Friday, November 19, 2004
Subvert this, bitch!
Here I am, up at two in the goshdamn morning, even though I have to be at PT at six. Can't sleep, so I blog instead.
Here's something that just set me off the other day. A movie website posted the trailer for the remake of John Carpenter's cult classic "Assault on Precinct 13". I haven't seen the original, even though I've heard about it endlessly from devoted movie nerds; seeing it is one of those things I know I should get around to, but never do (sort of like I know that I should start purchasing food that is neither deep-fried or 80% cheese). There's a whole other rant on remaking movies (general rule: remake the bad ones, leave the good ones alone, okay?) I could go into, but that's a story for another day.
Anyway, in the original movie the bad guys were apparently an army of crazed gang members (side note: anybody ever see "The Warriors"? It's the best movie ever, I swear) declaring all-out war on everyone inside police precinct 13, forcing the cops AND the criminals inside to work together just to survive. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Yeah, well they change that in the remake. In the remake, there's one particularly dangerous criminal inside, Laurence "Stop trying to hit me and hit me" Fishburne, who knows too many specifics about police corruption, so all the numerous bad guys trying to get inside are (drumroll please)........ corrupt cops.
Gah, that's friggin boring as hell, but whatever. The retarded, overweight webmaster of this fansite goes on to note, "Now, if that isn't subversive and f'ed up I don't know what is."
What the hell? Did I step into a timewarp back into the 1940s where the idea of Hollywood using legions of corrupt cops as bad guys would somehow be considered "shocking" and "subversive"? Actually, no wait, I agree with this guy, but not the way he thinks it: truly, NOTHING is subversive anymore, because "subversive" has become the bleeping NORM.
I hate to break it to the people in charge of the entertainment in our country, but there are some bad people roaming the streets. There are criminals out there who would kill you soon as look at you, and not feel a shred of remorse afterward. They'd do it to cash in on your insurance money, or for your car, or for ten bucks in your wallet. Some of them might even do it to make you shut up.
And yet we get movies now where who are the bad guys? Not the bloodthirsty subhuman scum who regard your life as forfeit to your whims, but rather the police who act as our first line of defense against these monsters. What has our society come to where we fear corrupt police officers more than hardened criminals?
Remember that movie "The Manchurian Candidate" that came out earlier this year? Well, there was another movie called that, about forty years ago. It involved a U.S. soldier getting kidnapped and brainwashed by communists to become the perfect assassin. It was awesome. This remake, for those of you who saw it, exchanged the communist villains of the original for (drumroll again)...... an evil U.S. corporation, brainwashing a U.S. soldier so they could puppeteer him into the White House through a campaign ("compassionate vigilance") playing on the public's irrational fear of terrorism. Yeah, I love my political satires when they're so ham-handedly obvious even an eight-year-old could understand them, don't you?
People, I hate to break this to you, but communism was and is a real ideology. It was responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people just in the latter half of the 20th century. It was a global disaster of epic proportions, and many of the countries under its thumb had interests in taking down the U.S. and acted or attempted to act on behalf of those interests. These are not fanciful flights of the imagination, these are facts.
But no, that's too boring. Why make a movie where the villains are communists, when we can make them instead symbolize the ultimate expression of capitalism? Yeah, that's the ticket. Values have eroded so much in the world that the only bad guys are good guys. Communists aren't dangerous, but overzealous anti-communists are. Vicious gangs of human street predators aren't to be feared, but policemen who cross the line are. Osama bin Laden isn't a threat, but John Ashcroft is (except when the case can be even remotely made that going after Saddam Hussein somehow "distracted" from hunting Osama, in which case Osama is suddenly Dr. Doom, a nefarious supercriminal god whose every minute of continued existence is a damning indictment of the Bush administration's failure to capture him. But otherwise, hey, do we really need these orange alerts?)
Subversive, my ass. Hollywood's a bunch of moral relativist, navel-gazing leftists and I'm supposed to applaud them for being "daring" every time they Expose the Ugly Truth About Real Life in Suburbia (or whatever). To hell with that. Start making movies with real bad guys again, or else I'll... well, I'll probably just bitch about it more, and maybe read some comic books. Good lord, the way they changed "The Sum of All Fears" from the book version to the movie version was only the beginning....
