Hollywood Fears Drones, Loves the Drone King [movie reviews]

This article discusses the plots of numerous sci-fi movies and contains spoilers for:  Total Recall, Elysium, Revenge of the Sith, The Lego Movie, Robocop, Captain America Winter Soldier, X-Men Days of Future Past.

You might think that Hollywood would be afraid of a ruler who is building an army of automated machines and an automated system for detecting threats to the regime.  It is amazing the number of movies that depict fear of the drone/droid, the soldier that is programmed simply to follow orders and has no qualms about war crimes and no Oathkeeper sentiments about the Constitution.

Revenge of the Sith
The recent trend could be said to be heralded by the Star Wars prequilogy, where the bad guys start out with access to a robot army, and eventually replace it with an army of clones (essentially a clone becomes a sort of human automaton for the purposes of the plot) called Stormtroopers.  Given his political leanings, Lucas may have had the university shootings of the Nixon era in mind when he conceived of the clone origins of Stormtroopers.  Also back then, he didn't have CGI, so Stormtroopers are much more nimble than any robot seen in the first Star Wars.

Total Recall
More recently we have the Total Recall remake. The remake tightens the colonialism angle and changes the setting to be completely on Earth.  Instead of the Martian colony vs. Earth, it's the Australian colony vs. Britain in a post-apocalyptic time--basic Two Worlds theme. The British dictator amasses an enormous army of robot soldiers which the Australian people will be powerless to stop.  The Australian people appear to be unarmed and can only run in terror as doomsday approaches.  It doesn't matter if the British people aren't keen on genocide; the autonomous battle droids will destroy on command.  NO human army necessary.

Elysium

The Supersoldier Era

Similar problems in Elysium.  Director Blomkamp makes a very similar movie to his previous District 9: a reluctant hero with a severe medical condition trying to get to a magic healing machine in the sky.  The adaptation of this plot to a Two Worlds story makes for a more gritty realization of the movie Upside Down (another Two Worlds sci-fi fantasy).  No extraterrestials in Elysium, however, quasi-governmental corporations are still responsible for slums, but in Elysium the protagonist is another factory worker who helps build battle droids (as in Total Recall) who will later show expertise in disabling them.  Elysium shows the totalitarian oppression accomplished through these droids and drones.  Only police/soldiers and criminals are armed, so the 2nd Amendment has been successfully dismantled in the future.  Blomkamp expands the apartheid theme of District 9 into a fanciful treatment (and moral framing) of America's immigration problem.  In the end, the Constitution of the future is not just a living document but living code.  Rewriting the code can instantly confer a right to free healthcare (not to mention the right to not be arrested) on whole populations.  (If only we didn't have this whole plague of representational government standing in the way of amnesty!)

Robocop
Which brings us to the Robocop reboot.  Where in the original Robocop movie corporations seem to be stepping in for a missing government, the reboot has been reworked into a morality tale that blames the corporations for bad government policy.  The movie frames its politics by showing a robot army used by America to occupy a Middle Eastern country.  It is extremely successful in reducing American casualties.  Suicide bombers are shown discussing how they don't want to kill anyone, just want to die on national tv (which is astoundingly different from suicide bombing in the 21st century), recasting terrorism as martyrdom.

A piece of legislation called the "Dreyfus Act" keeps the American government from using the military droids/drones to police its citizens.  So, as in Elysium, evil "corporationy" corporations are at work to overturn the Dreyfus Act (by funding a tv program for propaganda purposes) so they can sell even more droids.  Unlike the original, Robocop is simply a way to market robot police: by making a man into a robot soldier.  No politicians are shown to be villainous, just the cold-hearted corporate bozos.  The lead villain is named "Sellars" just to drive home that it's the bourgeois merchant class you are to fear.  If the government turns its robot military on its own citizens, it's the fault of corporate lobbying, so let's not ask why the government wants robot soldiers policing its own people, like an enemy occupation.

Robocop Alex Murphy is incredibly successful at solving and eliminating crime with his datamining, auto-profiling, and invincibility.  He should change his name to Homeland Security.  Is the point of Robocop that liberty is too essential to risk it even if that means are streets are not as crime-free?  Where are the pro-gun liberals?  They should take this message to heart.  Or is the message that a robot army is only bad if a corporation builds it?  Shouldn't we be afraid of a government empowered to squash any civilian uprising?  Even President Lincoln acknowledged that a people have a natural right to overthrow their government (whether he actuallly believed that is another matter).  Certainly all the authors of the Constitution, the Declaration, the Federalist papers and the Anti-Federalist papers agreed with that as the most fundamental right (because without that right, what happens when the government stops respecting your rights?).

Winter Soldier
Captain America: The Winter Soldier seems to be afraid for another reason.  The robot army in this movie is a bunch of aerial warships that combine the Obama-era data-mining powers of the NSA with the ability to target from the air anyone deemed likely to pose a threat to a totalitarian government.  The idea behind this movie is that once a benevolent government acquires the power to oppress its citizens, it is in immediate danger of a coup from people with the will to oppress the citizens.  Shades of this appear in The Avengers when the supersoldiers question whether a government more highly armed than its people can be trusted to always have their best interests at heart.

Days of Future Past
And now we have X-Men: Days of Future Past, which features a future where mutants are hunted by super-drones/droids, and not just them but anybody that carries the potential in their DNA for these paranormal mutants. Kind of like the Patriot Act under both Bush and Obama has been used to for purposes other than anticipating terrorist acts.  Kind of like a "legal regime" for indefinite suspension of citizen rights (Rachel Maddow).  Yep, the government gets so afraid of mutant terrorism (and they have good reason to be afraid) in the 1970s (alternate timeline) that they start work on droids that can detect a mutant and destroy him.  Eventually, these drones acquire powers that (out)match that of the mutants and the people of the world are oppressed by them in a indefinitely long contingency dictatorship.  By creating machines that even mutants couldn't fight, they ended up with a government that the people couldn't fight.

