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.
Even Megatron and Optimus Prime agree that Obama sucks.
Wonder what he thought of Iron Man and the government attempt to steal Tony Stark’s weapon?
Any good versus evil movie, with evil losing, can be interpreted as anti-Obama.
An unseemly obsession with negroes has been ruining this country for longer than I’ve been alive.
We can pretty much guarantee which side of that contest he was rooting for.
I really feel sorry for people like this, the only problem
is that they want all of us to drown in their misery.
But if they are pro obama, well that’s ok! /s/
Also, when Conservitives think there are subliminal messages in movies we are paranoid but when libs see it it’s racist.
Reading a NYT movie critic is like listening to a bunch of pretentious college sophomores as they pass a bong around the dorm room.
Obama is a Decepticon?
Sounds reasonable.
As far as I am concerned Movie Critics are more useless than a zipper to the Amish.
Movie critics are people who watch bad movies for a living.
Now thats a tough job isn’t it.
Their opiniopn is what they write and what makes their opinion worth a pint of sour owl pee? They like what they like and expect others to spend their money because these people with a suckee job like it.
They should shove their opinions where the sun don’t shine.
By the way they are bought and sold by the movie people.
The first one portrayed Bush as a complete hick fool, so it really doesn’t matter.
Rising personality cult of Obama. More Lenin/Stalin.
The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises were both right wing movies. The Dark Knight was a counterterrorist allegory, and The Dark Knight Rises was a counter-revolutionary allegory.
And, they’re actually right about Robin Hood this time ... it was never about robbing the rich and giving to the poor. It was always fundamentally about an outlaw fighting against the government. The villains have always been the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John — the tax collector and the government — not “the rich”.
Robin Hood robs the tax-man and gives to the people. He defends the right of self-suffiency, the right to hunt the King’s deer in the King’s forest.
Robin Hood was always a conservative outlaw.
SnakeDoc
Wow, even critics are affected by scientific fictional movies? I wonder what subliminal message triggered the BS?
You got it. 98% of what comes out of Hollyweird is garbage. Even in the good old days it was 90%. But there used to be some stuff worth watching. These radical-feminist/metrosexual movie reviewers are overly concerned with "subliminal messages" and whether or not women are portrayed correctly i.e. they perform as radical feminists expect them to perform. Whether the movie itself is entertaining or not is completely beside the point to these puffed-up morons.
Sounds like a medical condition.
Something that would cause a rash.
“Manohla Dargis
Sounds like a medical condition.”
I think the name translates to “yeast infection”.
Why are anti-consevative movies ok?
These NYT clowns believe they can bully those opposing Obama’s destruction of America.
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