For better and worse, Russ Meyer was the original Quentin Tarantino. He was a smooth talking hipster who made loud, funky movies that were immensely popular with a generation of young people because he embraced the sleaze and bad attitude they desired. But like Tarantino, Meyer didn't have much to say on anything. His films have no philosophical or political or even genuinely emotional or sexual wisdom to share. Cynically but cleverly disguised, their films are about pissing off the censors in hopes for shock value.
Vixen is incredibly well-produced and edited in an upbeat way that still plays easily. But its also a string of pointless (and dated) scenes of sex & violence with lame ass hipster lingo stitching it together. That makes its moronic and offensive kitsch seem like high, even arty camp when its not.
The plot of Vixen is that this spoiled, untamed, proud white trash republican chick has no sexual taboos. She cheats on her husband, has a lesbian fling and even seduces her brother, but she won't have sex with black people. Her racism is accepted and she doesn't really grow out of it or see error in it. Her enemy is the black boy her brother brings home. She insults, demeans and humiliates him throughout the film until he decides to sell her and all of his white "friends" to join the Communist Party. Racism is mean but communism would be evil. Russ Meyer has some ludicrous long dialogue where Cuba is modeled as a true picture of communism and only rich white men prosper because their fascism is somehow the same as Russia's?! Keep in mind that Meyer never once explains how capitalism is better and he foolishly identifies the opposite of socialism to be "democracy". The entire film comes from this embarrassing, delusional, dated rightwing macho patriotism that seeded today's so-called Libertarian Party in the United States. Most ironically is that Vixen only works as a film because of the furious editing techniques cribbed from Soviets.
I respect Russ Meyer for making some interesting, entertaining and sometimes insightful gems while on the outskirts of Hollywood, but he was a bigoted idiot just exploiting the hippie and feminist waves of filmmaking for pussy and dollars. Not my comrade.
Showing posts with label rightwing propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rightwing propaganda. Show all posts
Monday, February 12, 2018
Friday, January 26, 2018
Entourage (2004-2011) / Entourage 2015
I spent the last week bingewatching the 8 seasons of the Entourage TV series to review the movie. Why? The film bombed and the show is regarded as totally offensive & stupid entertainment for aging conservative hipsters. I needed to finally watch this to understand the mindset of Republicans, especially Hollywood Republicans and to try and empathize and sympathize with them.
I enjoyed the first 5 seasons as naive Bush Era comfort food for a post-9/11 generation who needed to drown out the horror and heavy concepts with crunk music, softcore TV porn and lots of mean-spirited humor. The Middle Eastern war is hardly referenced but it dictates the tone of the entire run. We're following a group of low class "street kids" from Queens, NYC who slowly reach the top of Hollywood. It happens slowly and for the most part realistically as they face setbacks of capitalist social climbing. The "epic" arc of this show is a bare-bones how-to guide from Mark Walhberg on the characters, methods, stories, lingo, dangers and rewards of becoming a Hollywood actor. But it only concentrates on the school of acting, directing, producing, writing and craftsmanship of moviemaking for white republican Gen Xers; and pretty much only the males.
See we follow the targeted circle of shady business from ethnic corporate characters who never question their servitude to such a corrupt system of exploitative globalized local ideology. No one questions the negative effect of their actions on anyone, not even their closest allies, family and friends. Except the protagonist, "E", who is the straight-and-narrow Catholic white kid who can hang with "the wiggers" and keep them on track to reaching bourgeois means of living. But he never becomes accepted by the rich and he, his actor best friend and their posse of social connections, business partners and soft muscle keep their gainful employment growing more and more amoral. I do not condone that kind of living nor that kind of writing unless its satirical and headed for a climax that is pro-democracy, pro-equality, socially moral and self-improving FOR those who need the instructions: kids, invalids, oppressed, depressed, vegetated and not pro-active. For all its warts, Entourage does inspire the watcher to act in both senses. To carve out a stake in life to live good later, to build a next egg. But the characters never make the world a better place. They simply play a part in a chaotic "God plot " that mirrors society only in that its based on the propaganda that supports it. Entourage ("E") starts as a hard-edge camp nostalgia piece that serves as nostalgia for those who lived it and ultimately fizzles, underperforms when it ends as a darkly crazed Ayn Rand piece of absurd rightwing revisionist history and a kind of Satanic bible on ruining your life. The Hollywood Ending of the show is a total cop-out. Was this intentional?