Lego Movie
The Lego Movie was a breath of fresh air, a fundamentally Libertarian movie that got past the Hollywood censors by naming their villain "Lord Business."  Lord Business is not just the President but the major stockholder in a wealthy conglomerate that controls most of the media, makes all the automated voting machines, and runs all the surveillance systems in the country.  He also has a robot army consisting of battle drones, worker drones, and "micro-managers."  The people are lulled into being micro-managed by the tentacles of Lord Business's empire until it reaches its logical conclusion of total control.  The political solution ends up with the people arming themselves with ideas and the weapons those ideas bring about.  Nice! This movie doesn't have so much the nebulous notion that corporations are inherently evil, although it obviously denounces cronyism and crony-corporatism, and makes a plug for the little business owner and his ideas.

Is it ironic that the movie that seems the most friendly to robot armies is a movie starring Matt Damon, one of the few Hollywood liberals that question why Obama is eroding our rights when he promised to bring back the Bill of Rights.  (In his words, the President "broke up with" him.)  In Elysium, the oppressive robot army turns good.  At the movie's end, instead of being horrible they all of a sudden act with great compassion and care.  It is good to have a robot army because a benevolent dictator (as Sean Penn conceived of Hugo Chavez and Castro) can use them to bring "liberty and justice for all."  This is almost a 180 from Winter Soldier, except that Elysium takes great care to show at the beginning how dangerous this technology is when used indiscriminately on a largely unarmed populace.

The ending of Elysium evoked this techno-socialist fantasy by Richard Brautigan:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Brautigan dreamed of a time when we will all be Eloi.  He wasn't concerned about the Morlocks.

You would think by now that people would have realized that whatever power grabs you tolerate in the President you trust, you leave open to the next President, whom you probably will not trust.  While Hollywood might appear to share our fear of drones and homeland security, they are still busy buying $40,000 plates for the man that has done more to increase their scope and use of homeland security and drones against the American citizen--except for Matt Damon, remarkably, who actually has noticed that Obama is everything they supposedly hated about Bush.  Most of them aren't concerned because as long as it's Obama eroding the Bill of Rights we're just being watched over by machines of loving grace.

The Conservative Croods (or The Crude Conservatives)

One of the more interesting and critical  reviews of The Croods out there is one (warning: the review has profanity) claiming that the movie promotes children taking an uncritical view of risk while basically adding nothing new to the plot of Hotel Transylvania.  Makes some good points and I recommend this review as a good starting point for thinking about the film, but I think there is a lot more to it.

If, as Anders argues, the humor is more ham-handed, the emotional moments are still very moving.  Croods is a very emotive film.  The jokes might be old, but the feelings are genuine.  In a dramatic sense, the film is a moderate success.

Anders gets ridiculously close to the mark, but thinks "[i]t's all a metaphor for how you're smothering your kids with your over-parenting."  Not quite.  It is true that both Hotel Transylvania and The Croods both involve an overprotective father watching his influence over his daughter get compromised by the appearance of a young man.  (Umm... Little Mermaid, anyone?) But in Hotel Transylvania the young man wins everyone over with his innocuous fun-loving nature, not by displacing the father as an authority figure.  It's not the case that he "teaches them to start unquestioningly accepting anything new and different" as Anders rightly notes about the counterpart in Croods.

Is this where Eep starts singing "Part of Your World"?

So, while there is a similar constellation of relationships, the message of the films are fundamentally very different.  Where in Transylvania the father's resistance to change is born of an emotional wound that needs healing through the formation of new relationships, Grug's resistance to change comes from his misplaced faith in the past.  He's too crood/crude to realize that the world has changed.  If this is sounding a little like the outdatedness of religious platitudes, the obsolescence of the U.S. Consitution, or the old fuddiduddiness of family values, you are starting to get the picture.

Anders gets the central issue in her cross-hairs in an almost tangential paragraph:

And there's a vaguely woolly liberal sentiment embedded in all this — Grug's "father knows best" ideology is presented as ultra-conservative and backward-looking, while Guy represents progress and innovation. The whole Crood family goes from thinking that the patriarchal Grug is right about everything to viewing him as sort of a sad holdout from an earlier time. And Eep, the feisty daughter, is sort of vaguely liberated by casting off her father's authority. So yay for liberal propaganda, I guess?

Yay, indeed.  Go, home team.  This is exactly what the movie is about.  It's not "vaguely woolly" at all. And if that wasn't enough, what circumstance make it obvious that Grug's ideology is obsolete?  Impending global environmental changes.  There's nothing like an impending environmental apocalypse to get you to let go of the past.  "You know, they didn't have modern technology and global warming/cooling/change when the Constitution was written..."

The stories of the past are also specifically discounted.  Early in the movie, Grug tells a story of a sad little bear who finds disaster because he abandons the safety of living in "routine, darkness, and terror."   A simultaneous appeal to liberal stereotypes of both conservatism and Judaeo-Christian (but not Muslim!) religion.  

Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. . . . These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us . . .  

Dan Savage, a man that our President has promoted as a voice to children around the country, openly derides the religious heritage of both Testaments of the Christian canon: both the Judaeo-Christian Tanakh and the early Christian writings.  They are both repugnant to him and he uses his pulpit to reach our young with his passionate message of hope of freedom from evil religion.

And Croods has a message of hope.  Father comes around.  Much as the Comte de Reynaud does in Chocolat:

Narrator:  The Comte de Reynaud was a student of history, and therefore a patient man. He trusted the wisdom of generations past.  Like his ancestors, he watched over the little village and led by his own example: hard work, modesty, self-discipline.

Comte:  I have completed the 18th Century. 

Madame Clairmont: Your letter to the editor, Monsieur le Comte ... this paragraph about family and tradition, it's... it's beautiful.

In Chocolat, the Comte's misplaced honor for the past will inspire xenophobia, racism, arson, and attempted murder (prescient of the current anti-Tea Party propaganda).  Once the Comte realizes how hate and fear and exclusion is at the core of his tradition-based way of life, he starts being open to the winds of change transforming his little community into a refuge of joy.  So, yay for liberal propaganda, I guess.

