplots to this movie. There's this whole thing where Michael Malone is going to make a feature after being jealous because documentaries don't do well but that awful George Mulrooney’s Yes, McCarthy was a Bad Man did awesome, which only serves to show how little the filmmakers know about Moore, given that his he actually made a feature film before the greater body of his work that is considered lesser than his documentaries.
Oh, and then there are the three terrorists who are going to take back their country from its new democracy by making a feature film and getting Michael Malone to direct it and ... something. Other reviewers said they were the only part of the movie they liked, but I tended to zone out and wonder how David Zucker lives with the idea that Islamic terrorists are both the worst threat since Hitler and a threat to everything the America stands for but portrays them as so haplessly stupid they don't realize suicide bombing means death and yet still manages to brush his teeth in the morning.
But I'm supposedly here to write about Dickens, so I'm just going to stick to that.
Next time ... when I do that part of the movie in-depth. I figured I'd give you guys a break. And me a break.
* If you want to watch a really awesome documentary on the Bush administration's doings in Iraq, a much better pick is "No End in Sight." Parts of it, like the government's failure to tell the troops to protect Iraq's museums in the looting after the fall of Baghdad, shocked me so much I nearly cried.
** Teeth (the abstinence-only movement) and Citizen Ruth (abortion) do, for the record. And Team America: World Police (the war on terror) gets points for being more on the conservative side of the fence, but making fun of its own, which An American Carol never does. On the other hand Saved (evangelical Christians) I think is a total preach-to-the-choir, "the left is right and the right is wrong" type of movie.
*** Actually, this is one of the movie’s weirdest contradictions. It goes on and on about how liberals and Michael Moore are an irrelevant minority, but then it also calls their peace protests and wish to bring the troops home dangerous and appeasing. "They don't matter ... BUT THEY MUST BE STOPPED!"
**** These are very close paraphrases of what the Gen. George S. Patton character says throughout the movie, including the bit about the Geneva Conventions. They don't mention Abu Ghraib. I'm actually kind of glad, because I fear they would try to defend it.
***** It makes me wish I knew a little more about the guy. Maybe somebody else can watch the An American Carol and analyze whether the film turning Patton into their personal Gary Stu is appropriate.
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From:
no subject
Personally, I liked Bush's War.
I find the whole "imaginary liberal" concept chilling. The fact is, this is extremely black-and-white thinking without any hint of grey area. I can't live like that and I believe it is lazy and shallow-minded for anyone to think that way.
I don't think I could possibly sit through this movie. I can see why critics' comments pulled you in, though.
From:
no subject
I find the whole "imaginary liberal" concept chilling. The fact is, this is extremely black-and-white thinking without any hint of grey area. I can't live like that and I believe it is lazy and shallow-minded for anyone to think that way.
When you stop seeing your enemies as people, all discourse has broken down. Although in a weird way I think there's people out there who believe in the "imaginary liberal" and don't at the same time. They may or may not be running for President.
I don't think I could possibly sit through this movie. I can see why critics' comments pulled you in, though.
Oddly enough, I don't think it's the worst movie I saw this year on a quality level. Tarantino's half of Grindhouse was that much of a torture. Then again, I went into An American Carol expecting to be angry and I didn't for Death Proof...
From:
no subject
I agree. After all, if they're not people, they don't really matter, do they?
I think there's people out there who believe in the "imaginary liberal" and don't at the same time.
I do, too. I'm also sure some people believe wholeheartedly in the concept-- just as sure as the Creationist Musuem stands, in utter refute of science. Some people will believe anything.
Well, I don't expect much beyond over-the-top gore out of Tarantino, but I get what you're saying. ;}
From:
no subject
Christian hegemony... white hegemony... anti-gay... anti-abortion... anti-women's rights... anti-intellectualism... pro-gun... pro-war... pro-xenophobia... pro-[mindless]consumerism...
...seem to gel together into something bigger and much scarier. >_>
And yet you know deep down, rather than simply throwing up my hands and screaming "HOW CAN THESE PEOPLE BE FOR SO MANY BAD THINGS???", the proper, human thing to do is going out of your way to understand them on a personal level (and knowing you'll probably fail to convert them if you tried) ._.
I suppose it also boils down to the failure of our political structure to provide real alternatives which would "diffuse" all Teh Evil from gathering under one banner...
From:
no subject
When you meet them ... not every one is like them and you can get them to understand your position and understand theirs.
I suppose it also boils down to the failure of our political structure to provide real alternatives which would "diffuse" all Teh Evil from gathering under one banner...
Our congressional system really isn't set up for a third party, alas. I think its yay-for-incumbents nonsense is why we're so backwards-ly white dudes while New Zealand once elected a transsexual MP.
From:
no subject
Of course, just make sure you never SAY everything in that article to them outright...
From:
Well ...
I don't want to turn this into a conservative bash-fest, though. I get tempted very often to argue for Obama based on this behavior, but I don't know how fair it is.
Like,
And with the news media itself (not just print and TV, but also the Internet and the radio and most sources) being so split we don't hear the same messages.
I can't wait until this election is over.