This sounds mediocre but I loved Parasite. Perhaps we gain something enjoying a movie in such a foreign context, so we can impose our own politics on the result, but there was never any sense the poor family was good or the rich family bad.
They upload the contents of his brain during his weekly brain upload. But that means he wouldn't know what death felt like because he'd be missing on average the last half week of his previous life.
“The Avengers” movies worked because they had two leading males who 1) talked like an East Coast speed-freak (RDJ) and 2) who if he couldn’t exactly do a 1940s accent at least learned to end his sentences on a masculine low note (Chris Evans). Since then Marvel seems mostly to have flailed around. The last two actors to play Spider-Man grew up in the UK. The range problem also seems to apply to actresses - Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton seem to be the go-tos for ambiguous or unsympathetic parts.
It's all about beauty. Film is visual, and so what we will accept visually is important. General audiences want pretty girls to be the good guys, or, if not that, the evil hot chick/femme fatale. E.g. as Steve has pointed out, Johnny Depp's ex Amber Heard, a real-life psycho with uncanny good looks, would have had a lot more success if film noir was still a thing and feminism hadn't ruined the idea of portraying some women as heartless sex pots who use their wiles to seduce, manipulate, and get men to kill each other.
Collette and Swinton were never beauties, and so audiences can accept them as less-than-perfect in a film. Blanchett was pretty in her youth, but in middle-age has become a plastic-surgery frozen stick that looks like withered piece of bacon left in the sun in bad moments. So she can play ambiguous as well (Blanchett would have probably been a better choice as The Evil Queen in the live action Snow White disaster than the still-MILFY-beautiful Gal Gadot).
Anya Taylor-Joy could be in that mix you mentioned as she ages. Right now she's still retains too much youthful prettiness for audiences to want to view her as anything but sympathetic, but with her malleable looks and great acting talent she can play ambiguous/unsympathetic roles. She's already done that a couple of times in excellent, artistic, but less-seen movies: in The Witch she abandons her family to become part of an evil witch cove, and she didn't exactly play a good girl in Amleth. Would not be surprised if in 10-20 years she's playing murderous middle aged women and cold-hearted mothers and such. -
Emma Stone has started producing her own movies presumably to allow her to play a wider range of roles than usually allowed (eg, “Poor Things”). I think you’re right: Hollywood likes leading actresses who look like princesses. That means that as they age there are fewer parts available. Amy Adams and Anne Hathaway whose breakthrough roles were playing actual princesses are good examples. Australian actresses meanwhile often break through in sitcom/soap opera-type TV shows (“Neighbors” being particularly important) so tend to have a wider range of physiognomies and comic gifts.
Not to be argumentative, but while I agree with your general thrust, a few quibbles:
As to Emma Stone: Emma is also older now. As a young thing she was too pretty to play anything but girl-next-door hottie. Also, look how much she had to mess with her looks in Poor Things to pull it off (and even then the movie wasn't a general audience hit). Its less about her producing her own stuff and more about her aging and her willing to uglify herself. See also: Charlize Theron in Monster.
Hathaway wasn't super-pretty as a youngster, but girl-next-door plain. Princess Diaries was for girls, as it was a fantasy about an awkward plain girl who becomes a princess; boys didn't watch it. In other words, she really wasn't a pretty princess, so plain girls watching could relate. When Nolan cast her as Catwoman, most male fans complained, as she wasn't a sexpot. She pulled it off because Nolan's Catwoman was more of sociopathic duplicitous selfish thief than a femme fatale seductress, but still males were disappointed. (Nolan likely cast her because Hathaway in real life resembles her nasty Nolan Catwoman character a lot).
Adams is probably the only one of those three I'd agree with you on. She was a pretty princess and your eye was drawn to her. She played Leo DiCaprio's infatuated nurse/wife in Catch Me If You Can and even though she's a brace-faced wide-eyed naive girl in that film and DiCaprio is DiCaprio you can believe her and DiCaprio as a couple.
I couldn't finish the review. It is no fault of Steve's but the movie's plot sounds so absurd I couldn't stay interested enough to even read about it. I don't see Hollywood putting out content meant to entertain a wide swath of Americans ever again. Hoping many more people choose to quit funding an industry who obviously hates us.