Attack of the Drones

At least two of the recent Two Worlds movies, Total Recall and Elysium, have involved the idea of evil regimes conveniently using robots to subdue humanity.  If all the people are oppressed, why trouble yourself indoctrinating soldiers when you can manufacture an army that is troubled by conflicts of loyalty and remorse?   The idea is a natural fusion of the idea of the Imperial Stormtrooper with the Terminator.  (Curiously, the robot in the old sci-fi movie Metropolis is not used as an instrument of war, but of corruption.)  Speaking of Star Wars, let's not forget Phantom Menace, which some have claimed was given anti-Bush and/or anti-conservative undertones.

Hmmm, robots used by collectivist totalitarian regimes to keep the masses in check.

There's something very messy about war, and while it's horrible, it's appropriate that human beings are on the field seeing it and knowing it.  Michael Medved, in his autobiographical Right Turns, writes about his front row seat in the pacifism movement of the 1960s/70s and how the student activism against the Vietnam War subsided when the rules of the draft changed to not terrify them so much.  Their idealism about making the world a better place went out the window when they didn't feel personally endangered, revealing much of the altruistic sanctimony as mere self-interest.

Now that more soldiers have come home from the Middle East (the end of the Wars goes on and on) the Wars have become more and more automated.  George Bush became the devil over the Wars in the Middle East, and the sainted Obama continued prosecuting the war with drones, the collateral damage to women and children due to increased drone use was largely ignored by the news and media.  The Bush was administration reviled for making rules for playing rough in the War on Terror and for not treating foreign terrorist with the rights of American citizens, while the Obama administration largely given a pass for secret kill lists, secret kill list criteria, secret interpretations of the Patriot Act, and "legal regimes" for indefinite detainment.  (Then again, do you really care what he's doing as long as he keeps dishing out "free" stuff for your out of his secret stash?) Claiming to be transparent but changing the rules to give itself discretion over how much sunlight is used to disinfect, waging a war against whistleblowers, this administration is almost scary, but, well gosh, look how intelligent Mr. President sounds and look at that nice paternal smile he gives us...

Hey, soldiers are coming home.  So forget about what's happening overseas.  Show's over, folks.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

At least two recent movies feature some kind of superman taking out a drone:  The Bourne Legacy and the iconic Man of Steel.  I think we're supposed to relate to these triumphs of an individual spirit over an inhuman, mechanistic government.  But this is just the Hollywood story machine acknowledging our deep-seated fears.

Boston Dynamics' ATLAS

Meanwhile the present American regime keeps pushing the envelope in automating the surveillance and policing of our own people, even as the media and Tinseltown keep selling this very trend as a uniquely conservative policy.   How progressives intend to regulate our lives without being able to police our lives seems to be ignored for the most part.

The armed forces continues to become more and more automated.  After all, as the movie White House Down tries to convince us, armies made up of actual humans are a threat to Pres. Obama.  I mean, if most soldiers were liberal Democrats,  Al Gore might have tried to get their votes counted in 2000.  Time to replace these people with machines.  Soon we'll be able to sit down and watch tv and forget that war has been automated.  We can go on watching our favorite tv shows until we one day find that our human militias and our native soldiers all together are no match for the automated machines of war.  A government that doesn't want its people dictating the rules any more, will have a new option at its disposal.  The terrorist threat has already been redefined as people that are opposed to Big Government.  Stooges in the media immediately tried to sell the Boston bombing as a probable conservative attack.  Now liberal news outlets are trying to redefine Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a conservative.

Sleep well tonight.

Movies and Politics: What movies are your kids going to watch?

No review is a replacement for actually watching with your kids, but it's getting harder and harder for parents to avoid the trap that has all parents in the house working and the tv filling in as babysitter, so ...

Recent movies that seemed relatively indoctrination-free and were fun:

Despicable Me 2 (very funny)
Monsters U
Wreck-It Ralph
Hotel Transylvania
Rise of the Guardians

Recent movies that are heavily liberalized:

Escape From Earth
Para-Norman
Fun Size (not really appropriate for kids or pre-teens at all, but is marketed and billed as a kids' movie)

Beautiful Creatures (again, more for older teens, but marketed to the Twilight age-group)

A fun movie that I've had mixed feelings about is The Croods, not because it is overtly liberalized but because I think that the cautious conservatism of the namesake family is meant as a caricature of conservatism.  Your kids are more likely to get out of it a celebration of individual innovation, but the filmmakers seem to mean it as an allegory of "coming around," "evolving" views, and getting over conservative "phobias" and prejudices.

At the Movies: A Tale of Two Worlds

The Matrix sequels not only did nothing to further the meaning or appeal of the original, but they did nothing to hurt the claim that the Waichowski siblings completely ripped off the the idea for the first.  But there was an earlier indication that The Matrix was a one-off.  V for Vendetta seemed like it was phoned in.  The fight scenes and general style were like a parody of The Matrix, the writing/acting/direction was reminiscent of the Dick Tracy movie, and its defense of torture as a means of political education were among several problems that made the film a major disappointment.  And all that was aside from the hint-hint implications of "Oh, by the way, we're thinking of George Bush" innuendo.  I think they even flashed an image of George Bush at some point.  Where people of various political persuasions (but probably libertarians most of all) could relate to The Matrix, V for Vendetta adapted a graphic novel into an anti-Republican political commercial.

A blogger named SLavery writes at this message board:

V For Vendetta was liberal crap.  And that's coming from a liberal who loves the original story. They hijacked a story about anarchy and facism [sic] and made it about American politics.  I half-expected "IT'S BUSH!" and "HEY, CHENEY!" to flash on the screen during V's talk with the detectives.

