4 ms·

Yeah, Princess Mononoke is really a lovely film. I thought when Spirited Away came out and became popular that people would naturally go back and check out Mono

Yeah, Princess Mononoke is really a lovely film. I thought when Spirited Away came out and became popular that people would naturally go back and check out Mononoke, but it didn't happen that much. Definitely worth a watch. As for Avatar - My two biggest complaints: 1. It paints it as black and white, good vs. evil. This is such a common source of human misery and brainwashing that I thought we'd started to move past in cinema. Every leader worth anything tries to play the underdog card. Ask yourself about every cause you sincerely respect and believe in - do any of your leaders not paint it as you vs. the world? The New York Yankees are the only organization I can think of that don't try to play the underdog external evil enemies card. All the world religions do, all political parties do, all nations do, and so on. 2. My housemate had a great quote - he said, "They completed de-humanized the humans before doing all the violence to them." It's quite right - the evil military industrial capitalist marines have no family members, loved ones, passions, or good about them. They exist to be eaten by dinosaurs, shot by arrows, crushed, beaten, and shredded. There's no marine who signed on for a security job, got a little freaked out what's happening, and died due to the complex violent decisions of the leaders. Nope, all the marines are not even human or worth sympathizing with at all - destroy the expoiters, make violence on them, and they deserve all the hells we can visit upon them. When you take "we're completely good and they're completely evil" and mix it with "our enemies aren't even human", you get a recipe for horrible atrocities. I watched a documentary of what the Imperial Japanese Army soldiers was thinking at Nanking. They regarded their cause as God's work, and their Chinese enemies as not human. Never mind the specific politics. Do we really want our epic, landmark art to assert that there is in fact pure good, pure evil, and the people with different views than us are pure evil and aren't even human? I kept trying to think of if I had a kid, how I'd talk to him or her after watching that to understand that the "clear good and evil" thinking leads to very bad places.

