An American tourist in Russia
I’m going to share with you a classic 1947 American Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street., an excellent case study for propaganda in opening days of the Cold War. Miracle on 34th Street is a great romantic comedy and I love this movie, but I have to recognize that all the moral lessons are really terrible. And … Read more
After recently giving the trilogy a re-watch, some elements of the story struck me differently than when I saw them as a kid. The original RoboCop film in 1987 is one of those movies that tells a great standalone story, and the best test of this was that there were enough themes and ideas that … Read more
Is it okay to admire just the “good” elements of nazism? Star Trek had an episode, Patterns of Force, that attempted to answer this exact question. Kirk and Spock arrive on a planet to discover that a rogue federation officer has established himself as dictator over the natives in an attempt to create a good nazi society with only the positive elements of nazi ideology. However, the experiment is no longer under his control, and the natives are planning to attack the neighboring planet and destroy everyone on it.
I recently tried watching the 2019 film 1917 on the plane, and couldn’t finish it. The movie was a boring play-by-play montage of “horrors of war” tropes. 1917’s self-imposed artistic trick of showing every frame of the film as if it was recorded in one continuous shot didn’t help either, the “one shot” effect actually made it worse. I literally felt like I was watching someone else play a video game. Video games are fun to play, but boring to watch as a spectator. I realized 1917 is just like Saving Private Ryan, it starts with a contrived excuse for the main character to wander around the battlefield and see various bad things, some of which are statistically unlikely to happen to one guy, especially all within a few hours of each other. It’s video game logic that’s tedious and immersion breaking in a movie. After further thought, I realized 1917 is the extreme but logical conclusion of war movie tropes going back decades. At this point, we might as well fire everybody in Hollywood and just watch movies generated by AI. The tropes are so routine even a computer can string them together just as competently as a person. I have decided this particular war movie trend started with the 1976 movie Apocalypse Now, and will explain why.
Yesterday we watched the 1970 Sophia Loren wartime drama Sunflower which I had high hopes for, but found myself just as disappointed as the characters in the movie itself. Sunflower is a story about reconciliation, both between people and nations, but meanders to the finish line with no reconciliation at either level. While I was … Read more