Elysium: Universal salvation

Gee, was it really that obvious?  One blogger sees more than a bit of 9/11 Truthism in V for Vendetta.  (Echoes of trutherism as well in the Waichowski Cloud Atlas's blaming of terrorist attacks on evil corporations.) Some people are noticing that V for Vendetta does may have an ironic relevancy now.  For others, the idea of an administration that talks freedom and instead implements secret wars, foreign meddling, civilian casualties, cover-ups of botched foreign policy and increased domestic surveillance, etc. is no longer a relevant subject now that there is a liberal administration.

More recently, I've noticed a rash of liberal sci-fi propaganda of the Two Worlds variety.  The film In Time has a series of borders separating castes of people based on how much currency they have saved up.  The movie condones robbery on the premises that if you are wealthy, the money was, in some sense, stolen from the poor.  More recently Upside Down features worlds separated by two separate forces of gravity.  Here the separation of.   Somehow, the world with the wealth ("cheap oil"... as opposed to expensive oil) is exploited by the world without the wealth.  None of this is, of course, explained.  Soon the movie Elysium will tell a tale of a world made fat by sucking the life out of another.  All the wealth of the world is somehow consolidated on a remote space station.  It all comes from the Earth though.  Notorious gun-hater Matt Damon is going to get mad and lead a revolution by turning himself into the ultimate weapon.

Noteworthy is the new wind of anti-colonialism breathed into the recent Total Recall reboot.  The otherworldliness of the Martian outback is replaced by:  Australia.  It all takes place on planet Earth.  The image of Britain sending troops to wipe out Australian colonists would be enough to get Obama to send back our bust of Winston Churchill.  Oh, too late, he already did.

I realized recently that a smart and funny children's movie fits this world-exploiting-world pattern.  Monsters, Inc. tells the tale of a world with a morally corrupt energy policy.  The monster world's energy needs are met by emotional torture of children.  No political undertones there.  The sequel, I hear, will tell the story about how Mike and Sully revolutionize the business of tormenting children by making childhood terror an even more advanced art.  It's a heartwarming story.  Many is the fiend who can tell you that two heads are better at tormenting a child than one.  Monsters Inc. though, didn't stand out to me as a movie with a lot of overt messaging (as in Escape From Earth), in spite of the apparent political inspiration for the story.

There is the world of the victims and the world of the predators, the world of the 99% and the world of the 1%.  That is the narrative.  Look for it.  You are imbibing it.

Movie Review: Field of Dreams From My Father

Field of Dreams seems to be a movie about regrets, second chances, and vague notions of long lost goodness.    It's a movie made of sentiment, by sentiment, for sentiment.  The more vague and general the sentiments are kept, the more we can relate to them.  It borders on the Christian in its theme of second chances.  As Michael Moriarty says.

Field of Dreams is a beautifully made film of forgiveness and reconciliation … for everyone.  It is ultimately everyone’s field of dreams in everyone’s most childlike reveries.

Michael Moriarty goes on to criticize what he sees as the philosophy of the film in his thought-provoking article on Field of Dreams, made all the more interesting by his own link to baseball in his family history.  I don't necessarily agree with all that he reads into the film, but I want to mention some things that made me question where this movie is coming from.  I agree with Moriarty that

Field of Dreams is not only more palatably radical than any other American baseball film but more heart-warmingly revolutionary than any other American film in recent history.

However, I don't think that it is nearly as philosophically deep as what Moriarty attributes to it.

Something that has always bothered me about the movie, something that seemed at first like it didn't even belong, a distraction from the story, is the PTA scene where Ray realizes that he should go see his childhood hero, the reclusive writer Mann, an epiphany that hits him as parents bicker over whether to allow Mann's infamous book in the school curriculum.

When I first saw the movie as a teenager, I wondered why the filmmakers seemed to think the exchange was so meaningful, why trying to get this wonderful book was included at the school library--and putting down the ignorant yokels that don't want it--was such a blow for freedom.  Ray's wife is all charged up for freedom after calling a local townswoman a "Nazi cow," and revels in re-living her 1960s revolt against "fascism."  This is all the more a triumph because she also got all the other parents in the room to fall for her false dichotomy between eliminating Mann's book from the curriculum and upholding the Constitution.

Perhaps even more important is how obvious Daisy Jo Bookburner is supposed to convey the Left's caricature of conservatism to the audience:

Movie Review: Beautiful Creatures

Not that this will reassure everyone, but, hey, it's better than Twilight.  Aside from some silly caricatures it's kind of a smart, funny movie at a time that we've been inundated with movies about teenagers and young jobless adults coming to grips with various supernatural powers in a supernatural world.

The silly caricatures I mention do figure into the messaging that I really want to discuss here.  The worst is Emma Thompson's depiction of a Southern church lady.  We see her tormenting her teenage son over Bible lessons at the beginning, and afterward her son disparages her by wondering aloud to his friend how loving Jesus can make her so crazy.  This, dear reader, is how the Left sees the South, the Bible Belt, and most of church-going America.  In case you miss the point, this character later exclaims before the whole town that “atheists, homosexuals, liberals, Democrats, and Greenpeace" are, along with the movie's witches, the sort of “unnatural abominations” from which they are obligated to protect their town.  This caricaturish delivery isn't just limited to Thompson but is supported by the most superficial high school girls in town being the most religious.  They even pray in class, which the teacher reminds them is not allowed.  Is there anything political about "prayer in school" being depicted as something intended to offend and isolate?  The movie also ridicules the idea of evil being something promoted or led by a powerful spirit (i.e. Satan); spirits merely inform powerful wizard humans, silly!  They don't actually wield power of their own!  By the way, what is The Dark that claims some witches on their 16th birthday?  Is that some kind of sentient entity?

To be fair, the movie develops a meaningful spiritual theme, and even has a minister's sermon support that theme.  One of the most knowledgeable people in the "wizarding world" of this film is a woman who does in fact go to church and believe in God, but this curt nod is practically lost in all the attempts to compare religion unfavorably with the leftist notion of embracing the world and embracing ideas.  One of the few "muggles" in the town to be introduced to this dark underworld of magic, we are informed, claims the local library as her church, and her love of "ideas" she finds there is presented as much more valuable and cosmopolitan than the theological ideas in their local church.  Getting out of your parents' little town and getting that larger view of the world at a university filled with anti-conservative messages is what frees the soul from its shackles.  Otherwise, one might just end up like the ultra-stupid religious folks in the movie; or worse, married to one of them.