patio11 17y ago
Yeah. An alternate reading of Avatar (supported by the text) is the story of a stolid marine colonel's tragic death in support of a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth. Sending humanity back at the end of the movie, with the exception of two collaborators, is genocide of the entire human race. I know, that isn't quite the Wars For Oil Suck, Love Your Purple Bambi Earth Goddesses Or You Will Be Brutally Slain thing he was going for, but still. (Edited to add: Am I a bad person if I sympathized with the marine colonel most out of any character? "Oh blimey, traitors have just stolen a top-of-the-line helicopter gunship armed with missiles that could blow us all apart. Men, masks on! I'm about to blow the door, step unprotected into an environment filled with poisonous gas, and engage them singlehandedly. With a sidearm.")
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  Ah, spoiler alert!?
- grannyg00se 17y ago
  "a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth" is not a scenario that is reasonably interpreted by viewing of the film. In what "text" is this reading supported? In the film, the humans are there on behalf of a corporation interested in mining natural resources for profit. That position is made clear. There is no indication at all that Earth is in need of this resource for any other reason than corporate greed. As mentioned elsewhere, the story is pretty black & white that way.
defen 17y ago
Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race.
- gaius 17y ago
  I don't know if you've seen Hero but that is an amazingly beautiful film. The sets, the lighting, the costumes, the actors, everything is gorgeous. You could take almost any still from it and blow it up and put it on the wall. It is set in the Chinese equivalent of the Western mediaeval period, and has all these perfect little vignettes, like a miniature visual essay into the nature of raindrops falling on a sword. But the political message which only really sinks in afterwards is "China should stop fucking about already and just invade Taiwan" and then you think, wow, someone really wanted to get that message across to Western moviegoers...
  - chops 17y ago
    I guess I'm dense (or uninformed), but I never picked up on that in Hero.
    - gaius 17y ago
      The Taiwanese view Taiwan as the "true China" and dream of the day the Communists are out of power so they can go home. The Chinese view Taiwan as a rebel breakaway province and would very much like it "back". That's what Hero is about - any amount of sacrifice and slaughter is worth it to "reunify" China.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  Edit: Wow, comment turned out to be very long, background on lots of historical periods. tl;dr is that propaganda and flimsy motives is by no means a Nazi thing, not at all. It's standard operating procedure for most causes and almost all wars in history. History is re-written afterwards to make the story simpler and easier to follow, but most wars and fights had flimsy motives and two sides when they were started. Later, the loser is deemed to be "evil", and the winner's cause was just and never in doubt. Some history with links that might be interesting for other people who enjoy learning history. Personally, I'm a large fan of learning about all sorts of things, and history is one of the things I love the most. What got me interested in history was learning about Sengoku Japan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period Now, the Japanese people have some strong ideas about Sengoku, but they're mixed ideas with conflict and debate about who the "good guys" were. It's funny because I'd made my conclusions and opinions on a number of the leaders of the era, only to find out that many Japanese people have much greater or worse opinions on certain people. By learning from a true outsider's perspective, I feel like I got more of the legitimate story than the propaganda. Besides, there's no debate as to the merits of the caste system, or whether power is better consolidated under the Emperor who is God-on-Earth, or the Shogun, who is ostensibly the chief servant of the Emperor, Head of the Military, and Head of the Economy. So, by getting into 1600's Japanese history and seeing how complicated and nuanced it was, it gave me a much greater and more interesting view of Western European and American history. What's interesting is that typically has "good guys" and "bad guys" and it's very clear who is who. For instance, take the American Civil War. Under the American Constitution, Federalism, Representative Democracy, and under classical international law, the Confederate Secession was legal, and the attempt to re-supply Fort Sumpter was illegal. The total war/slash and burn Union campaign was brutal. In the North, they also suspended habeas corpus, arrested people who spoke against the war (including Senators, yikes!), conscripted people against their will, and generally did some very bad shit. The war is taught and sold as a civil rights thing - really, looking back on primary and secondary sources, it wasn't. Here's Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, right after the Confederacy started. http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html Here's what he thinks about slavery at that point: > It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that— I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. Here's Lincoln toeing the line on whether the Northern states should be mandated to return fugitive slaves: > There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by State authority, but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept? His whole speech, he goes on trying to mediate and defend slavery. Why the war then? > I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. He then makes a really interesting and somewhat crazy argument that the Articles of Confederacy are still legally binding, and that's why the South can't secede, and trying to would be an act of war: > In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." And YET, despite that, I think Lincoln absolutely was doing the right thing. I believe the Union invasion of the Confederacy was illegal under any definition of legal at the time, the President authorized breaking all sorts of laws, and yet, it was the right thing to do. I'll bite that bullet - President Lincoln broke the law, did some vicious things, but it was still in retrospect the correct course of action. Most people won't bite that bullet - so they want to claim that there's clear good guys and bad guys. I'd encourage them to read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, it's simply too wild and crazy not to read. It doesn't match what I read in my high school "U.S. History" textbook very well, but yet, that was legitimately what he said. Crazy stuff. I like reading speeches from early leaders to get at their motivations. Later, when audio and video recordings are available, I watch them. All the WWII countries went on and on about their propaganda. Had the Axis won, right now, we'd be reading about the evil imperialist Allies who sought to enslave the noble Germanic people. I've seen FDR's speeches, Churchill's speeches, and Hitler's speeches. Churchill was generally pretty honest - he was a military man, and spoke rather plainly. He was put in after his predecessor failed - Prime Minister Chamberlain was more of a politician and not much of a military man, so he stepped down and Churchill became PM. He spoke simple, plain, about fighting for England and winning and courage. Roosevelt and Hitler, though, they whooped all sorts of emotions about how American/German way of life were under attack by brutal enemies. Both lied, frequently, about enemy plans. Here's a totally comic forged map that FDR presented as Nazi intelligence: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/250-who-put-the-gau-in-gaucho-a-forged-map-of-nazi-south-america/ http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/250-who-put-the-... (The Nazis were a lot of bad things, but if you look at their war plans, they really didn't care so much about the West. They invaded Poland, violating the Treaty of Versailles really really badly, and then England and France declared war on Germany. Germany didn't care so much about Western Europe or North America - Hitler was desperately afraid of and hated the Soviets, and all their plans were designed around going East. That's why they launched Operation Barbarossa - the invasion into the USSR - even though they couldn't come to a cease fire with England beforehand) Hmm, this comment is turning out to be quite long. I wanted to set a stage for the kind of speeches people give - Hitler's were always the evil, evil un-human oppressors of Germany. He talked about "the rape of the Germany people in 1918" and the hordes that wanted to destroy the German race. Really, the Nazis were very evil, but they weren't openly evil the way The Empire is in Star Wars - Nazi rallying speeches sounded a lot like Soviet rallying speeches sounded a lot like American rallying speeches. They hate us... seek to destroy out way of life... this is a fight to the death... but we're proud and strong and courageous and we'll win... give yourself over to the greater good and victory is assured... we're righteous and right is on our side... > Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race. So yeah, that turned out to be a long comment. But it's not so much a Nazi propaganda movie - just a standard propaganda movie, like any political group in history would use. The enemy is evil, has no heart or soul, nothing human about them, and they'll completely destroy us for completely faulty reasons if we don't completely destroy them first. Standard us-vs-them total genocidal war propaganda. Though, it is a little disconcerting to see in a mainstream film in the year 2009.

