4 ms·
Not the OP, but a person from behind the former Iron Curtain who watched a lot of old commie stuff, the good and the mediocre and the really boring ones. There
by inglor_cz 4y ago
Not the OP, but a person from behind the former Iron Curtain who watched a lot of old commie stuff, the good and the mediocre and the really boring ones.
There is politicized and politicized. Art often has a political message, but there is a certain threshold where the message starts squeezing everything else out of the picture and the characters become stuffy - a weird kind of "ideal exemplars" of a certain desired stereotype instead of believable humans.
If the main hero can't be characterized more personally than "Soviet and a hero" or "trans and brave", the threshold is crossed.
People like to watch movies about other people, not stereotypized puppets.
- foldr 4y agoThere are loads of Hollywood movies from all eras that meet all these criteria. It's not a new phenomenon. Check out the oh-so-subtle characterization in The Sands of Iwo Jima, for example. Or if you want an idealized do-gooder character, how about Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night? (A great movie, but Tibbs's character is only a little more filled out than 'black and a good guy'.) It's honestly astonishing to me that people would think that American movies with political messaging are somehow a new phenomenon. I'd have to assume that these folks have just not watched many old movies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sands_of_Iwo_Jima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sands_of_Iwo_Jima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...
- corrral 4y agoI think if you made two buckets labeled "sex" and "politics" a majority of well-regarded films from all of the 20th century, right back to the beginning of film, would land in at least one of the two. Lots would qualify for both. Tons of our most beloved films are political, and that's true back to the dawn of cinema.
- inglor_cz 4y agoI don't doubt that you are right, but I am fairly ignorant when it comes to older American movie production, so I cannot pinpoint any examples.