The filmmakers probably think they are being subtle and ironic by making the superficially good to be bad and the superficially bad to be Christ-like.  It is the irony that is superficial and anything but subtle.  Behold the face of evil:

Crazy church lady

Based on other movies  reviewed on this blog, I'll give it a 7.0 on the Lib-o-meter for its barely restrained secular liberalism.

Cloud Atlas Reprise: The Conservative Hunger for Exploitation

There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party.  ―Solzhenitsyn, Washington D.C., 1975*

The weak are meat,
and the strong do eat.
    ―Old Georgie, c. 2400 A.D.

This review has some spoilers...

Having had a change to view this movie myself, just extra tidbits to follow up Contrariwise's review. The Fine Art Diner blog also had a thought-provoking analysis of the movie, but I thought a key point that it gets wrong is the idea that the fabricants are robots.  The fate of the fabricants should confirm for the viewer that they are organic.  (There is also a reference to the "genoming" of fabricants.)  I don't think we are given any indication that anything other than genetic predisposition and various forms of psychosomatic conditioning (including the "Catechisms" alluded to) produce the illusion of sentient beings without "free will." The post is worth reading for exposing the misuse of Solzhenitsyn as a general commentator on abuse rather than an all-out enemy of the great lie of socialism, though there are other gems as well.  For Solzhenitsyn, it was socialism that, in its penultimate incarnation as communism, had erased the humanity of human beings.

Movie Review: Man of Steel Liberalism [spoilers]

Well, this is possibly the best one yet in terms of a less caricaturish, more fleshed out, so to speak, son of Krypton.  Brave attempts by the film to bring out the alien character of Krypton, and to make real the humanity of a boy who at an early age must come to grips with not being human.

Major spoilers follow.  While I won't be getting into how the movie ends, I'll still be getting into the backstory of Kal-El's origins as exposited by the film, and talk about various revelations made in the film, all of which may differ significantly from the canonical story you grew up with.

If the story line of the movie seems weak in points, realize that the story line was never very strong.  Sometimes making a story more realistic only makes the weaknesses more obvious.  The traditional explanation of Superman's powers is so ludicrous, scientifically speaking, that it makes the most other comic book superheroes plausible by comparison.  It's a difficult story to "update" in the sense of lending it more plausibility in terms of modern scientific understanding.

What destroyed Krypton?  Tired of the old idea that Jor-El was the one scientist smart enough (in a planet full of technologically advanced aliens) to figure out Krypton's impending doom, in this retelling Krypton's doom is obvious.  The planet is falling apart around them.  What isn't common knowledge is that Krypton is so close to destruction there's no point in even evacuating it.  Jor-El's advanced mind grasps this.  Jor-El was working on his documentary A Belated Truth after selling his tv channel to General al je-Zod for stacks of Kryptonian cash.

Here is where we get our first politically charged message--in one of the first storyline changes:  Planet Krypton is destroyed not from natural causes but from a short-sighted energy policy.  Nice bone thrown to the environmental activists.  But it gets even weirder... The whole planet appears to be a collectivist, statist regime run by a global Supreme Court oligarchy, but in spite of not being burdened by a Senate or other republican sort of legislature, the planet was doomed because, as General Zod puts it, they were too deliberative to take action sooner.

The Power of the Liberal Imagination

This struck me funny:

Most actors are either independents or liberals. Conservatives aren't creative enough to be actors or artists.*

 Well, aside from the obvious, that liberals would think that a homogeneously conservative field was an example of exclusion, it seems to me that this could be re-stated thus:

Most conservatives are generally too grounded in reality to sufficiently suspend their disbelief, to pretend convincingly that their lives are other than they are, or to master the use of words well enough to make others' emotions override their sense of reality. 

Movie Review: The Purge [liberalism]

I'll try not to give away anything important about the ending, however this review has some potential spoilers about The Purge.  Ironically, it serves the cathartic urge to see people heroically defending their families -- but in spite of the film's premise, don't expect the national crime rate to magically drop.

On the surface of things, The Purge seems a little hard to peg in terms of its philosophy.  When the security system fails, as you know it will, the family must rely on guns and the good ol' 2nd Amendment to protect themselves.  There was at least one pro-military nod in it as well.

The basic premise of the film, also presented in the official trailer, is that America has solved almost all its domestic policy problems.  Crime is extremely low and unemployment is down to a ludicrous 1%!!!!  Wow.  Unfortunately, the lynchpin of this new American society seems to be a national holiday in which America takes a total break from law and order.  No law enforcement and no emergency services from dusk till dawn on Purge Night.  High government officials are exempt from this glorious tradition, kind o' like our Congress wants to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act.

I don't know if I'll spend much time on the plausibility of this premise here, but it is implied that most crime stems from people's resentments and that this is mostly solved by giving them a single night each year to, as Fox Mulder would say, get their "ya-yas" out.

So why would liberal Hollywood make a movie about a family needing to protect itself from home invasion with guns.  Well, first of all, it's implied that the only reason any guns are necessary is that the police are not available during Purge Night.  Yes, otherwise, the police would always arrive in time to prevent the crime instead of clean up after the crime.

Next, Purge Night is wrapped in patriotic fervor.  The new American government sends messages to the public about Purge Night that are wrapped in God and country, very explicitly so.  This was all set up by the "Second Founding Fathers."  Yes, this second set of Fathers have re-Constituted America, and their God-and-country formulation has them make the public dependent on a national system of emergency services (that CNN maligned Romney for insufficiently supporting) that can be suspended on a national level.  And this is done, so the movie implies, to weed out the poor and inconvenient, just as the recent, even less plausible sci-fi In Time has also troped.