patio11 17y ago

Yeah. An alternate reading of Avatar (supported by the text) is the story of a stolid marine colonel's tragic death in support of a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth. Sending humanity back at the end of the movie, with the exception of two collaborators, is genocide of the entire human race. I know, that isn't quite the Wars For Oil Suck, Love Your Purple Bambi Earth Goddesses Or You Will Be Brutally Slain thing he was going for, but still. (Edited to add: Am I a bad person if I sympathized with the marine colonel most out of any character? "Oh blimey, traitors have just stolen a top-of-the-line helicopter gunship armed with missiles that could blow us all apart. Men, masks on! I'm about to blow the door, step unprotected into an environment filled with poisonous gas, and engage them singlehandedly. With a sidearm.")

anigbrowl 17y ago
Ah, spoiler alert!?
grannyg00se 17y ago
"a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth" is not a scenario that is reasonably interpreted by viewing of the film. In what "text" is this reading supported? In the film, the humans are there on behalf of a corporation interested in mining natural resources for profit. That position is made clear. There is no indication at all that Earth is in need of this resource for any other reason than corporate greed. As mentioned elsewhere, the story is pretty black & white that way.

defen 17y ago

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race.

gaius 17y ago
I don't know if you've seen Hero but that is an amazingly beautiful film. The sets, the lighting, the costumes, the actors, everything is gorgeous. You could take almost any still from it and blow it up and put it on the wall. It is set in the Chinese equivalent of the Western mediaeval period, and has all these perfect little vignettes, like a miniature visual essay into the nature of raindrops falling on a sword. But the political message which only really sinks in afterwards is "China should stop fucking about already and just invade Taiwan" and then you think, wow, someone really wanted to get that message across to Western moviegoers...
- chops 17y ago
  I guess I'm dense (or uninformed), but I never picked up on that in Hero.
  - gaius 17y ago
    The Taiwanese view Taiwan as the "true China" and dream of the day the Communists are out of power so they can go home. The Chinese view Taiwan as a rebel breakaway province and would very much like it "back". That's what Hero is about - any amount of sacrifice and slaughter is worth it to "reunify" China.
lionhearted 17y ago
Edit: Wow, comment turned out to be very long, background on lots of historical periods. tl;dr is that propaganda and flimsy motives is by no means a Nazi thing, not at all. It's standard operating procedure for most causes and almost all wars in history. History is re-written afterwards to make the story simpler and easier to follow, but most wars and fights had flimsy motives and two sides when they were started. Later, the loser is deemed to be "evil", and the winner's cause was just and never in doubt. Some history with links that might be interesting for other people who enjoy learning history. Personally, I'm a large fan of learning about all sorts of things, and history is one of the things I love the most. What got me interested in history was learning about Sengoku Japan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period Now, the Japanese people have some strong ideas about Sengoku, but they're mixed ideas with conflict and debate about who the "good guys" were. It's funny because I'd made my conclusions and opinions on a number of the leaders of the era, only to find out that many Japanese people have much greater or worse opinions on certain people. By learning from a true outsider's perspective, I feel like I got more of the legitimate story than the propaganda. Besides, there's no debate as to the merits of the caste system, or whether power is better consolidated under the Emperor who is God-on-Earth, or the Shogun, who is ostensibly the chief servant of the Emperor, Head of the Military, and Head of the Economy. So, by getting into 1600's Japanese history and seeing how complicated and nuanced it was, it gave me a much greater and more interesting view of Western European and American history. What's interesting is that typically has "good guys" and "bad guys" and it's very clear who is who. For instance, take the American Civil War. Under the American Constitution, Federalism, Representative Democracy, and under classical international law, the Confederate Secession was legal, and the attempt to re-supply Fort Sumpter was illegal. The total war/slash and burn Union campaign was brutal. In the North, they also suspended habeas corpus, arrested people who spoke against the war (including Senators, yikes!), conscripted people against their will, and generally did some very bad shit. The