Mickey sounds like the ghola Duncan Idaho in the later novels of the Dune series.
Confused takes about class struggle and cartoonish evil white people are common in korean movies and occasionally even in kpop. The new thing is that now there is a western audience that laps them up.
Korean movies often have as a main character a likeable scoundrel that eventually turns in a moral guy like in the Squid Game series. The entire shtick of Parasite was that it toyed with the expectation of a moral turning point and eventually refuted it. I was surprised that Parasite was so successful with audiences who are not familiar with this korean scoundrel trope but I guess the Academy voters liked the vague class struggle noises and voted out of leftism even if they were confused about what everything meant.
"The usual problem satirists have with Trump is that he’s one of them: He’s self-aware that he’s playing a comic character."
This is a good insight. In 2016, his supporters said of Trump's critics, "They take him literally but not seriously; we take him seriously but not literally." Ruffalo hates Trump. Norm Macdonald, who did Bob Dole for SNL, said you can't do a good impression of someone you really hate. (I haven't seen the movie, so I'm not sure if Ruffalo was doing an impression.) Alec Baldwin had the same problem doing Trump for SNL--he hates him. The boss character Baldwin played on 30 Rock was based on Trump, but he made him likable, as it was okay at the time to like Trump.
I began listening to Scott Adams' podcast during the first Trump administration and feel he has the best understanding of the man.
Ruffalo is an evil psycho who's praised Anitfa terrorists and lamented the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse killed/wounded them in self-defense. Don't be confused by his (alleged) talent or baby-faced soft-voice smiling interviews: he's evil.
But I agree: Trump knows the entertainment industry very, very well, and has manipulated it very, very well since 2016. They basically gave him free advertising in 2015-2016 to laugh at him until they suddenly realized what they were doing---but by then it was too late. And they resent being played so badly.
Its not for nothing that in The Art of the Deal (written in 1987) Trump makes mention that, instead of real estate like his father, he considered becoming a Hollywood studio head. He was interested and focused on the media conglomorate empire even way back them. And if you note Trump's style, he very much seems like a portrait of a loud-mouthed Hollywood studio president.
Disagree. He's always got a wide-eyed, confused, smiling stupid look on his face. I doubt he could ever play anything convincingly except a slightly awkward dumb guy. Maybe he can be Will Ferrell's next comedy partner.
Ruffalo playing Bruce Banner/Hulk was both funny and bad because it requires us to believe Mark Ruffalo is some sort of genius scientist. That's almost as bad as when Denise Richards was playing a nuclear physicist in a James Bond movie.
She's consistently been voted the worst Bond girl ever for that horrendous miscasting. Some people recently on YouTube have tried to defend her and the role, and always-professional Pierce Brosnan* has always said good things about her work with him on the film, but everyone else recognizes the young bimbo was the worst choice for the worst role.
Christmas Jones, you were an f'ing joke.
*Pierce is well-known for almost never badmouthing any castmates from any movie, so his nice words are just Pierce being Pierce. He even did commentary for his atrocious last Bond film Die Another Day with a then-young-and-nervous Rosamund Pike and said nice things about everyone, including Madonna and her awful cameo.
By contrast, I read a tweet (Xeet?) by super satirist Seth MacFarlane that was a melon-juice-soaked tongue bath of Kamala Harris. Satirists aren't supposed to go wobbly. By the same token, their literal hatred of Trump renders their satire flat. All we get is "Blonaldolf Trumpler Putinsky sure is StUpiD!!!" [uproarious laughter, standing ovation].
As our host has pointed out, Obama ruined comedy, as all these critical observers of the human condition suddenly can't figure out that Obama's MIL lived in the WH.
The Biden WH was similarly deadly serious. Nobody can figure out anything funny about a senile old machine politician who has to be corraled by a Secret Service agent in an Easter Bunny costume.
Steve was right how Obama ruined comedy, but for 4 years was himself in abject denial that Biden was a dementia-addled puppet and therefore worthy of lampooning the D's Weekend at Bernie's routine. It wasn't until the D's pulled Biden last June that Steve quit pretending Biden was all there---but Steve hasn't issued a mea culpa yet.