By the time the film was made, the cast seem totally checked out and repulsed by their characters. The show promotes a kind of Hollywood that is toxic for most people and is secretive in its real crimes and existential horrors. But now America and the world is rebelling to this cheap puppetshow Illuminati social rigging. It attaches itself to any majorly successful young show or star. Walhberg is like a soldier preaching his abusive "neoliberal" conservative government monopoly. The negative turn the show takes in Season 6 is quite gross and deadening. As the country shifts from the culture of George W Bush to the culture of Obama, things get much darker, Satanic and passive aggressively conservative. There's a short pointless subplot where E learns to dishonestly claim racism to land an actor job for his untalented young black male friend and first official client. Its such an awful display of white nationalist Neo-Nazi genetic hierarchy programming, which is the most extreme and horrific display of mental illness, economic oppression and sadomasochistic indirect torturing of the bullying bourgeois to the trusting, naive, left-in-the-dark minorities who don't fit the pyramidal ideology for 1% of the population. Corporate Hollywood's entire purpose is to put people to sleep so they make the rich richer and forget their own socio-economical struggles. The show flirts with subverting this but ultimately accepts "the way things are".
Whats tragic is that the show builds progressiveness, democracy, economy, wit and a unique passion initially in those special first 5 seasons and its powerful because of its dude-bro trappings. The show is supremely bro-mantic, almost to a homoerotic level. It starts as a queasy and then tranquil even blissful pill to make you love these characters despite their deep failures as young men. They play realistically and beautifully in a decent Scorsese style of comedic drama and dramatic comedy... "dramedy". What might account for the switch in creative tone is the gradual HBO franchising that happens with every decent show HBO picks up. I thought Entourage worked best as a tone poem on the loneliness of Mark Wahlberg's search for identity and struggle to grow up. But the showrunner, who eventually directs the movie and writes most of the last seasons, gives into to being a total network shill who spoils all of the tender interplay, loses the transgressive even radically leftist elements to make a repetitive "cast of writers"dark sitcom fusion of The OC, The Simpsons, Sex & the City, The Sopranos and whatever still had ratings at the time. This works well as the "comeback season" Season 7 feels as experimental, respectful, engaged and electrified as the writing ever was. The Story Editors weave the plots well and the directing is quite brisk. But more and more the show becomes a soapbox for a Judeo-Christian egomania of judgment, violence, chauvinism and eventual White Boy self-worship. It provides a unique example of the failure of self-awareness. If the show made fun of itself more, became genuinely inclusive or changed the face of TV in any way, I would consider it a classic show. Its not.
It never touches The Larry Sanders Show in fusing comedy and drama and it never reaches that show's poignancy or hilarious wit. It wants to be a tell-all about show business and the struggle to make art commercially, but the humor of the show becomes a sad self-criticism of the bleak separation of lowly TV actors and the Hollywood puppeteers they serve. The show loses its credibility as working class blues and becomes an ugly mirror to the silent abuses that we are supposed to enjoy seeing played through these stifled talents to sell a dollar. This show, like the film version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, is the high level of farce that is not even aware of how farcical, phony and unflattering it is. They cannot let go of George W Bush's Republican lies or correctly process or politely react to the liberalism of Obama's American values. You see the redeeming human qualities dirtied by an intense racist rejection of each other. By the show's end, it becomes the dated, pathetic exploitation of dried up actors that it hoped to lampoon, help and prevent. Its a real anticlimax that I do not enjoy after a few days of investment. If the show painted filmmaking as a quest for quality and not a hunt for money, maybe it would've ended in a grand way.
The show had its strengths in the acting (at least early on), some of the directing and the growth of the character Ari Gold. See, the show starts as a character study of E and eventually includes his Italian-American sidekicks... and their sidekicks. But Jeremy Piven is electric as one of a few stars who is an HBO veteran and a modest name. The show starts as a far right expensive sitcom for white and black yokels in the American South but, thanks to the creative control Piven puts into his award-winning performance, the show gets some class and the actors up their game and the writers have something to write for. He also includes as much camp gay-friendly content in the intense gay-bashing as he can and tries to add an arc to the overall characterization. I think his direct say in the A plot's direction was nil, but they certainly bounced off of him as much as he bounced off of them. Its a case of the actor becoming the auteur but not given the total control he needed and deserved. Because the only boss in Hollywood is the head of execs, as the show obsessively writes into the show causing almost ALL of the show's decline. In fact, the show's A plot becomes the humbling and defanging of Ari Gold's Jewishness to the corporate capitalism of Aryan people. Thats what ruins the show: so much transcendant positive change in the reflection of leadership gets highjacked and replaced with in-your-face propaganda for capitalist White Pride, White Nationalism, rightwing-ism, republicanism and ultimately the creation of a NeoNazi elite class that presides over a distinctly whites-only utopian communism. Its bourgeois anti-art. Propaganda.
