liberal Tagged Articles at Cinematical

A couple of people have been griping about Wall-E director Andrew Stanton's refusal to admit that his cute little movie about a robot in love actually contains some pretty upfront green politics, but there's a far more polarizing reference in the film than its harmless pro-environment agenda. It's no major plot spoiler to reveal that, about an hour or so into the story, Fred Willard appears in a recorded message as the mysterious president of Earth's corporate government and orders the ship's captain (Jeff Garlin) to "stay the course." Wait, we've heard this one before: It was the go-to statement used by the Bush administration for about three years or so when describing its modus operandi in Iraq (the term was abandoned when staying the course started to sound like a bad idea). In Wall-E, the context is quite different -- it's an order to not do something, rather than take action -- but hard to ignore nonetheless.

Certain critics with (surprise!) conservative slants have taken issue with this. At Dirty Harry's Place, John Nolte expresses his disappointment in the first paragraph of his review: "Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome?" he asks. New York Post critic Kyle Smith picked up the rant and decided to write his own, even though he hadn't seen the film yet: "This kind of crack, lame as it is, also breaks the spell of the movie by hurling you out of the theater and back into reality."

Who wants to spend a beautiful summer evening inside an overly-air conditioned concert hall listening to a washed up politico, some gadget nerds, a NASA guy and a couple of Hollywood producers talk about the environment? Apparently, everybody. WIRED Magazine threw just such an event in New York City last night, occasioned by this week's release of Al Gore's global warming doc, An Inconvenient Truth, and judging by the clamoring crowds that spilled out of Town Hall onto 43rd street as far down as 6th Ave fifteen minutes before showtime, it was the hottest ticket in town. Boldfaced names in attendance reportedly included director Darren Aronofsky and his Oscar-winning baby mama Rachel Weisz, and Chelsea Clinton, who Gore took pains to point to from the stage as "a friend of the family".

But if we're talking about "hot" -- and, considering the bounty of temperature-related puns the topic at hand brings to the table, we most definitely are -- could anyone hotter have been in attendance than the guest of honor himself? Though it's way too early for it to mean anything (or, at least, for it to mean anything good), the liberal media is currently under the spell of a debilitating case of Gore Fever, They've got it bad, got it bad, got it bad - they're hot for an aging also-ran who won't even admit to thinking about running for President in 2008. Or maybe they're just, understandably, hot for the idea that liberal passion could actually mean something again. Or maybe -- and this is the one I'd like to believe -- we're talking about social movement that ostensibly thrives on dissent; Gore not only stands for the opposite of everything the current administration has come to represent, he's also the Anti-Hillary. You don't have to know much about global warming to warm to the appeal of the presumptive Democratic nominee's polar opposite.

The evening certainly wasn't billed as Al Gore's Coming Out Party -- in his opening remarks, WIRED editor Chris Anderson labeled the event as a celebration of  "a new kind of environmentalist" he called the Neo-Green, a gadget-savvy do-over of the spacey hippie drip of olde, one "that realizes that technology doesn't only create problems - it solves them." But from the standing ovation that met the Vice President's entrance, to the thunderous applause with which the audience punctuated his every minor point, it was clear that the mass assembled were there to hear a statement of intent.

They didn't quite get that, but most in attendance seemed happy enough with what they did get. At the very least, the event showcased an Al Gore to which jokes involving the words "bore" or "snore" did not apply. At most, it was a chance to contemplate a rabblerouser in the body of an elder statesman, and that in itself was a spectacle rare enough to rouse my interest.

V for Vendetta - produced by Joel Silver and the Wachowskis; based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore (who has since disowned the film), and starring a bald Natalie Portman – won't officially premiere until the Berlin Film Festival in February, but ever since its first public screenings in Austin a couple of weeks ago, the film's been trapped in a bit of a tug of war between the left and right corners of the web. The fan boy circles are, predictably, all about it, and even the Hollywood Reporter has come out with a positive review. In contrast, Jason Apuzzo's leading one of the strongest marches against the picture on Libertas. From what I can tell, neither Apuzzo, nor his commenters, have actually seen the film, but that's not stopping them from proclaiming it a national tragedy. Partially in response to the Reporter review, Apuzzo writes: "Those of you who’ve been claiming that this film is just an innocent little adaptation of an 80’s graphic novel series are, um, in for a surprise."

His commenters take this opening and run with it. Calling V "a big slap in the face to “Jesusland”",  Jim Rockford claims that "What makes this film junk as a film and as storytelling is that it’s explicit pro-Terrorist and anti-American, anti-Bush politics fly in the face of the reality: terrorists really DO want to kill us all; they’ve tried very hard." It will fail commercially, he continues, because "being explicitly opposed to what most of your paying customers hold dear is a good way to lose their business." Michael Hutchinson continues the ideological doomcasting: "Now, the Wachowski Brothers were REALLY lucky that they were able to sell The Matrix with its anti-social message because of its flash and style, but its messages were rather hidden and a huge part of the audience just went for the SFX. Here you have a movie that’s all about its message, even in the trailers. Do you really think this can find an audience?"

Of course, the film's success (or lack thereof) may very well rest on one entirely non-political factor: as Alexander "Bejamins" Hamilton puts it on Left Behinds: "...the problem isn't the directors, it's that Evey Hammond is played by fucking Natalie Portman. Because Natalie Portman can't fucking act."

Thoughts?