American Exceptionalism in the Movies

What has happened to the movies?  In 1979, when people had enough of the liberal cynicism of All In The Family and Carter malaise, Superman flashed his red and blues in the name of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way."  According to Obama now, there only thing special about America is that we just happen to live here, just like Brits happen to live in the UK and Iraqis happen to live in Iraq.  That's it.   Like most Progressives, he's ashamed of America and thinks that Founding Fathers were a bunch of rich, white jerks whose ideas are obsolete, if they were ever useful.  (Until the election of her husband, Mrs. Obama hadn't discovered any reason to be proud of America.)

If there was anything more special about America, there would be an American Way worth fighting for, uniquely American ideas that allowed for extraordinary growth of this nation as an economic and political power capable of bringing at least two major totalitarian threats to their knees, checking the expansion of Chinese communism and Islamofascism as well.  The Obama brand of liberal "anti-imperialism" faults America with deriving its economic power mainly from greed, in the uniquely liberal-Marxist zero sum logic.

But in 1979, while the Meatheads were living off the conservative Archies till they got their degree to teach liberalism to the next generation, Superman was still championing The American Way as a transcendent force of liberty.  A far cry from the Progressive disarmament advocacy of the wrong-in-so-many-ways Superman IV in 1989.

Cut forward to 2012.  Captain America brings back an echo of American exceptionalism, anti-cynicism, pro-God, pro-country, pro-military but not so pro-military that he blindly trusts our government.  In The Avengers, Nick Fury tells the Captain that America could "use a little 'old-fashioned'."  The Avengers brings together Captain America's virtues of American virtue with Tony Stark's American pioneering individualism and spirit of entrepreneurship.   A rich man that isn't villainized for being unapologetically rich.  There are other ways, of course, to read the subtext, but some of this seems promising.  Maybe the Zeitgeist is changing again.

Escape From America, I Mean, Escape From Planet Earth

Another children's film planting liberal messages in the minds of your children.  Because there just aren't enough liberal messages bombarding our kids as they grow up.  I give this maybe an 8.3 on the Lib-o-meter (or Progresso-meter for those identifying with the Woodrow Wilson fascists since the hippies have gotten a bad rap).

Over all, it's cute.  Funny in a few places, nice sentiments, but over all, a little on the mediocre side.  Not as forgettable as Space Chimps or as boring as Mars Needs Moms.   But as at least one other reviewer has noted: "there are a lot of liberal political undertones that parents should note."

We got the tired mean army guy stereotype (as seen in the sci-fi film Avatar) amalgamated with the other tired kill-the-aliens-before-they-get-you stereotype.  The most original play on the former stereotype has been in Monsters vs. Aliens, which was surprisingly good. For the latter stereotype see James Woods in Contact.  It seems to be written to play into the tired anti-Bush narrative of the evil conservative that wants to decimate other nations on the off-chance that they might pose a danger to us.  (Slightly better than the evil conservative that does it to build an oil pipeline.)  The "conservative" folly of The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Yes, this is about the uselessness of fear and warmongering.  While the recent Avengers movie plays favorably against most Hollywood movies on the Lib-o-meter, there is a cynical skepticism about the need to develop advanced weaponry after Earth is invaded by a powerful immortal villain, soon to be followed by an army of powerful villains.  Yes, to a Progressive that believes that citizens needs to be unarmed and dismantling your weapons is the key to stopping the aggression of totalitarian political movements, this makes a whole lotta sense.  (Though it sure wasn't the key to the Berlin Wall coming down.)  Enter the current administration that believes in having no more weapons of mass destructing than the next nation, does believe in arming genocidal radicals so they can have the anti-American theocracy they've been dreaming of, and believes that only police and government agents should be armed.  Oh, it's a liberal fascist dream.

The point is, your children need to be taught that a person who wants weapons to be safe or thinks that he or she is under any threat is paranoid and dangerous and wants desperately to kill and destroy.  Or so the moviemakers think.  They were probably as disappointed as Chris Matthews that the Boston bombers weren't Tea Partiers from some anti-government militia group.

And what is the biggest threat to our planet?  The best alien minds of the galaxy answer that for your kids: It's Global Warming, kids!  In the 80s, the answer probably would have been nuclear holocaust, as played up in the movie Dreamscape.  That liberal trope is old news, since the success of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy.  Global Warming is now the narrative of choice for the progressive trend toward the One World Government.

This even makes its way into this movie, which blames our wars on our silly division into nations.   Yep, borders lead to wars, just like property lines and fences lead to breaking-and-entering.  I mean, all China needed to end the wars between its states was a ruthless Emperor to force them to be one country, which was the message of the Jet Li flick Hero.

The liberals that made this movie were not content with these as the only progressive messages in the film.  The movie is deliberately vague on the gender of the Grey Aliens, but the Greys turn out to all have male voices, and in the final scene of the movie, it is revealed that the three Grey Aliens are a married unit. Not a married couple, if you catch my meaning.  It happens so fast, most reviewers didn't even notice it.  As they share kleenexes while witnessing the exchange of wedding vows, one alien says to the other two, "Let's never break up, guys."  Same sex polygamy, folks.  Boy, when liberals set out to do a children's movie, they go all out.  Personally, I think there's something very cynical about it.

So, while Fun Size beats this at a 9.6 on the Lib-o-meter, and so does Para-Norman with an 8.7, the libs would love to introduce your kids to their more inclusive, less fearful universe with Escape From Planet Earth.  While reminding the young audience that it is the U.S. that is particularly stupid about alien invaders (unlike the more general story of the sci-fi District 9), they decided not to call it "Escape From America," something liberal radicals are often promising to do, but rarely follow through on.

Movies: Conservative(?) Donnie Darko vs. Liberal Adventureland: Those Greedy 80s

Donnie on  a date with a girl and Frank the Bunny

Hollywood seems to have been nursing the cliche of the Greedy 80s.

The 80s were greedy.  Know how you can tell?  Prosperity generally went up, unemployment generally went down (paving the way for Bush I's victory and for the bizarre 2010 attempts to compare Obama to Reagan).    Yes, people's situations improved, particularly black people's, but something was still not right... Lot of people got filthy rich at the same time.  Those jerks.