Yet I do not regret watching it through at least once to have some knowledge of what the world is up against and how the modern media sees itself. Its a history lesson for future generations not to repeat and to rebel against. Very much, this is the new type of modernism that artists now must deconstruct and post-modernize. I prefer totally new content if its good, but this type of bad art can be used to subvert its own prejudices. Unfortunately there is a massive bulk of cinema that is more Triumph of the Will than The Great Dictator. Is there goodness in badness? Is their badness in goodness? Is everything really gray? Is the brightness of childhood a fleeting illusion only sustained by physical youth? Or is it simply a projection of one's own sense of legend and experienced illusion?
Is Entourage a good show? If you view it in a Twin Peaks way where each run of the series is its own series. This is the typical style of global television. TV originally was closer to the diverse microcosm of anthology than the macro world-building of novels and epic films. Entourage works in the first 5 seasons as a comic book manchild fantasy that is almost essential to modern spectatorship's disintegration of white rightwing chauvinist patriarchy. Its the monkey minded-ness of the social group who are most anti-monkey mindness. We all are experiencing the group's exorcism of bigotry and hate in its most bigoted and hated minority. The sad truth is that the white man has made himself the most targeted minority and the most outwardly violent group because of their own competitive spirit against themselves. Thats what is bred from any social hierarchy's "winner of the lotto".
But remember that this show failed, is regarded shitty by the new press and Hollywood is determined to clean up its messes. Its sad that many names associated with the show have fallen into terrible career failure. Some have been accused of the sexual harassment that is even previously written into the show. By the final stretch the cameos in the show are simply favors for Wahlberg and the usual Hollywood republicans who need work: David Spade, James Woods, Andrew Dice Clay, Dennis Hopper, James Cameron. They are the real "entourage" who look out for each other. The entire show is a metaphor for Republican exclusiveness, The Elite. Its damning evidence of its own collective crimes. Is this intentional? Was a Marxist steering this asinine celebration of excess and materialism? To make it a lucrative but essential demystification and anti-propaganda to sabotage capitalism? Nah, I think its just a bad show. But its a bad show people still love. But we don't need anymore bad shows like Entourage.
You can sum up the emotional resonance of the show in the bromantic sadness of the phrase "later, bro" as you part from someone you really can't get along with but you're related by blood. Thats how the world sees America now.
The story ends with a shallow triumph that isn't really earned just to satisfy fans if the show never returns for a proper finale. The movie is a reboot for a 9th season that erases the mistakes of the 8th season. That I appreciate and see as a brilliant David Lynch level power play by Doug Ellin, the showrunner, writer and director, AND Mark Wahlberg who seems to be the major producer and free from network control. The show had an overly Romantic, sell out ending, akin to Objectivist standards. But the film, if its not a true ending, sets up another quest for a mature, darker, wiser story where the Entourage actually learn to be humans again. Could it ever become the progressive, leftist documentary of changing attitudes it aspired to be? Maybe. It is unfinished and left in a gray middle that is neither the show's highs or its lows. A sad ending if final but a good cliffhanger too. And thats sort of the most common type of ending in life. Maybe not the most preferred or important, but its the popular measure of mediocrity.
The show is a crystallization of white male egomania, the desperate urge to stay young and cool forever to fuck younger, cooler girls. Thats what Hollywood star system is filled with and motivated by and catering to. Its not a cancer of human thought but a symptom of a worse mental illness, the rejection of God and the quest to become AntiChrist, the superego, the man-god so separate bu equal to Creation that it is above all other living things. Its a collective oneness except exclusive for this genetic breed. As much as I liked some seasons more than others, I think the entire show is basically white supremacy porn, totally in service to fascism and oppression of laborers. And shows like this shouldn't be made the way this is ultimately executed. Its a shame, because its a decent show idea but its not popular except to the rich white audience who make it and the poor whites who want to buy into it. How sick is the American dream? You can watch Citizen Kane reject it or Entourage worship it. I think the choice of superiority is evident.
