Lights! Cameras! Action!

Movies comes in all forms, action, drama, horror, Westerns, comedy, chick flicks, guy flicks, action movies and just plain dumb movies.  Movies are based on best selling books, original screen plays, short stories, historical characters and events and some apparently are based on what is written on the Boy’s Room walls at the local Junior High School.

Many of us like to “get away” and watch a good movie, either at home or in the theater. I prefer mine in the comfort of my television room (cheap SOB) but some like the experience of the really big screen.

Nearly everyone has their list of best and worst movies, and their list of favorite actors and actresses. Some, like me, have a mental list of actors they hate seeing in any type of movie.

So, this thread is a combination of the Academy Awards show and the Razzies presentation:

The Best and the Worst!

Who and what are your favorites and who and what are like fingernails on a blackboard to you?

No one is watching, so trot out your lists.

William Stephenson Clark

AVATAR – JUST A MOVIE OR PROPAGANDA?

How The World Works Conservative backlash against “Avatar”
A right-wing nightmare: The free market has spoken — anti-American lefty green propaganda sells!
By Andrew Leonard

A still from “Avatar”A movie as big as “Avatar” deserves more than one blog post, and I’m afraid I just can’t resist poking at the hilarious spectacle of conservative movie critics launching into thermonuclear hissy fits at the anti-American, greenie pagan leftist propaganda embedded in the politics of James Cameron’s epic. The Los Angeles Times has a great story by Patrick Goldstein rounding up the outrage.

To say that the film has evoked a storm of ire on the right would be an understatement. Big Hollywood’s John Nolte, one of my favorite outspoken right-wing film essayists, blasted the film, calling it “a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC cliches that not a single plot turn, large or small, surprises. . . . Think of ‘Avatar’ as ‘Death Wish’ for leftists, a simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you … hate the bad guys (America) you’re able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all.”

John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard’s film critic, called the film “blitheringly stupid; indeed, it’s among the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen.” He goes on to say: “You’re going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie’s politics — about how it’s a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq… The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism — kind of. The thing is, one would be giving Jim Cameron too much credit to take ‘Avatar’ — with its … hatred of the military and American institutions and the notion that to be human is just way uncool — at all seriously as a political document. It’s more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard issue counterculture cliches in Hollywood have become by now.”

Lilacluvr

Where was Michael Moore’s Gift?

I saw  Michael Moore’s Capitalism:  A Love Story this evening.  It was not my favorite Moore film in any way. 

Michael Moore’s gift is his  ability to see the comedy, and extract it out of, any tragedy.  He was unable to do that with this movie.  Or, as a reasonable alternate hypothesis, there is just nothing funny about our current national tragedy.

A touching moment of the film was when Michael and his dad visited the remains of the factory where the elder Moore worked.  It was a nice reminiscing journey for both of them.  Kinda felt like one of those “good moments” with one’s own family.

There was depressing scene after depressing scene of people being unfairly dislodged from their homes.  Moore even found a U.S. Representative willing to encourage people to break the law by staying in the homes they can no longer afford.

I recommend the film not because of the light-hearted moments (there were none of those for me), but because of our duty to face what we have become as a Korporate-Kontrolled-Kapitalist nation.

iggydonnelly

The Argument Clinic.

What's wrong with this picture? Not a damned thing.

This morning, I had the opportunity to sleep in. I woke to the sound of my wife getting ready for work and watching the news. She passed on the news that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are on their way home from being captive in North Korea. It is a good day. What could be bad about that?

Well, apparently it can be bad, because according to the Republicans, sending Bill Clinton to speak to the North Koreans was wrong because it gives that countries leaders opportunities to use the release and photos of Kim Jong Il and the former president  as propaganda tools.