Most of what Hollywood is doing now in their depictions of Trump is just trying to give morale to the base (D's and Never Trump R's) and hoping to paint Trump poorly for future generations. So they make bad caricatures of him on purpose. Taking him seriously, viewing him as 3D, making his followers not brainless idiots and instead complex moral-driven people is not their bag now.
This is why murderer Alec Baldwin's "impression" of Trump or Stephen Colbert's "parody" of right-wing commentators were so lauded and feted by the commies despite being very poor facsimiles with no intelligence behind their schtick. Such characters' purpose was not intelligent critique getting the character right, but to drum up the choir and to hope that when people looked back they would confuse the bad impressions as accurate.
For Hollywood studios now, depictions of Trump are the same as depictions of Hitler or Tojo in Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1930s. Propaganda for their side and trying to imprint a simplistic image for future generations. So the Chuck Jones comparison you make is particularly apt.
This is unfortunate, of course, because we anti-communists still have not learned we need such a machine on their side to counter these depictions. Historians make a big deal about going to "contemporary third-party sources" for their theories but when those sources are almost all propaganda from the communist perspective history gets wildly skewed.
EDIT: I would point out that we were not always so naive. See how the South seized upon history departments and pop culture to depict The Lost Cause from the 1860s-1920s, culminating in Birth of a Nation. It was only after Jews and other communists took control of academia and Hollywood that anti-South pop culture and history became the norm. But still, the remnant remains: Robert E. Lee and most confederate soldiers are depicted as noble (if misguided) in most histories and serious pop culture, and Gone With the Wind (1939) is still the top-grossing movie of all time. There is a lesson there for us.
A problem for anti-Trumpers in Hollywood is that a US president in a Michael Bay movie who spoke like Trump (eg, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, pledging to annex Canada) would be the hero. Meryl Streep as a female Trump in “Don’t Look Up” didn’t quite work (she’s too innately high-class) but the most entertaining part was Jonah Hill burlesquing as Stephen Miller crossed with Don Jr.
Have Michael Bay, David Fincher, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan ever commented on the Trump Era or DEI?
Nolan is definitely One of Us. The Dark Knight Rises was all about a giant critique of communist revolutions, with Bane being a Stalin/Mao/Castro/Che/Pol Pot stand in. Plus there are no "token female" soldiers in his movie, but only males on both sides, and the two female characters depicted (Catwoman and Talia) depicted are both selfish duplicitous women.
Bay is also One of Us, which is why his movies get trashed. He's unapologetically masculine, plays to the crowds v. the critics, and, visually, he is stunning, and his action scenes are ballet-like when studied. The Rock is still great after all these years.
Fincher is a gun for hire, as Steve has said, although masculine. Fight Club and Seven were great films, but he has no message beyond what the storywriter puts in there.
Cameron, however, has gone hippie woo-woo anti-white civilization. He seemed masculine and right-wing in his early films, but the Avatar bloated nonsense has revealed him to be thoroughly a Hollywood communist.
Nolan is currently making an adaptation of the Odyssey with the very northern European-looking Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway playing Odysseus and Penelope. Greek-washing?
Damon's has an everyman look to me. I think like Charles Bronson he could conceivably play everything from any of the 4 corners of Europe.
Hathway being a Greek princess works. Many Greek women look like her---dark hair, dark eyes, with light skin. They're not all swarthy wenches. Plus her as Penelope--an ambiguous manipulative women in the story, but ultimately good and loyal to Odysseus --- works for her.
He's also cast tranny girl Elliot (formerly Ellen) Paige in it, so maybe he's been bitten by the same crazy bug as Cameron. Or he could be being loyal (Paige was in Inception for him).
I wouldn't accept her as anything human at this point. At most, I would accept voicing Proteus or Cyclops or some other CGI-genderless being Odysseus encounters.
But in the best-case scenario, she gets locked up in an insane asylum for life before filming.
Disagree. Bronson made a name for himself playing half-breed types such as the Irish-Mexican in The Magnificent Seven or a half-Native American like in Chato's Land. He also played a German-American from the Dakotas in The Dirty Dozen. Nobody ever cried foul; he thus played all types of ethnicity.
