Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?
I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were “gooks” and “Indians” whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.
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<p>"Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.
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</p><p>What nonsense.<span> </span>Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie."</p>
<span>My Oscar for the worst of the current nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Taken from a hagiography of Nelson Mandela by a British journalist, John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda. In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the “rainbow nation”, Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela’s embrace of the hated Springbok symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence – but not black violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because “we didn’t really know”. The subliminal theme is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation, never justice. </span>
ReplyDelete<span><span>"My Oscar for the worst of the current nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Taken from a hagiography of Nelson Mandela by a British journalist, John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda. In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the “rainbow nation”, Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela’s embrace of the hated Springbok symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence – but not black violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because “we didn’t really know”. The subliminal theme is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation, never justice."</span></span>
ReplyDeleteOh wonderful, Pilger the film critic, now? There is one easy, really great thing Pilger and all of his fellow superior human beings, pure of heart and motive, can do to undercut the big Con. DO. NOT. GO. TO. SEE. HOLLYWOOD. MOVIES. Simple!
ReplyDeleteOscars were created for the film industry, by the film industry, to promote the film industry,to increase the profits of the film industry. If one understands those basic concepts, little time is wasted whining and complaining about the Oscars.
While Pilger and his perfect, principled people bask in their inante goodness, the rest of us lesser beings will go to see movies for those fleeting moments of mindless entertainment. (Though Pilger probably sees them for free,(What an elitist!) we shmucks will continue to pay for the right to be brainwashed again and again for the EMPIRE.
<span><span>Oh wonderful, Pilger the film critic, now?</span>
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Only film critics can write about a movie? Henry Miller who's not a film critic, wrote a memorable piece on Kubrik's "Clockwork Orange", vehemently critical of it's violence when most critics were extatic. Miller had a point.
Levi-Strauss, not an art critic , wrote wonderfully and harshly about modern art as totally irrelevant and alienating..
Hopefully every writer with something to say should be able to criticise without being a "specialist".</span>
Of course they should, Tgia. I was being facetious.
ReplyDeleteI read this post and then said "Now let's sample vza's righteous indignation."
ReplyDeleteNot indignant at all, sir...just amused.
ReplyDeletedear vza, I love you ; you're the best reason to visit AACS.
ReplyDeleteAngry Arab Commenters, Now that the the Heroic American Cowboys have liberated the Iraqi beauty,Little Nell,from the Evil Saddam, we're gonna saddle up, and go rescue some other folks from the EvilDoers. Let's Ride !