1988 Pres. Debates in Donnie Darko "You tell 'im, George!"

Anyway, several 80s period pieces have been made and here I want to compare two. . .

Bible Miniseries Racially Charged With Obama-Satan

Satan?  Or have the Presidential years been really unkind to Obama?

Scorsese's Jesus

I don't think I would noticed a resemblance (at least not based on this picture alone) if people weren't implicating "The Bible" mini-series as anti-Obama propaganda.  Supposedly a little child pointed out the resemblance between Obama and Satan, as well as asking why all the good people looked white.  How race-conscious do you have to be as a child to notice everybody's race?  Still, generally they (and I'm talking Hollywood, not just Christian filmmakers) have almost always chosen actors they felt would have broad appeal as the protagonists, and these have tended to white people with movie star looks.

I know at least one person who thought Joseph, Mary, and Gabriel in this latest miniseries looked overly Nordic. (Hmmm, is that Gabriel, or Thor?)

Check out Last Temptation of Christ. Willem Dafoe looks pretty darn white to me.  And look at the cast of ethnic characters standing behind the Scotsman (Judas):

The Disciple Judas in Scorsese's 'Last Temptation'

I've tended to notice this tendency in most all Bible dramas that I've seen.  Proof to most critical race theorists that Christendom is institutionalized racism, rather than a very common shortsightedness.  It seems like this haunts most Biblical productions to a great degree except for one:  The Passion of the Christ.

There's something different
about Caviezel in this picture.

The director of Passion took great pains to overcome the past productions' tendency to "whitewash" (pun intended) the cultural and ethnic context of Jesus' life and death.  The movie is a constant reminder to Jesus and his disciples were, ethnically and religiously, Israelites.  Jim Caviezel gets valmorphanized with a new nose right out of the Shroud of Turin. Everybody's speaking (a reconstruction of) Aramaic, the language of the Jews at the time, and a true effort to convey the religious context of 1st Century Judaism is attempted.  Gone is the image of WASPs speaking King James English in proper British accents.  Jesus is finally an Israelite, and so are his Galilean disciples.  Any European-looking people?  Yes, playing Romans, who speak Latin.

Oh, and one more person:

This clean-shaven Caucasian is none other than Lucifer, the Accuser of the Brethren.

Ironic that the one real attempt to give us Semitic Jesus instead of white-bread Jesus comes from the man vilified as an anti-Semite from the movie's very release (long before his nervous breakdown)? Or more ironic that given this, Hollywood and its progressive entourage focused entirely on a scene with a Judaean mob?  I think it was either Time or Newsweek with a long article that argued that the scene was inherently anti-Semitic in character--without the author explaining why he was attacking the Gospel of John (the source of the scene) as racist.  All the artistic freedom Hollywood was frothing with over Scorsese's unusual weirdfest went out the window.

Gibson's Kepha ("Peter" in Aramaic) to the left of Jesus
(on Jesus' right hand).  The first Pope looks kind o' Jewish. 

Of course, it didn't help that Gibson's later maniacal episode had him regressing into his father's anti-Zionist paranoia.  Yet, how eagerly the powers that be focused their attention on this episode as having the utmost significance, even though the Judaean religious leaders are hardly the only Israelites in the movie.  So much more attention in fact, than they ever give to the Islamic leaders/activists and African American ministers that spout the same paranoia.  Curious.

But Christians all over America were still embarrassed that Gibson gave the anti-church crowd what they wanted (over 2 years later) by opening up a full can of crazy.  As they will probably be embarrassed that someone didn't speak up during the making of this latest Bible miniseries and say, "Hey, can we make the Devil at least as white-looking as the other main characters?  As a rule of thumb, it would distract people much less if the Devil is always at least as Caucasian-looking as Mary the mother of Jesus.

Odeya Rush

Speaking of which, I'm not sure if even the Israeli actress Odeya Rush is as conscientious a choice as Mel Gibson would have made (although Caviezel seems like a bad choice without the makeup).  However, she is slated for the title role in the prequel to Passion of the Christ., which is Mary, Mother of the Christ.  The continuity with Passion will be in the screenwriting not the directing.  (One Bible blockbuster sandwich, hold the Mel.)  To demonstrate how pervasive the anti-Passion propaganda has been, check out Odeya Rush's suspicion these many years later:

Rush said that she was somewhat reluctant when she was initially handed the script, but found it completely devoid of anti-Semitic sentiment.*

Odeya Rush was 6 years old when that movie came out.  Her knowledge of Passion was founded on hearsay.  The "anti-Semitic sentiment" that caused such an uproar for the first film was from the Gospel of John.  Hopefully, she would find all the Gospels devoid of the sentiment.

Jim Caviezel

... and Jim Caviezel

Post-script:  The Gibson/Caviezel portrayal is not only the least European Jesus we've seen, surpassing even Pasolini's unibrowed Spaniard in The Gospel According to Matthew, it is one of the most accessible, down-to-earth, naturally human portrayals ever, far removed from Zefirelli's hypno-tranced messiah.  Speaking of the White Jesus of Easters Past, here are Jeffrey Hunter from King of Kings and the Swede Max von Sydow from The Greatest Story Ever Told.   

Above:  Max von Sydow looks almost Middle Eastern next to this Son of Odin. 

Follow-up: Mehdi Ouazzani, the "Obama-Satan" actor has played many different ethnicities--mostly European.  I guess there would have been fewer complaints had he kept his sinister mustache for the Lucifer role.  He could've twirled it while offering Jesus the kingdoms of the earth.  

Obama "look-alike" Mehdi Ouazzani

Errata: I originally confused the roles of Victor Argo (Peter/Cephas) and Harvey Keitel (Judas) in Last Temptation.



Jesus Hood and his band of swarthy men:

Broken City: Modern Noir in Liberal Sepia Tones

As a movie, for all its flaws, I liked the drama of Broken City.  But many things about the script seemed to cross the line into propaganda.