Like Yul Brenner (who acted along side him in The Magnificent Seven), Bronson's look was at once both iconic and yet malleable for various racial types. Brenner stretched himself more by ethnicity, but Bronson's look was such that every European-American could imagine him in the family somewhere.
Rob Henderson (half-Korean) had an interesting analysis of Parasite, where he claimed both families had been middle-class or upper-middle-class, then one rocketed upwards and the other downwards. That's why the poor family couldn't fold pizza boxes.
Apparently to Asian audiences it’s clear that the wife of the wealthy family is embarrassingly nouveau riche in ways that western audiences don’t pick up on. There’s also something about the poor mom being a former shot-putter, which may or may not be a reference to the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
There haven’t been many American class-conflict movies since, say, “It’s a Wonderful Life” because Americans tend to admire rich people and movies are about wish fulfilment. But there is perhaps a sub-genre in which frustrated workers team up to get revenge on their horrible bosses (“Fun with Dick and Jane”, “Tower Heist”, um, “Horrible Bosses”). Maybe “Parasite” is closer to those?
While watching "Parasite," I felt like I was missing out on a lot of class clues that would be visible to Koreans. In contrast, while watching "My Fair Lady," I can follow most of the class clues.
For me, the most interesting line in the review was "his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea." How insane do you have to be to defect to NK? Grandpa Park Taewon defected in 1950, so maybe he didn't have complete information, but he was 'purged' already in 1956, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire would say.
It’s probably not an exact parallel but the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass was born to an East German-Polish family in the Free City of Danzig when the borders of Germany stretched much further east. During the war he was lucky to be taken prisoner by the Americans and commence his career in West Germany but I presume he must have had family who ended up in Stalinist East Germany. His political positions favoring eastern Germans (eg opposing reunification) ended up hitting his popularity in confident post-1989 western Germany.
A general impression I have is that Korea, especially Korean politics, is more complicated than Americans would guess. The U.S. did a good job handling Japan from 1945 onward, in part because we invested a lot during WWII in getting ready to occupy Japan. (Lots of Japanese language instruction for officers and bureaucrats, lots of effort put into books about Japanese culture like Ruth Benedict's the Chyrsantheum and the Sword.) d
But we wound up with half of Korea in August 1945, and we didn't seem to have much of a clue what we were doing.
A big problem in the postwar world in places like Korea was that everybody who was competent in modern bureaucracies got their experience either in the Communist Party or in collaborating with the colonial power (in this case Japan). So the US inherited the collaborators, who weren't popular with either the Communists or the peasant masses who mostly wanted to throw out all the foreign devils.
The US found one non-Communist anti-Japanese nationalist who had been in exile in America and put him him charge, but Syngman Rhee was erratic and unpopular, with lots of uprisings against him. The Truman Administration worried more that he'd invade North Korea than that North Korea would invade South Korea.
This encouraged Stalin and Kim to invade, which eventually dragged the more reluctant Red Chinese in.
Nobody seemed to be a reliable decisionmaker in Korea in those years, even though the participants were mostly men who been the big winners in WWII.
The forcing out of the recent South Korean lady president who was the daughter of South Korea’s murdered dictatorial 1970s first couple over her ties to a cult called the Church of Eternal Life would seem like good material for a paranoid South Korean thriller in the vein of “Parasite” or “Squid Game”.
Making fun of white Evangelical christians is so 2024
Indeed.
The movie's release was delayed more than a year.
I'm guessing the writer at Salon didn't want to actually write the eldritch words "mayonnaise" and "tartar sauce" lest Bodies Of Color be attacked?
This sounds mediocre but I loved Parasite. Perhaps we gain something enjoying a movie in such a foreign context, so we can impose our own politics on the result, but there was never any sense the poor family was good or the rich family bad.
" For example, why is the poor family defeated by simple paying tasks such as folding pizza boxes, "
This is S Korea - China level IQ. Of course box folding is too easy.
How does Mickey 17 know what happened to the others?
They upload the contents of his brain during his weekly brain upload. But that means he wouldn't know what death felt like because he'd be missing on average the last half week of his previous life.