I enjoyed the first 5 seasons as naive Bush Era comfort food for a post-9/11 generation who needed to drown out the horror and heavy concepts with crunk music, softcore TV porn and lots of mean-spirited humor. The Middle Eastern war is hardly referenced but it dictates the tone of the entire run. We're following a group of low class "street kids" from Queens, NYC who slowly reach the top of Hollywood. It happens slowly and for the most part realistically as they face setbacks of capitalist social climbing. The "epic" arc of this show is a bare-bones how-to guide from Mark Walhberg on the characters, methods, stories, lingo, dangers and rewards of becoming a Hollywood actor. But it only concentrates on the school of acting, directing, producing, writing and craftsmanship of moviemaking for white republican Gen Xers; and pretty much only the males.
See we follow the targeted circle of shady business from ethnic corporate characters who never question their servitude to such a corrupt system of exploitative globalized local ideology. No one questions the negative effect of their actions on anyone, not even their closest allies, family and friends. Except the protagonist, "E", who is the straight-and-narrow Catholic white kid who can hang with "the wiggers" and keep them on track to reaching bourgeois means of living. But he never becomes accepted by the rich and he, his actor best friend and their posse of social connections, business partners and soft muscle keep their gainful employment growing more and more amoral. I do not condone that kind of living nor that kind of writing unless its satirical and headed for a climax that is pro-democracy, pro-equality, socially moral and self-improving FOR those who need the instructions: kids, invalids, oppressed, depressed, vegetated and not pro-active. For all its warts, Entourage does inspire the watcher to act in both senses. To carve out a stake in life to live good later, to build a next egg. But the characters never make the world a better place. They simply play a part in a chaotic "God plot " that mirrors society only in that its based on the propaganda that supports it. Entourage ("E") starts as a hard-edge camp nostalgia piece that serves as nostalgia for those who lived it and ultimately fizzles, underperforms when it ends as a darkly crazed Ayn Rand piece of absurd rightwing revisionist history and a kind of Satanic bible on ruining your life. The Hollywood Ending of the show is a total cop-out. Was this intentional?
By the time the film was made, the cast seem totally checked out and repulsed by their characters. The show promotes a kind of Hollywood that is toxic for most people and is secretive in its real crimes and existential horrors. But now America and the world is rebelling to this cheap puppetshow Illuminati social rigging. It attaches itself to any majorly successful young show or star. Walhberg is like a soldier preaching his abusive "neoliberal" conservative government monopoly. The negative turn the show takes in Season 6 is quite gross and deadening. As the country shifts from the culture of George W Bush to the culture of Obama, things get much darker, Satanic and passive aggressively conservative. There's a short pointless subplot where E learns to dishonestly claim racism to land an actor job for his untalented young black male friend and first official client. Its such an awful display of white nationalist Neo-Nazi genetic hierarchy programming, which is the most extreme and horrific display of mental illness, economic oppression and sadomasochistic indirect torturing of the bullying bourgeois to the trusting, naive, left-in-the-dark minorities who don't fit the pyramidal ideology for 1% of the population. Corporate Hollywood's entire purpose is to put people to sleep so they make the rich richer and forget their own socio-economical struggles. The show flirts with subverting this but ultimately accepts "the way things are".
Whats tragic is that the show builds progressiveness, democracy, economy, wit and a unique passion initially in those special first 5 seasons and its powerful because of its dude-bro trappings. The show is supremely bro-mantic, almost to a homoerotic level. It starts as a queasy and then tranquil even blissful pill to make you love these characters despite their deep failures as young men. They play realistically and beautifully in a decent Scorsese style of comedic drama and dramatic comedy... "dramedy". What might account for the switch in creative tone is the gradual HBO franchising that happens with every decent show HBO picks up. I thought Entourage worked best as a tone poem on the loneliness of Mark Wahlberg's search for identity and struggle to grow up. But the showrunner, who eventually directs the movie and writes most of the last seasons, gives into to being a total network shill who spoils all of the tender interplay, loses the transgressive even radically leftist elements to make a repetitive "cast of writers"dark sitcom fusion of The OC, The Simpsons, Sex & the City, The Sopranos and whatever still had ratings at the time. This works well as the "comeback season" Season 7 feels as experimental, respectful, engaged and electrified as the writing ever was. The Story Editors weave the plots well and the directing is quite brisk. But more and more the show becomes a soapbox for a Judeo-Christian egomania of judgment, violence, chauvinism and eventual White Boy self-worship. It provides a unique example of the failure of self-awareness. If the show made fun of itself more, became genuinely inclusive or changed the face of TV in any way, I would consider it a classic show. Its not.
