An American tourist in Russia
Here are my first (and probably last) impressions after watching Dune 2. It’s almost three hours long, with ponderous pacing. The shots of CGI landscape are all too long, and it felt like a third of the runtime was just staring at particle animations. The dialogue is mostly wooden exposition dumps with characters reciting stuff … Read more
I just watched Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove, which was quite the experience, mainly because I now have the context of what Disney did afterward. I can see how TENG made some great contributions to the animated film industry, and some really terrible ones that poisoned basically every Disney production since then. The Emperor’s New Groove was released in 2000, when I was 11, when I was still a kid and watched it as a kid. Watching it as an adult, with the context of later Disney films, particularly after they bought Marvel, was quite different.
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.
A villain is simply a hero with the wrong motive. MI6 as portrayed in James Bond films is a top-notch spy agency with ludicrously high-tech gadgets and information-collecting assets. Now imagine an organization of similar power and scope, but evil. I of course am referring to the real MI6. Just kidding, they’re a bit underwhelming … Read more
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