“The Avengers” movies worked because they had two leading males who 1) talked like an East Coast speed-freak (RDJ) and 2) who if he couldn’t exactly do a 1940s accent at least learned to end his sentences on a masculine low note (Chris Evans). Since then Marvel seems mostly to have flailed around. The last two actors to play Spider-Man grew up in the UK. The range problem also seems to apply to actresses - Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton seem to be the go-tos for ambiguous or unsympathetic parts.
It's all about beauty. Film is visual, and so what we will accept visually is important. General audiences want pretty girls to be the good guys, or, if not that, the evil hot chick/femme fatale. E.g. as Steve has pointed out, Johnny Depp's ex Amber Heard, a real-life psycho with uncanny good looks, would have had a lot more success if film noir was still a thing and feminism hadn't ruined the idea of portraying some women as heartless sex pots who use their wiles to seduce, manipulate, and get men to kill each other.
Collette and Swinton were never beauties, and so audiences can accept them as less-than-perfect in a film. Blanchett was pretty in her youth, but in middle-age has become a plastic-surgery frozen stick that looks like withered piece of bacon left in the sun in bad moments. So she can play ambiguous as well (Blanchett would have probably been a better choice as The Evil Queen in the live action Snow White disaster than the still-MILFY-beautiful Gal Gadot).
Anya Taylor-Joy could be in that mix you mentioned as she ages. Right now she's still retains too much youthful prettiness for audiences to want to view her as anything but sympathetic, but with her malleable looks and great acting talent she can play ambiguous/unsympathetic roles. She's already done that a couple of times in excellent, artistic, but less-seen movies: in The Witch she abandons her family to become part of an evil witch cove, and she didn't exactly play a good girl in Amleth. Would not be surprised if in 10-20 years she's playing murderous middle aged women and cold-hearted mothers and such. -
Emma Stone has started producing her own movies presumably to allow her to play a wider range of roles than usually allowed (eg, “Poor Things”). I think you’re right: Hollywood likes leading actresses who look like princesses. That means that as they age there are fewer parts available. Amy Adams and Anne Hathaway whose breakthrough roles were playing actual princesses are good examples. Australian actresses meanwhile often break through in sitcom/soap opera-type TV shows (“Neighbors” being particularly important) so tend to have a wider range of physiognomies and comic gifts.
Not to be argumentative, but while I agree with your general thrust, a few quibbles:
As to Emma Stone: Emma is also older now. As a young thing she was too pretty to play anything but girl-next-door hottie. Also, look how much she had to mess with her looks in Poor Things to pull it off (and even then the movie wasn't a general audience hit). Its less about her producing her own stuff and more about her aging and her willing to uglify herself. See also: Charlize Theron in Monster.
Hathaway wasn't super-pretty as a youngster, but girl-next-door plain. Princess Diaries was for girls, as it was a fantasy about an awkward plain girl who becomes a princess; boys didn't watch it. In other words, she really wasn't a pretty princess, so plain girls watching could relate. When Nolan cast her as Catwoman, most male fans complained, as she wasn't a sexpot. She pulled it off because Nolan's Catwoman was more of sociopathic duplicitous selfish thief than a femme fatale seductress, but still males were disappointed. (Nolan likely cast her because Hathaway in real life resembles her nasty Nolan Catwoman character a lot).
Adams is probably the only one of those three I'd agree with you on. She was a pretty princess and your eye was drawn to her. She played Leo DiCaprio's infatuated nurse/wife in Catch Me If You Can and even though she's a brace-faced wide-eyed naive girl in that film and DiCaprio is DiCaprio you can believe her and DiCaprio as a couple.
I couldn't finish the review. It is no fault of Steve's but the movie's plot sounds so absurd I couldn't stay interested enough to even read about it. I don't see Hollywood putting out content meant to entertain a wide swath of Americans ever again. Hoping many more people choose to quit funding an industry who obviously hates us.
Mickey sounds like the ghola Duncan Idaho in the later novels of the Dune series.
Confused takes about class struggle and cartoonish evil white people are common in korean movies and occasionally even in kpop. The new thing is that now there is a western audience that laps them up.
Korean movies often have as a main character a likeable scoundrel that eventually turns in a moral guy like in the Squid Game series. The entire shtick of Parasite was that it toyed with the expectation of a moral turning point and eventually refuted it. I was surprised that Parasite was so successful with audiences who are not familiar with this korean scoundrel trope but I guess the Academy voters liked the vague class struggle noises and voted out of leftism even if they were confused about what everything meant.