It never touches The Larry Sanders Show in fusing comedy and drama and it never reaches that show's poignancy or hilarious wit. It wants to be a tell-all about show business and the struggle to make art commercially, but the humor of the show becomes a sad self-criticism of the bleak separation of lowly TV actors and the Hollywood puppeteers they serve. The show loses its credibility as working class blues and becomes an ugly mirror to the silent abuses that we are supposed to enjoy seeing played through these stifled talents to sell a dollar. This show, like the film version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, is the high level of farce that is not even aware of how farcical, phony and unflattering it is. They cannot let go of George W Bush's Republican lies or correctly process or politely react to the liberalism of Obama's American values. You see the redeeming human qualities dirtied by an intense racist rejection of each other. By the show's end, it becomes the dated, pathetic exploitation of dried up actors that it hoped to lampoon, help and prevent. Its a real anticlimax that I do not enjoy after a few days of investment. If the show painted filmmaking as a quest for quality and not a hunt for money, maybe it would've ended in a grand way.
The show had its strengths in the acting (at least early on), some of the directing and the growth of the character Ari Gold. See, the show starts as a character study of E and eventually includes his Italian-American sidekicks... and their sidekicks. But Jeremy Piven is electric as one of a few stars who is an HBO veteran and a modest name. The show starts as a far right expensive sitcom for white and black yokels in the American South but, thanks to the creative control Piven puts into his award-winning performance, the show gets some class and the actors up their game and the writers have something to write for. He also includes as much camp gay-friendly content in the intense gay-bashing as he can and tries to add an arc to the overall characterization. I think his direct say in the A plot's direction was nil, but they certainly bounced off of him as much as he bounced off of them. Its a case of the actor becoming the auteur but not given the total control he needed and deserved. Because the only boss in Hollywood is the head of execs, as the show obsessively writes into the show causing almost ALL of the show's decline. In fact, the show's A plot becomes the humbling and defanging of Ari Gold's Jewishness to the corporate capitalism of Aryan people. Thats what ruins the show: so much transcendant positive change in the reflection of leadership gets highjacked and replaced with in-your-face propaganda for capitalist White Pride, White Nationalism, rightwing-ism, republicanism and ultimately the creation of a NeoNazi elite class that presides over a distinctly whites-only utopian communism. Its bourgeois anti-art. Propaganda.
Yet I do not regret watching it through at least once to have some knowledge of what the world is up against and how the modern media sees itself. Its a history lesson for future generations not to repeat and to rebel against. Very much, this is the new type of modernism that artists now must deconstruct and post-modernize. I prefer totally new content if its good, but this type of bad art can be used to subvert its own prejudices. Unfortunately there is a massive bulk of cinema that is more Triumph of the Will than The Great Dictator. Is there goodness in badness? Is their badness in goodness? Is everything really gray? Is the brightness of childhood a fleeting illusion only sustained by physical youth? Or is it simply a projection of one's own sense of legend and experienced illusion?
Is Entourage a good show? If you view it in a Twin Peaks way where each run of the series is its own series. This is the typical style of global television. TV originally was closer to the diverse microcosm of anthology than the macro world-building of novels and epic films. Entourage works in the first 5 seasons as a comic book manchild fantasy that is almost essential to modern spectatorship's disintegration of white rightwing chauvinist patriarchy. Its the monkey minded-ness of the social group who are most anti-monkey mindness. We all are experiencing the group's exorcism of bigotry and hate in its most bigoted and hated minority. The sad truth is that the white man has made himself the most targeted minority and the most outwardly violent group because of their own competitive spirit against themselves. Thats what is bred from any social hierarchy's "winner of the lotto".
