Summary: Alita is fun and beautifully done, and well worth seeing. Feminists’ reviews were savage. Their attacks reveal much about them and the new puritanism (ideological, not religious) sweeping America.
Movie/TV Reviews
Threads and the Failure of Satire
I just watched the 1984 BBC docudrama Threads. In many ways, it is typical of a Cold War film at the height of the Red Scare. However, Threads created a new pinnacle of propaganda. The film’s creators deliberately terrorized an entire generation of children and skillfully blurred the lines between truth and fiction. Threads mimics real news reports, presenting a chain of events that are difficult to distinguish from real-life media, especially for a child. Despite all the praise it received in the years since then, Threads is a horrible film that teaches all the wrong lessons, and didn’t even make a nuclear war less likely. If anything, this wave of propaganda has made self-inflicted armageddon more inevitable than ever before.
Spielberg Saved Private Ryan and Killed Patriotism
Synopsis: The classic 1998 gory D-Day movie Saving Private Ryan is a triumph of war cinema that lesser filmmakers have attempted to imitate countless times in the following decades up to the present day. Saving Private Ryan practically defined the entire genre of American war films, but also helped destroy it, perhaps irreversibly.