Korea, one peninsula, two dystopias.
I've watched a few South Korean TV shows. I was struck by how American their culture and system is compared to other Asian countries (' TV shows)
"The usual problem satirists have with Trump is that he’s one of them: He’s self-aware that he’s playing a comic character."
This is a good insight. In 2016, his supporters said of Trump's critics, "They take him literally but not seriously; we take him seriously but not literally." Ruffalo hates Trump. Norm Macdonald, who did Bob Dole for SNL, said you can't do a good impression of someone you really hate. (I haven't seen the movie, so I'm not sure if Ruffalo was doing an impression.) Alec Baldwin had the same problem doing Trump for SNL--he hates him. The boss character Baldwin played on 30 Rock was based on Trump, but he made him likable, as it was okay at the time to like Trump.
I began listening to Scott Adams' podcast during the first Trump administration and feel he has the best understanding of the man.
Ruffalo is an evil psycho who's praised Anitfa terrorists and lamented the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse killed/wounded them in self-defense. Don't be confused by his (alleged) talent or baby-faced soft-voice smiling interviews: he's evil.
But I agree: Trump knows the entertainment industry very, very well, and has manipulated it very, very well since 2016. They basically gave him free advertising in 2015-2016 to laugh at him until they suddenly realized what they were doing---but by then it was too late. And they resent being played so badly.
Its not for nothing that in The Art of the Deal (written in 1987) Trump makes mention that, instead of real estate like his father, he considered becoming a Hollywood studio head. He was interested and focused on the media conglomorate empire even way back them. And if you note Trump's style, he very much seems like a portrait of a loud-mouthed Hollywood studio president.
Mark Ruffalo is a B-lister who has been getting a huge push from Hollywood because of his leftist politics, not for any special acting ability.
The man is a good actor. A little whiny, but he has talent.
Disagree. He's always got a wide-eyed, confused, smiling stupid look on his face. I doubt he could ever play anything convincingly except a slightly awkward dumb guy. Maybe he can be Will Ferrell's next comedy partner.
Ruffalo playing Bruce Banner/Hulk was both funny and bad because it requires us to believe Mark Ruffalo is some sort of genius scientist. That's almost as bad as when Denise Richards was playing a nuclear physicist in a James Bond movie.
Denise Richards as nuclear physicist was stunt-casting at its best!
She's consistently been voted the worst Bond girl ever for that horrendous miscasting. Some people recently on YouTube have tried to defend her and the role, and always-professional Pierce Brosnan* has always said good things about her work with him on the film, but everyone else recognizes the young bimbo was the worst choice for the worst role.
Christmas Jones, you were an f'ing joke.
*Pierce is well-known for almost never badmouthing any castmates from any movie, so his nice words are just Pierce being Pierce. He even did commentary for his atrocious last Bond film Die Another Day with a then-young-and-nervous Rosamund Pike and said nice things about everyone, including Madonna and her awful cameo.
We'll disagree on that; it's subjective, of course. I find him whiny and much too beta-male for the "macho" roles he's given.
Agreed. His turn as the Hulk has been laughable. Ed Norton and Eric Bana were both better cast as Bruce Banner.
By contrast, I read a tweet (Xeet?) by super satirist Seth MacFarlane that was a melon-juice-soaked tongue bath of Kamala Harris. Satirists aren't supposed to go wobbly. By the same token, their literal hatred of Trump renders their satire flat. All we get is "Blonaldolf Trumpler Putinsky sure is StUpiD!!!" [uproarious laughter, standing ovation].
As our host has pointed out, Obama ruined comedy, as all these critical observers of the human condition suddenly can't figure out that Obama's MIL lived in the WH.
The Biden WH was similarly deadly serious. Nobody can figure out anything funny about a senile old machine politician who has to be corraled by a Secret Service agent in an Easter Bunny costume.
Steve was right how Obama ruined comedy, but for 4 years was himself in abject denial that Biden was a dementia-addled puppet and therefore worthy of lampooning the D's Weekend at Bernie's routine. It wasn't until the D's pulled Biden last June that Steve quit pretending Biden was all there---but Steve hasn't issued a mea culpa yet.