But remember that this show failed, is regarded shitty by the new press and Hollywood is determined to clean up its messes. Its sad that many names associated with the show have fallen into terrible career failure. Some have been accused of the sexual harassment that is even previously written into the show. By the final stretch the cameos in the show are simply favors for Wahlberg and the usual Hollywood republicans who need work: David Spade, James Woods, Andrew Dice Clay, Dennis Hopper, James Cameron. They are the real "entourage" who look out for each other. The entire show is a metaphor for Republican exclusiveness, The Elite. Its damning evidence of its own collective crimes. Is this intentional? Was a Marxist steering this asinine celebration of excess and materialism? To make it a lucrative but essential demystification and anti-propaganda to sabotage capitalism? Nah, I think its just a bad show. But its a bad show people still love. But we don't need anymore bad shows like Entourage.
You can sum up the emotional resonance of the show in the bromantic sadness of the phrase "later, bro" as you part from someone you really can't get along with but you're related by blood. Thats how the world sees America now.
The story ends with a shallow triumph that isn't really earned just to satisfy fans if the show never returns for a proper finale. The movie is a reboot for a 9th season that erases the mistakes of the 8th season. That I appreciate and see as a brilliant David Lynch level power play by Doug Ellin, the showrunner, writer and director, AND Mark Wahlberg who seems to be the major producer and free from network control. The show had an overly Romantic, sell out ending, akin to Objectivist standards. But the film, if its not a true ending, sets up another quest for a mature, darker, wiser story where the Entourage actually learn to be humans again. Could it ever become the progressive, leftist documentary of changing attitudes it aspired to be? Maybe. It is unfinished and left in a gray middle that is neither the show's highs or its lows. A sad ending if final but a good cliffhanger too. And thats sort of the most common type of ending in life. Maybe not the most preferred or important, but its the popular measure of mediocrity.
The show is a crystallization of white male egomania, the desperate urge to stay young and cool forever to fuck younger, cooler girls. Thats what Hollywood star system is filled with and motivated by and catering to. Its not a cancer of human thought but a symptom of a worse mental illness, the rejection of God and the quest to become AntiChrist, the superego, the man-god so separate bu equal to Creation that it is above all other living things. Its a collective oneness except exclusive for this genetic breed. As much as I liked some seasons more than others, I think the entire show is basically white supremacy porn, totally in service to fascism and oppression of laborers. And shows like this shouldn't be made the way this is ultimately executed. Its a shame, because its a decent show idea but its not popular except to the rich white audience who make it and the poor whites who want to buy into it. How sick is the American dream? You can watch Citizen Kane reject it or Entourage worship it. I think the choice of superiority is evident.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
G.I. Joe Retaliation 2013
Another Obama Era film from 2013, one of my favorite recent years for cinema. It was such a highly political year for films and Hollywood was just starting to embrace the voice of social media and not yet trying to control it. In 2012, they fed into the hysteria of Mayan calendar apocalypse and with 2013 the bipartisan executives and stars either saw Obama as the Muslim Illuminati antichrist or flipped off the racist paranoid conspiracy theories. A few in the middle saw him for what he is: a popular NeoLiberal puppet with questionable authority but a typically human guy.
GI Joe 2 is interesting because it can't make up its mind and rather cowardly but fiscally walks the line. It casts Dwayne Johnson (Hollywood's Obama surrogate) as its hero. The Rock, like Obama, is a decent person with mediocre skill but a unique star magnetism. Interestingly, as "Roadblock", The Rock plays a militant lackey who is only in authority because the first GI Joe film's All-American white boy protagonist is killed. Already we get rightwing whistleblowing that blacks are subordinate and this liberal change is only temporary. The film shoehorns in some Asian characters for the Asian market but always reminds us that they are inferior to Snake Eyes. That would be true to the source material but its offensive here because Snake Eyes is barely in the story at all and the Asian characters are very important to the plot. In Michael Bay fashion, women are stripper-ish eye candy who are just skilled enough to not come off as mannequins. There's also the lame homophobia and colorism that comes along with every Dwayne Johnson role. Can we admit this guy is a sellout already? If he thinks Barack failed to live up to Ronald Reagan I would say The Rock has failed to live up to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The topper is the plot set-up by the 2009 predecessor's cliffhanger ending: that The President is a plant from the shadowy Deep State terrorist group Cobra. Now this would be a fair criticism of Obama's NeoLiberal and CIA ties, but "Retaliation" goes out of its way to draw parallels to Isis and The Illuminati. The entire film is a rightwing nut's militaristic fever dream that stops short of Reptilians ruling the planet (ironically, that IS the plot of the far superior 1987 GI Joe animated film).