Some of the things I noticed directly about Broken City:  Pro-law-and-order incumbent NY mayor is facing an idealistic challenger.  The challenger seems honest and passionate; he's against the corporations and for the little guy. The mayor is corrupt and is all about wealth and cronyism and being in the big corporations' pockets.  And he doesn't like the NY Times but rather the Post.  Seeing any patterns yet?

Here and here the corrupt mayor who is favored for having cleaned up the town is described as "Giuliani-esque."  And here the challenger is described as the "rich, liberal, and inexplicably honest councilman."  Almost as inexplicably honest as our rich, liberal Chicago politician-turned-President.

We knew the Man from Illinois was the one honest politician from the totally corrupt Blagovichian Chicago scene even if he did win his state senatorial bid by having his opponent disqualified. Why, just look at that honest little punim. And a man who "oozes sincerity" (think "Slick Willie") such that he can sell a ketchup popsicle to an Eskimo in white gloves is much preferred to anyone that actually tells us what we don't want to hear: e.g., that there's no way that the party can go on simply by sending the bill to "all those rich folks."

But I digress.  This review is even more enlightening about the film's narrative.  It describes the mayoral debate as "a baseball-bat-to-the-head invocation of current political schisms."  The challenger Valliant (Valliant? what is this, an allegory? seriously?) is described as "the idealistic liberal." But here is <<spoiler alert>> the crux of the story:  

What’s interesting is the way Broken City plays as a parable of American conservatism reckoning with its own sins. Taggart is a conservative everyman – uncomfortable around the cultural upper class, wedded to traditional gender norms, rough-hewn, and simple. He’s loyal to Hostetler, at least initially, and his trial calls up shades of white resentment against minorities who question the needs of law and order. Hostetler’s glittering wife, presumably unfaithful, stumps for gay rights causes, and the liberal Valliant is an oily ivy-league alien. In short, the movie begins rooted in right-wing sympathies and assumptions. 

By the conclusion, they have all been inverted. In Broken City’s most quietly moving scene, Taggart sits in a car with a gay man who recounts his feelings for the lover he’s just lost. You can sense the gears turning in Taggart’s head, as the demands of common human decency brook no respect for his cultural comfort zones. The final scene suggests the “liberal elite” is at least trying to do the right thing, which is more than can be said for the other side, and that whatever its intentions were, it’s time for conservatism to own up to the damage it’s caused.

Dang, it is an allegory.  "[C]ommon human decency" versus "cultural comfort zones."  There's the strawman! I missed you most of all, Scarecrow.   

Fun Size: Liberal Adventures in Babysitting

Fun Size reminded me a little superficially of Adventures in Babysitting.  Both were essentially teen movies that targeted a pre-teen audience (an ugly trend) partly by using a pre-teen character.  The Elizabeth Shue vehicle had its share of vulgarity and wasn't really all that appropriate, but the vulgarity is much more incidental in AiB than in Fun Size.  But hey, a lot happens in 25 years.

But making a movie for pre-teens that is overly sexualized, glamorizes teen sex, and has a giant rooster humping a car isn't the main point of this post.

I wanted to point out the little political advertisements to be seeded in the minds of young people. Please let me know if there is a similar movie that is as conservative-friendly as this is liberal-friendly.

1) Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  One of the smart kids is so smart and sophisticated she thinks of dressing up for Halloween as Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg, as she is a "feminist icon."

2) E. O. Wilson.  One of the smart, sophisticated kids thinks of being E.O. Wilson  for Halloween.  I don't think they explain other than that he's a famous sociobiologist.  E.O. Wilson promotes evolutionary biology as the foundational understanding of our humanity and nature.  He has an outlook that aside from its religious overtones and its sweeping grandeur, is much more aligned with liberalism.  Is that what gets smart kids all excited about Wilson or is it his handy "butterfly net."

3)  Katie Couric.  One of the few times the frat boys aren't saying something vulgar, it's to compliment a woman by comparing her to Katie Couric.  Katie Couric.  Couric is pretty, but that's the journalist that comes ot mind for this frat boy?   Katie Couric.  'Nuff said. (Any odds on a non-vulgar beauty nod to Megyn Kelly, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, S.E. Cupp, etc...)

4) "My moms."  The smart, sophisticated boy is raised by a stereotypically liberal same-sex couple.  He mentions his "moms" all the time.  He's very close to his momzzz.  He'd never lie to his moms.  He always listens to his moms.  He talks to his moms.  He loves his moms.  Moms. Moms. Moms.  (Meanwhile, I hear that the "Glee" show has decided to change its name to "My Two Dads" since most of the original viewership has moved on anyway.)

5) Obama.  Okay, we meet the "moms."  In case we have any doubts where these ancient Greek-spouting green-conscious sophisticants are about, you'll see them handcrafting a big oversized jolly portrait of good-natured Obama.  Gosh, liberals are so smart and sophisticated.  

6) Raise your hand.  Just to throw it out there, a boy asks a room full of girls if anyone wants to kiss him.  One boy quickly raises his hand and quickly lowers it before he is noticed.

Is it desperation or overweening pride or both that have filmmakers so out of the liberal closet with their early proselytizing?

Now this all wouldn't be so bad if there was that other kind of movie.  The fun movie for kids in which the following things occur.  A smart kid wants to be Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell (Oh, that's right; there's that "scandal"--and why didn't the NAACP defend him?) because they are black intellectual icons or conservative icons or black conservative icons, and why wouldn't smart kids want to acknowledge them?  How 'bout some obviously conservative parents who are also obviously smart and compassionate.  (Oops, Hollywood folk know that there are no such people, because the liberal icons tell them so.)  Maybe some conservative kids that rally around and protect bullied kids.  Hey, Hollywood has also been about showing the way the world should be rather than the way it is, so the industry's total inability to perceive these things shouldn't hinder their ability to imagine.  And Hollywood'll be finally showing 55% of Americans that they don't hate everything about them and can actually think outside their narrow narrative.

Like that'll happen.