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ہفتہ 3 جنوری 2004Saturday, January 03, 2004
Holiday Movies
These holidays were spent mostly at home. Laziness and illness (both me and Amber) were to blame. The end result was that we watched a lot of movies.
- American History X is a very good movie about a younger brother following in the footsteps of his older skinhead brother. Edward Norton was great as the older brother. Somehow, the racist dialogue repeating “facts” about minority crime etc. reminded me of some of the rhetoric of Godless Capitalist1.
- Amores Perros does not try to mess with your head like 21 Grams with its convoluted timeline. But the move did not appeal to us.
- Cold Mountain: Finally a romantic movie of my kind with many more shootings than kisses. It is a good movie. But what it desperately wants is to be a great one. Unfortunately there are too many flaws for it to be a great movie. Like Amygdala and Foreign Dispatches, the omission of African Americans and the issue of slavery is strange. I think it seems to be an effort towards a more romantic notion of the Confederacy. In addition, the lead couple (Nicole Kidman and Jude Law) don’t have much chemistry. This makes the single sex scene in the movie a bit out of place (not that I didn’t enjoy seeing the beautiful Kidman). Pace David Edelstein in Slate (SPOILER ALERT), I think the scene with Natalie Portman would have been better if the filmmakers had kept the original book version of it. The moral ambiguity there would have fit better.
- Donnie Darko: I was wondering why I never saw this one in the theater and it turns out it didn’t stay there for long and was on 50 screens at best. It is a good sci-fi movie and I recommend it to everyone.
- Finding Nemo: Excellent and very entertaining.
- In America: This is the story of a family coming to America and coming to terms with their loss. It is seen mostly through the eyes of a young girl. I liked it very much and Amber says she loved it but she cried a lot. So a warning to guys taking their cry-able wives or girlfriends. The movie is actually bitter-sweet and not a tragedy.
- Les Invasions Barbares: A very funny movie (yes, Amber cried even in this one). I think it is a French Canadian movie. I have a question for Canadians who have seen it: Are Canadian hospitals as crowded and corrupt as shown in the movie? Those hospital scenes seemed straight out of Pakistan.
- Lola Rennt: Well, the title “Run, Lola, Run” describes the movies very well. Lola runs in this movie. A. Lot. This is a multiple scenario movie done reasonably well.
- Monsters Inc is an OK movie.
- Nirgendwo in Afrika is about a German Jewish family who escape to Kenya in 1938. A reasonably good movie worth watching. It is supposed to be based on an autobiographical novel. I have a question for people who know Jewish history better than me. You see, late in the movie after the war has ended, the family is thinking whether they should return to Germany. Were there any German Jews who returned to their old homes in Germany after World War II?
1 I am not equating Godless to neo-Nazis.
Posted by Zack at January 3, 2004 4:30 PM in Movies
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Tracked on January 4, 2004 4:03 AM
Comments
Posted by: godlesscapitalist (13 comments) at January 6, 2004 12:59 AM
godless: I wasn’t sure whether I should put that comment about you in a movie review post, but I did think of you when watching the movie. Not because you are a neo-Nazi but because you take your rhetoric too far. Note that I did not say GNXP and the blog remains on my blogroll.
I am not going to discuss African American crime statistics with you here. All I’ll say is that those statistics do exist and reasonable people can differ about the reasons. What associated you with the character played by Edward Norton in my mind was your dogmatic use of these statistics and your general refusal to even consider any other point of view.
Posted by: Zack (1800 comments) at January 6, 2004 1:18 AM
I am not going to discuss African American crime statistics with you here.
no prob - it’s a quagmire, and tiresome to boot.
your dogmatic use of these statistics and your general refusal to even consider any other point of view.
honestly now, can you really say that I haven’t considered other points of view? It takes effort to swim upstream. life would be much easier if i could accept the consensus of polite society.
still, you are going to buy a home someday if you stay in the US. at that point we’ll see if you listen to the (realist) gc sitting on one shoulder, or the idealist h-bd nonbeliever on your other shoulder.
Posted by: godlesscapitalist (13 comments) at January 6, 2004 2:03 AM
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heh. thanks, i guess.
but i wouldn’t put facts in quotes, unless you don’t believe the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. perhaps they’re neo-nazis too. they’re everywhere these days, these nonwhite neonazis and their “facts” from the FBI… :)
more seriously, a problem arises when everyone who expresses a truth is grouped to an extreme end of the spectrum. if everyone who’s antiwar is branded unpatriotic, that’s bad. and if everyone who mentions something factual on race is grouped with neonazis, that’s also bad.
you know, kinda like the nra one-liner: if opinions on X are outlawed, only outlaws will have opinion on X.