Posted on 01/18/2013 8:04:15 AM PST by chessplayer
New York Times movie critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis team up for next Sunday's edition (posted early online) to once again pour their peculiar brand of pretentiousness over the latest crop of innocent films: "Movies in the Age of Obama."
In the summer of 2011, Dargis lamented "the symbolic phallus" present in the form of a rifle in a Western. Last July she managed to make a villain out of President Reagan, while Scott chimed in by complaining that movie superheroes were "avatars of reaction" and that the last X-Men movie was insufficiently attentive to the civil rights movement.
Their latest team-up is slightly less obnoxious, as it's in the form of an opinionated article instead of a conversation, but their strained attempts to tease out Obama-related themes from sci-fi and superhero movies remains silly and politicized.
The big studios still shy away from openly taking on class, unless the issue comes swaddled in period rags and a comfortable historical distance, as in “Les Misérables” and even the last “Robin Hood” was more about the rights of the rich than the privations of the poor. When the big studios do notice bad times, it’s often with the cluelessness of people who whine about their money woes while driving a Lexus. That said, glimpses of class conflict emerged amid the shadows of “The Dark Knight Rises,” which riffs on the French Revolution, nods at the Occupy movement and glances back at the gangster movies of the 1930s, in which struggles for power and money were accompanied by the rat-a-tat of Tommy guns.
Of course, “The Dark Knight Rises” is also a WAR movie, and Mr. Obama has been (to cite his predecessor’s self-description) a wartime president. “The Dark Knight Rises” imagines a Hobbesian state of social chaos, a more complicated situation than pictured by its prequel, “The Dark Knight,” which is in some ways the central movie of the Bush years, with its sharply drawn lines of good and evil. Batman’s fight with the Joker was as personal and apocalyptic as Harry Potter’s epochal struggle with Voldemort, which came to an on-screen conclusion in the same year that Osama bin Laden, the prime evildoer of the Bush era, met his violent end.
Movie audiences tend to prefer symbolic, fantastical wars, with intergalactic robots (in the subliminally anti-Obama “Transformer” movies, the third of which lays waste to the president’s adopted hometown, Chicago), alien life forms and futuristic settings.
...except the Transformers toys, television series and first animated movie date back to the mid-eighties. When the first big movie was released in 2007, the concept was more than 20 years old and Obama was still a Senator of no consequence. The project for the 2007 film and screenwriting began in 2003, well before Obama began running for President.
Obama wasn’t portrayed too well in the last two
Yep. A NYT movie review tells you a lot more about the reviewer than the movie being reviewed.
Gosh, how was “Death of a President” reviewed by the NYT? That was an assassination of GWB....
From the Slimes in 2006:
“Since it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, “The Death of a President,” a formally clever fake-umentary directed by Gabriel Range, has attracted some fairly predictable controversy. Since the president in question is George W. Bush and the death is the result of an assassination, the film has become a lightning rod for the usual forms of self-righteousness that often masquerade as political discussion. On one side, howls of “How dare you?” and on the other, ringing endorsements of free expression and artistic courage.”
http://movies.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/movies/27deat.html?_r=0
Over-indoctrinated, pseudo-intellectual liberal idiot.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.