Most of what Hollywood is doing now in their depictions of Trump is just trying to give morale to the base (D's and Never Trump R's) and hoping to paint Trump poorly for future generations. So they make bad caricatures of him on purpose. Taking him seriously, viewing him as 3D, making his followers not brainless idiots and instead complex moral-driven people is not their bag now.
This is why murderer Alec Baldwin's "impression" of Trump or Stephen Colbert's "parody" of right-wing commentators were so lauded and feted by the commies despite being very poor facsimiles with no intelligence behind their schtick. Such characters' purpose was not intelligent critique getting the character right, but to drum up the choir and to hope that when people looked back they would confuse the bad impressions as accurate.
For Hollywood studios now, depictions of Trump are the same as depictions of Hitler or Tojo in Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1930s. Propaganda for their side and trying to imprint a simplistic image for future generations. So the Chuck Jones comparison you make is particularly apt.
This is unfortunate, of course, because we anti-communists still have not learned we need such a machine on their side to counter these depictions. Historians make a big deal about going to "contemporary third-party sources" for their theories but when those sources are almost all propaganda from the communist perspective history gets wildly skewed.
EDIT: I would point out that we were not always so naive. See how the South seized upon history departments and pop culture to depict The Lost Cause from the 1860s-1920s, culminating in Birth of a Nation. It was only after Jews and other communists took control of academia and Hollywood that anti-South pop culture and history became the norm. But still, the remnant remains: Robert E. Lee and most confederate soldiers are depicted as noble (if misguided) in most histories and serious pop culture, and Gone With the Wind (1939) is still the top-grossing movie of all time. There is a lesson there for us.
A problem for anti-Trumpers in Hollywood is that a US president in a Michael Bay movie who spoke like Trump (eg, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, pledging to annex Canada) would be the hero. Meryl Streep as a female Trump in “Don’t Look Up” didn’t quite work (she’s too innately high-class) but the most entertaining part was Jonah Hill burlesquing as Stephen Miller crossed with Don Jr.
Have Michael Bay, David Fincher, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan ever commented on the Trump Era or DEI?
Nolan is definitely One of Us. The Dark Knight Rises was all about a giant critique of communist revolutions, with Bane being a Stalin/Mao/Castro/Che/Pol Pot stand in. Plus there are no "token female" soldiers in his movie, but only males on both sides, and the two female characters depicted (Catwoman and Talia) depicted are both selfish duplicitous women.
Bay is also One of Us, which is why his movies get trashed. He's unapologetically masculine, plays to the crowds v. the critics, and, visually, he is stunning, and his action scenes are ballet-like when studied. The Rock is still great after all these years.
Fincher is a gun for hire, as Steve has said, although masculine. Fight Club and Seven were great films, but he has no message beyond what the storywriter puts in there.
Cameron, however, has gone hippie woo-woo anti-white civilization. He seemed masculine and right-wing in his early films, but the Avatar bloated nonsense has revealed him to be thoroughly a Hollywood communist.
Nolan is currently making an adaptation of the Odyssey with the very northern European-looking Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway playing Odysseus and Penelope. Greek-washing?
Damon's has an everyman look to me. I think like Charles Bronson he could conceivably play everything from any of the 4 corners of Europe.
Hathway being a Greek princess works. Many Greek women look like her---dark hair, dark eyes, with light skin. They're not all swarthy wenches. Plus her as Penelope--an ambiguous manipulative women in the story, but ultimately good and loyal to Odysseus --- works for her.
He's also cast tranny girl Elliot (formerly Ellen) Paige in it, so maybe he's been bitten by the same crazy bug as Cameron. Or he could be being loyal (Paige was in Inception for him).
Page may be playing the gray-eyed gender-bending goddess Athena. Then again, maybe not.
I wouldn't accept her as anything human at this point. At most, I would accept voicing Proteus or Cyclops or some other CGI-genderless being Odysseus encounters.
But in the best-case scenario, she gets locked up in an insane asylum for life before filming.
"I think like Charles Bronson he could conceivably play everything from any of the 4 corners of Europe."