Here's something that just set me off the other day. A movie website posted the trailer for the remake of John Carpenter's cult classic "Assault on Precinct 13". I haven't seen the original, even though I've heard about it endlessly from devoted movie nerds; seeing it is one of those things I know I should get around to, but never do (sort of like I know that I should start purchasing food that is neither deep-fried or 80% cheese). There's a whole other rant on remaking movies (general rule: remake the bad ones, leave the good ones alone, okay?) I could go into, but that's a story for another day.
Anyway, in the original movie the bad guys were apparently an army of crazed gang members (side note: anybody ever see "The Warriors"? It's the best movie ever, I swear) declaring all-out war on everyone inside police precinct 13, forcing the cops AND the criminals inside to work together just to survive. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Yeah, well they change that in the remake. In the remake, there's one particularly dangerous criminal inside, Laurence "Stop trying to hit me and hit me" Fishburne, who knows too many specifics about police corruption, so all the numerous bad guys trying to get inside are (drumroll please)........ corrupt cops.
Gah, that's friggin boring as hell, but whatever. The retarded, overweight webmaster of this fansite goes on to note, "Now, if that isn't subversive and f'ed up I don't know what is."
What the hell? Did I step into a timewarp back into the 1940s where the idea of Hollywood using legions of corrupt cops as bad guys would somehow be considered "shocking" and "subversive"? Actually, no wait, I agree with this guy, but not the way he thinks it: truly, NOTHING is subversive anymore, because "subversive" has become the bleeping NORM.
I hate to break it to the people in charge of the entertainment in our country, but there are some bad people roaming the streets. There are criminals out there who would kill you soon as look at you, and not feel a shred of remorse afterward. They'd do it to cash in on your insurance money, or for your car, or for ten bucks in your wallet. Some of them might even do it to make you shut up.
And yet we get movies now where who are the bad guys? Not the bloodthirsty subhuman scum who regard your life as forfeit to your whims, but rather the police who act as our first line of defense against these monsters. What has our society come to where we fear corrupt police officers more than hardened criminals?
Remember that movie "The Manchurian Candidate" that came out earlier this year? Well, there was another movie called that, about forty years ago. It involved a U.S. soldier getting kidnapped and brainwashed by communists to become the perfect assassin. It was awesome. This remake, for those of you who saw it, exchanged the communist villains of the original for (drumroll again)...... an evil U.S. corporation, brainwashing a U.S. soldier so they could puppeteer him into the White House through a campaign ("compassionate vigilance") playing on the public's irrational fear of terrorism. Yeah, I love my political satires when they're so ham-handedly obvious even an eight-year-old could understand them, don't you?
People, I hate to break this to you, but communism was and is a real ideology. It was responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people just in the latter half of the 20th century. It was a global disaster of epic proportions, and many of the countries under its thumb had interests in taking down the U.S. and acted or attempted to act on behalf of those interests. These are not fanciful flights of the imagination, these are facts.
But no, that's too boring. Why make a movie where the villains are communists, when we can make them instead symbolize the ultimate expression of capitalism? Yeah, that's the ticket. Values have eroded so much in the world that the only bad guys are good guys. Communists aren't dangerous, but overzealous anti-communists are. Vicious gangs of human street predators aren't to be feared, but policemen who cross the line are. Osama bin Laden isn't a threat, but John Ashcroft is (except when the case can be even remotely made that going after Saddam Hussein somehow "distracted" from hunting Osama, in which case Osama is suddenly Dr. Doom, a nefarious supercriminal god whose every minute of continued existence is a damning indictment of the Bush administration's failure to capture him. But otherwise, hey, do we really need these orange alerts?)
Subversive, my ass. Hollywood's a bunch of moral relativist, navel-gazing leftists and I'm supposed to applaud them for being "daring" every time they Expose the Ugly Truth About Real Life in Suburbia (or whatever). To hell with that. Start making movies with real bad guys again, or else I'll... well, I'll probably just bitch about it more, and maybe read some comic books. Good lord, the way they changed "The Sum of All Fears" from the book version to the movie version was only the beginning....
