Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Love the principled "cannot be won" foundation of the analysis. Beautiful, bespeaking the soul of a great artist. No wonder she won Best Marketing Campaign at the Hollywood Employee of the Year Awards.

Speaking of those and things not worth watching...

One conception of Hell would be having two perpetual TV shows running in some inescapable duoplex. The Oscars on one screen and the mutherfucking Olympics on the other...

Meanwhile, I wouldn't mind getting my two blogs on the SMBIVA roll...

http://www.consumertrap.com
http://www.deathbycar.info

We can't even look forward to documentaries entitled the Wonderful, Horrible Life of Kathryn Bigelow or hip, breezy deconstructions of her oeuvre.

I haven't seen the movie either, but I have read about it and it appears to contain a few standard "ra-ra American GIs are so compassionate" war movie tropes.

You have the scene where the tough sergeant with a heart of gold befriends a local I-raqi street urchin, only to later find the urchin cut up with a bomb planted inside his helpless little body by the evil nips, VC or A-rabs. Though in a bizarre twist, it turns out the kid in question wasn't really the urchin. The A-rabs killed the wrong kid.

Then you have the scene where the SWAHOG risks his life to disarm an Iraqi man with a bomb strapped to his chest by the evil A-rabs. Unfortunately, the SWAHOG fails, the bomb goes off, and mucho guilt results. We can assume those A-rabs who strapped the bomb to his chest got a good night's sleep afterwards...terrorist animals that they are.

I'm waiting for a movie about the keyboard-wielding Predator drone boys and the terrible angst they suffer as they commute home to Virginia. Perhaps it can be called "The Qwerty Clocker."

They also use the Muslim call to prayer and verses read from the Quran as a plot device to signal imminent danger, relying on the aversive conditioning of American audiences to regard any expression of the Arabic language or the Muslim religion as threatening.

All in all, it sounds like a thoroughgoing POS movie...sight unseen.

Thanks to Youtube, we can now enjoy Stalinist World War II propaganda.

They had Kate Moss look alikes who actually sung as they "liberated" Europe.

Comparing this to Hurt Locker makes me wonder if communism was really all that bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSI061gJ4yo

I didn't see Hurt Locker. I don't plan to. Even relatively good American WWII movies (eg Saving Private Ryan) still distort the "liberation" of Europe. Normandy was bascially just a side show. The real action was a few thousand miles to the east.

I haven't seen Waltz with Bashir either.

The one American war movie I really liked was a very obscure one called "The Boys in Company C." The white soldiers and black soldiers hated one another. There was drug dealing, sexual frustration. And when the little Vietnamese boy gets murdered by Americans, he's nothing but a little Vietnamese boy who gets murdered.

Did the Palestinians get any compensation?

Hurt Locker actor Anthony Mackie told the New York Times’ Melena Ryzik. “We were shooting in Palestinian refugee camps. We were shooting in some pretty hard places."

Too bad Mackie wasn't allowed to keep Gilad Shalit company for a few years. It would have been great training for "method" acting when he got back.

I did see it. Pseudo-quasi-objectively, it was good film making. En entre mots, the editing and cinematography were competent, and the lead actor managed to convey savagely ironic desperation into a none-too-subtle impulse to get himself and his betters killed.

But, it was also rank propaganda, despite all the hoodoo about it being beyond politics.

I've read scribblers who bemoan Cameron's lack of storytelling finesse in Avatar (which I also saw, with wife and chilluns) - but the observational truth follows as such: there was way more story in Avatar than Hurt Locker.

It wasn't perfect, and at a few points rather hamfisted, but it was a narrative.

An entertaining one, which is better than most of the fecal stew coming out of Louis B's goy-free city on the lesser Pacific.

The Hurt Locker, not so much.

But, what's to be expected from the ninth province of increasingly fascist Eretz Yisroel?

(ps - sorry I forgot the anti-spam thing the first time around...)

taking swipes at hollywood "at war "
is really shooting barreled bait fish eh ???

http://www.speedski.com/images/people/JohnWayne/JohnWayne_IwoJima.jpg

to me just noticing
the change of terms
from soldier boys
to warriors is enough
to take

only gets exceeded by
my love of old hollywood's
" marvelous "
twisting of gung ho

now that's golden era jarhead daring do

http://cdn3.ioffer.com/img/item/578/382/26/o_AHX1eh5d3eJqplD.jpg

a dark anti empire heart brightens
with giddy manic --if ultimately enervating-- glee !!!!

avatar reminded me of the disney little mermaid

http://www.jimhillmedia.com/mb/images/upload/little-mermaid-cover-web.jpg

as if seen by dark light of course

fish tank rococo

atrocious ...i'm sure i'd much prefer
hurt locker
that is if the fetching mzz bigelow
can muster black hawk down
like formal gumption

http://www.dirtyharrysplace.com/movienews/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/kathryn_bigelow.jpg

hanky soaked homage

War is a "deplorable situation" but hey, there's Oscar gold in them thar corpses.

So... you against art, or what?

on the other hand
long live the legacy of evans carlson

the red raider hisseff

http://cache4.asset-cache.net/xc/50377805.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=E41C9FE5C4AA0A1458EB5C38108B4A87A7A5992D7AC34FDF43E39561382968EEB01E70F2B3269972

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_Carlson

i oughta post him up here

I made the mistake of watching all the Oscar contenders, including The Hurt Locker, so I probably shouldn't comment on the film. But the reason it got the bald statue is pretty clear.

Ya see, actors make up the largest academy voting bloc (a bit over 60%). The Hurt Locker's only real competitor was Avatar, which contains very little acting and lots of gee-wiz fx. Most of the actors employed making films like Avatar are not paid SAG scale. Producers pay actors who act in front of blue screens and wearing electrode suits as "dancers" - a significanly lower pay grade than "actors."

Sure, big names with contracts are still paid the same. They're perfectly happy with the set up, since they get the same money for significantly less work. But for work-a-day actors, voting Avatar an Oscar would be like wearing a sign on your back saying "PLEASE FIRE ME AND REPLACE ME WITH A COMPUTER PROGRAM."

And even actors aren't that stupid.

alan s
excellent comment

No matter the blather, everyone knows the groove ain't there. Where are the directors, writers, musicians of even thirty five years ago, let aloned during the "high points" of U.S. film making. Most everything done anymore is a bunch of self-obsessive or ideological crap. Everyone may want it, but no one needs it.

Judging books by covers has a fine track record. Just ask Jack Green.

http://www.nyx.net/~awestrop/ftb/ftb.htm

A suggestion:
The adds for a film are usually instructive, done by people who understand the market for the film. Someone who sees one of the war films should also look at the advert -- and analyze the add text -- to see if it matches the content of the film. It is a bit of a thought exercise but I have noticed that if one reads the adds properly one can selectively avoid the film.

Then too the iconic elements in US culture are replayed and the narrative is also replayed. How difficult it must be to think of a new way to sell-promote-reactionary cultural codes.
NO? Yes?

,

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