Dunno about that. Bronson had a kind of Tatar cast of features that I don't think really exists in , say, Britain.
Disagree. Bronson made a name for himself playing half-breed types such as the Irish-Mexican in The Magnificent Seven or a half-Native American like in Chato's Land. He also played a German-American from the Dakotas in The Dirty Dozen. Nobody ever cried foul; he thus played all types of ethnicity.
Like Yul Brenner (who acted along side him in The Magnificent Seven), Bronson's look was at once both iconic and yet malleable for various racial types. Brenner stretched himself more by ethnicity, but Bronson's look was such that every European-American could imagine him in the family somewhere.
Okja was so bad that it made me dislike the guy's other movies
Rob Henderson (half-Korean) had an interesting analysis of Parasite, where he claimed both families had been middle-class or upper-middle-class, then one rocketed upwards and the other downwards. That's why the poor family couldn't fold pizza boxes.
Apparently to Asian audiences it’s clear that the wife of the wealthy family is embarrassingly nouveau riche in ways that western audiences don’t pick up on. There’s also something about the poor mom being a former shot-putter, which may or may not be a reference to the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
There haven’t been many American class-conflict movies since, say, “It’s a Wonderful Life” because Americans tend to admire rich people and movies are about wish fulfilment. But there is perhaps a sub-genre in which frustrated workers team up to get revenge on their horrible bosses (“Fun with Dick and Jane”, “Tower Heist”, um, “Horrible Bosses”). Maybe “Parasite” is closer to those?
You don’t think tower heist had a class thing going on. Great movie!
While watching "Parasite," I felt like I was missing out on a lot of class clues that would be visible to Koreans. In contrast, while watching "My Fair Lady," I can follow most of the class clues.
For me, the most interesting line in the review was "his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea." How insane do you have to be to defect to NK? Grandpa Park Taewon defected in 1950, so maybe he didn't have complete information, but he was 'purged' already in 1956, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire would say.
I wondered about that too. What goes through people's minds?
Angela Merkel's father moved from West to East Germany, right? Hmm...
It’s probably not an exact parallel but the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass was born to an East German-Polish family in the Free City of Danzig when the borders of Germany stretched much further east. During the war he was lucky to be taken prisoner by the Americans and commence his career in West Germany but I presume he must have had family who ended up in Stalinist East Germany. His political positions favoring eastern Germans (eg opposing reunification) ended up hitting his popularity in confident post-1989 western Germany.
A general impression I have is that Korea, especially Korean politics, is more complicated than Americans would guess. The U.S. did a good job handling Japan from 1945 onward, in part because we invested a lot during WWII in getting ready to occupy Japan. (Lots of Japanese language instruction for officers and bureaucrats, lots of effort put into books about Japanese culture like Ruth Benedict's the Chyrsantheum and the Sword.) d
But we wound up with half of Korea in August 1945, and we didn't seem to have much of a clue what we were doing.
A big problem in the postwar world in places like Korea was that everybody who was competent in modern bureaucracies got their experience either in the Communist Party or in collaborating with the colonial power (in this case Japan). So the US inherited the collaborators, who weren't popular with either the Communists or the peasant masses who mostly wanted to throw out all the foreign devils.
The US found one non-Communist anti-Japanese nationalist who had been in exile in America and put him him charge, but Syngman Rhee was erratic and unpopular, with lots of uprisings against him. The Truman Administration worried more that he'd invade North Korea than that North Korea would invade South Korea.
This encouraged Stalin and Kim to invade, which eventually dragged the more reluctant Red Chinese in.
Nobody seemed to be a reliable decisionmaker in Korea in those years, even though the participants were mostly men who been the big winners in WWII.
The forcing out of the recent South Korean lady president who was the daughter of South Korea’s murdered dictatorial 1970s first couple over her ties to a cult called the Church of Eternal Life would seem like good material for a paranoid South Korean thriller in the vein of “Parasite” or “Squid Game”.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus has a piece about South Korea's birth dearth in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population-implosion
The widespread open hostility to children is depressing. Like, even if you hate the opposite sex, don't you still like kids? Kids are great!
The movie has too much of an irreverent Deadpool vibe. Sick of movies making light of death.