Obama wasn't the superhero the Democrats claimed he was, but he was far from a bad guy. He was bad at national security, instituting crazy government abuses of surveillance and drone strikes and, when the Dems actually got control of the Senate, he didn't do much for the American citizen unless you were gay or rich. Because he played to whatever the leaders of the party wanted. This is what EVERY president has done since Kennedy. So why cast Obama as a demon? Why replace him with Trump? Because really, as this moronic meathead film displays, Republicans just want strong old school white male values in place with everyone lower than them on the pyramid food chain. Just... because. It feels right to them and this film disgustingly feeds that insanity, selfishness and inferiority. Oh yeah. For no real reason, the 2nd half of the film throws in a pointless role for Bruce Willis to browbeat The Rock, shoot people and give the Joes old white men as backup.
Its odd because while far from egalitarian or radically progressive the G.I. Joe franchise is very much against the regression, racism and sexism in this film. This film lacks the dark faces, estrogen and democratic patriotism that even Stephen Sommers brought to the childish 2009 film.
I love the G.I. Joe cartoon and comic books. This shitty, cynical film has nothing to do with it. It lacks the heart and most of the characters that G.I. Joe fans love. I'm not even talking about kids. A gritty Christopher Nolan style G.I. Joe film isn't a bad idea, but it should avoid everything this film is. But it shouldn't be "Dunkirk" either.
GI Joe 2 is interesting because it can't make up its mind and rather cowardly but fiscally walks the line. It casts Dwayne Johnson (Hollywood's Obama surrogate) as its hero. The Rock, like Obama, is a decent person with mediocre skill but a unique star magnetism. Interestingly, as "Roadblock", The Rock plays a militant lackey who is only in authority because the first GI Joe film's All-American white boy protagonist is killed. Already we get rightwing whistleblowing that blacks are subordinate and this liberal change is only temporary. The film shoehorns in some Asian characters for the Asian market but always reminds us that they are inferior to Snake Eyes. That would be true to the source material but its offensive here because Snake Eyes is barely in the story at all and the Asian characters are very important to the plot. In Michael Bay fashion, women are stripper-ish eye candy who are just skilled enough to not come off as mannequins. There's also the lame homophobia and colorism that comes along with every Dwayne Johnson role. Can we admit this guy is a sellout already? If he thinks Barack failed to live up to Ronald Reagan I would say The Rock has failed to live up to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The topper is the plot set-up by the 2009 predecessor's cliffhanger ending: that The President is a plant from the shadowy Deep State terrorist group Cobra. Now this would be a fair criticism of Obama's NeoLiberal and CIA ties, but "Retaliation" goes out of its way to draw parallels to Isis and The Illuminati. The entire film is a rightwing nut's militaristic fever dream that stops short of Reptilians ruling the planet (ironically, that IS the plot of the far superior 1987 GI Joe animated film).
Obama wasn't the superhero the Democrats claimed he was, but he was far from a bad guy. He was bad at national security, instituting crazy government abuses of surveillance and drone strikes and, when the Dems actually got control of the Senate, he didn't do much for the American citizen unless you were gay or rich. Because he played to whatever the leaders of the party wanted. This is what EVERY president has done since Kennedy. So why cast Obama as a demon? Why replace him with Trump? Because really, as this moronic meathead film displays, Republicans just want strong old school white male values in place with everyone lower than them on the pyramid food chain. Just... because. It feels right to them and this film disgustingly feeds that insanity, selfishness and inferiority. Oh yeah. For no real reason, the 2nd half of the film throws in a pointless role for Bruce Willis to browbeat The Rock, shoot people and give the Joes old white men as backup.
Its odd because while far from egalitarian or radically progressive the G.I. Joe franchise is very much against the regression, racism and sexism in this film. This film lacks the dark faces, estrogen and democratic patriotism that even Stephen Sommers brought to the childish 2009 film.
I love the G.I. Joe cartoon and comic books. This shitty, cynical film has nothing to do with it. It lacks the heart and most of the characters that G.I. Joe fans love. I'm not even talking about kids. A gritty Christopher Nolan style G.I. Joe film isn't a bad idea, but it should avoid everything this film is. But it shouldn't be "Dunkirk" either.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)