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Anthropoid -> RE: PBEM 109 (7/18/2009 4:59:43 AM)
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This is totally off topic, but since there is some interest it seems, here is the movie review I wrote over at a Civ site where we have had lots of 'off-topic' discussions over the years. Didn't really notice any derogatory racial stuff in this one, though there was one racially stereotyped robot.
quote:
Netflix is worth every penny.
Watched two movies tonight, one of which is one of the best movies I've ever seen, the other of which is one of the worst.
The former (good) one was called "Very Young Girls" a documentary about underage prostitutes and an organization called GEMS that is focused on helping young women who have fallen victim to sexual exploitation, i.e., 'pimping' to break out of 'the lifestyle.' This is one of the most heartbreaking, but straightforward and unquestionable movies I've ever seen.
It is a devastating indictment of our societies that these injustices prevail at the high rates they continue at, and meanwhile we are spendin gabillions of dollars on porn, Hollywood, and cable TV. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of your daughters, nieces, and neighbor kids are running away, getting involved in drugs, and becoming victims to pimps every year. The average age at which prostitutes enter the lifestyle today? 13, that is how sick we are as societies . . . Sometimes I (almost) empathize with how much they (the Islamofascists) hate the West and its moral corruption. If only they were any better and used only nonviolent means to protest and did not simply replace consumeristic exploitation of women and girls with pure medieval brutality and repression of them . . . Anyway, an amazing movie and everyone should watch it. Not a "fun" movie by any stretch of the imagination, but an excellent movie: 9 out of 10.
The other one was an interesting counterpoint to the first. While children from the lower classes, ethnic minorities, the underprivileged, are suffering lives as veritable slaves, the middle-classes continue to subsidize the feeble-brained marketers who have taken over Hollywood by paying for not only one version, but remakes of this second dog of a movie movie that has got to be the most foul piece of crap ever to be Transformed into cinema: Transformers.
Now don't get me wrong, the whole idea of an alien race of sentient robot creatures from another galaxy who come to Earth to find and fight over an ancient relict that is the possible key to a new beginning to a vanquished civilization . . . sure, a bit heady but I can go with that. Good fantasy is all in good fun I say. But when a story like that, which deserves a certain, shall we say 'serious' tone in order to be palatable, is also mixed with the most juvenile excuses for humor, eye-candy, and feeble story lines, Hollywood has gone too far. Combine this with the false nostalgia, and false emotional ups and downs, the trivialization of combat, human frailty, injury, patriotism, warfare . . . It is not so much that the entire movie was terrible.
There are undeniably amazing special effects, good casting, good cinemtography, even some funny scenes, and some good acting (amazing really that those guys managed to do as well as they did given the atrocious story they had to work with). Even the basic story is not entirely too silly to have been a decent movie.
But in execution it works out to be one thing and one thing only: a teenage boys excuse for scene after repetitive scene of the following mix: nerdy-but-smart-late-bloomer guy saving the day + sex-pot popular High School girl sweating and panting + giant robots fighting + special forces guys bravely saying SpecOps cliche lines and vainly firing cool weapons at giant robots + National Security advisor guys saying officialese sounding politician/leader type things (and firing shotguns at mischevious ninja star throwing nasty-bot thing) + explosions galore + hapless humans running through utter chaos of cars and bricks exploding while giant robots pummel each other senseless and yet, somehow manage to pass through with only a little scrach on their forehead and a smudge of dirt on their cheek + some "Area 51-esque nefarious double-top-secret "A-hole" guys acting like nefarious A-holes + A-hole guys getting bested and handcuffed nekkid to a pole by aforementioned sexpot female (who lo and behold is _actually_ the daughter of a car thief who is an expert mechanic! and turns out to be (despite being just a "girl") quite the brave soldier in the war against the decepticons!) . . . The first three scenes to employ this time-tested formula to begule the juvenile males were a bit of a chuckle. The 12 and 14 left me slack-jawed. By the end I was yawning and continuing to watch purely out of amazement at how long they were dragging this thing out. An amazingly overblown waste of billions of dollars: 1.5 out of 10.
When I take the implications of these two movies together, I don't hold out a great deal of hope for the betterment of human kind in the longrun. More technological? More segmented into posh spoiled haves and poor suffering havenots? Sure, but "advancing" into a true civilization? No, I don't think so.
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