war is taught and sold as a civil rights thing - really, looking back on primary and secondary sources, it wasn't. Here's Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, right after the Confederacy started. http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html Here's what he thinks about slavery at that point: > It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that— I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. Here's Lincoln toeing the line on whether the Northern states should be mandated to return fugitive slaves: > There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by State authority, but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept? His whole speech, he goes on trying to mediate and defend slavery. Why the war then? > I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. He then makes a really interesting and somewhat crazy argument that the Articles of Confederacy are still legally binding, and that's why the South can't secede, and trying to would be an act of war: > In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." And YET, despite that, I think Lincoln absolutely was doing the right thing. I believe the Union invasion of the Confederacy was illegal under any definition of legal at the time, the President authorized breaking all sorts of laws, and yet, it was the right thing to do. I'll bite that bullet - President Lincoln broke the law, did some vicious things, but it was still in retrospect the correct course of action. Most people won't bite that bullet - so they want to claim that there's clear good guys and bad guys. I'd encourage them to read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, it's simply too wild and crazy not to read. It doesn't match what I read in my high school "U.S. History" textbook very well, but yet, that was legitimately what he said. Crazy stuff. I like reading speeches from early leaders to get at their motivations. Later, when audio and video recordings are available, I watch them. All the WWII countries went on and on about their propaganda. Had the Axis won, right now, we'd be reading about the evil imperialist Allies who sought to enslave the noble Germanic people. I've seen FDR's speeches, Churchill's speeches, and Hitler's speeches. Churchill was generally pretty honest - he was a military man, and spoke rather plainly. He was put in after his predecessor failed - Prime Minister Chamberlain was more of a politician and not much of a military man, so he stepped down and Churchill became PM. He spoke simple, plain, about fighting for England and winning and courage. Roosevelt and Hitler, though, they whooped all sorts of emotions about how American/German way of life were under attack by brutal enemies. Both lied, frequently, about enemy plans. Here's a totally comic forged map that FDR presented as Nazi intelligence: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/250-who-put-the-gau-in-gaucho-a-forged-map-of-nazi-south-america/ http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/250-who-put-the-... (The Nazis were a lot of bad things, but if you look at their war plans, they really didn't care so much about the West. They invaded Poland, violating the Treaty of Versailles really really badly, and then England and France declared war on Germany. Germany didn't care so much about Western Europe or North America - Hitler was desperately afraid of and hated the Soviets, and all their plans were designed around going East. That's why they launched Operation Barbarossa - the invasion into the USSR - even though they couldn't come to a cease fire with England beforehand) Hmm, this comment is turning out to be quite long. I wanted to set a stage for the kind of speeches people give - Hitler's were always the evil, evil un-human oppressors of Germany. He talked about "the rape of the Germany people in 1918" and the hordes that wanted to destroy the German race. Really, the Nazis were very evil, but they weren't openly evil the way The Empire is in Star Wars - Nazi rallying speeches sounded a lot like Soviet rallying speeches sounded a lot like American rallying speeches. They hate us... seek to destroy out way of life... this is a fight to the death... but we're proud and strong and courageous and we'll win... give yourself over to the greater good and victory is assured... we're righteous and right is on our side... > Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race. So yeah, that turned out to be a long comment. But it's not so much a Nazi propaganda movie - just a standard propaganda movie, like any political group in history would use. The enemy is evil, has no heart or soul, nothing human about them, and they'll completely destroy us for completely faulty reasons if we don't completely destroy them first. Standard us-vs-them total genocidal war propaganda. Though, it is a little disconcerting to see in a mainstream film in the year 2009.