Of course Capra was a Republican. So the whole It’s A Wonderful Life movie is kind of Republicans talking to each other, how the Depression should have been handled with individual people stepping up more. Of course that never happened, the overtones of “we might slip back into Depression” that many people thought might happen in 1946 didn’t take place either. But Bedford Falls was clearly a Republican stronghold, which certainly was possible in the Northeast at the time.
So my fantasy is that new business comes into Bedford Falls and both Potter and Bailey are gently shoved aside by the growth. A new bank comes in and George Bailey is offered a middle management position and he takes it, can’t turn down the money. But the drama’s gone. The Al Stephensons are going to be the way of the future.
Al Stephenson is from The Best Years Of Our Lives, the real Best Picture winner from 1946 and a movie that frankly kicks Wonderful Life’s ass every which way. Wonderful Life was a curio from the day of its release. But there’s always a big market for fantasy I guess.
I don’t know-- when the crash happened, George talked his customers into only taking what they needed to tide them over. That “to each one according to his need” stuff sounds pretty Commie to me.
Also, those sweaters looked pretty homemade and coarsely woven. Almost as if they were…bleachad and dyed human hair??
(Actually, I believe they were homemade- because his mother made all those cardigans he wore)
It was all voluntary though. That was the key. The key people were supposed to step up and fix things, just like JP Morgan saved the stock market back in the day.
wellllll…Ernie kissed Bert (IIRC), and Bert got upset.
(And to correct myself, Ernie’s wife left him, not Bert’s.)
Time to watch it again.
What I wish I could find is a local piece made that humorously “explained” the 1989 S&L “Keating Five” scandal using quotes from IAWL. And it worked! It also kinda made George look like a crook. “Your money’s not here!”
And I don’t know if by “split personalities” you mean true dissociative identity disorder or fictional “multiple personality trope disorder”, but the real thing involves memory loss and other obvious mental issues that would have hampered the whole “criminal mastermind” thing. Walter White / Heisenberg clearly acted with full awareness and knowledge of his actions at all times. At its core, Breaking Bad was a classic story of how power corrupts. Giving him a split personality disorder lets him off the hook and kneecaps the whole story.
There’s a phrase that the writer Robert A. Caro often uses when discussing his LBJ biographies - Power Reveals. And I feel Walter White is a good example of that. He’s someone who’d always had a corrupt soul, who’d always had a certain rage simmering just underneath the surface, but was never able to act on his more unsavory tendencies or cause a lot of destruction until he began making meth and amassing power.
Jesse, on the other hand, seems like a decent person at heart, just one who had the misfortune of getting mixed up in a ghastly business. He’s someone who’s genuinely haunted by a lot of the stuff he’s done, and at one point even tries giving his money away.
Walt, viewing himself as a civilized person, may not like that he was pushed, as he sees it, to do some of the things that he did. He may not have liked killing people, especially at the beginning. But, overall he doesn’t seem too bothered by his sins, and just sees them as the cost of doing business.
I don’t remember that scene. Was it in the Pottersville reality? We joke about how Pottersville looked like way more fun, but in reality Pottersville would have been much more intolerant of a same-sex relationship. That’s why Bert and Ernie were so much meaner in the Pottersville reality; they were sexually repressed and unfilfilled.
In contrast with the Bedford Falls reality, in which not only garlic-eating immigrants, but people of all walks of life and preferences were treated well and accepted for who they were. In that reality, Bert and Ernie only needed the thinnest of “cop partnership” covers for society as a whole; the residents of Bedford Falls knew the real truth, and winked and nodded graciously, understanding that love is love. That’s why Bert and Ernie worked so hard to make the Baileys’ honeymoon at the old house as magical as possible; they wanted George and Mary to experience the same happiness that they found.
“Y-you’ll get your money in 60 days.”
“60 DAYS?!?”
“Well, tha-that’s what you agreed to in the 12 pages of small print at the back of the contract you signed.”
Aw, that just looked like a playful hat smash after the kiss on the forehead. Or maybe the one that got kissed (not sure if it was Bert or Ernie) was still in the “ah wish ah knew how to quit yew” denial stage.
Anyway, all I saw in that scene was a couple very much in love (and George and Mary seemed like they were getting along pretty well too).
Cracked has a series of videos called Cracked After Hours in which they dig into popular TV/Movies and pick them apart (in a humorous way). Many of those videos are on pretty much exactly this topic. Here’s the entire playlist, but here’s a few I like (in fact, I end up rewatching a lot of these videos once or twice a year).
Let’s start with this one, just because I like it and you’re in the market for a fun new reason to dislike Bill Cosby, this one’s for you.
Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly is basically Jesse James: an ex-Confederate living as an outlaw and still kicking spitefully against the federal government out on the frontier.
Of course, Whedon removed the stain of slavery from Malcolm’s war of rebellion, contrived to make Malcolm’s victims deserving of their fates, and the federal government (the Alliance) evil in its effects. But the undeniable vibe of the series is “federal government bad.”
Within the confines of the show’s plotting, I suppose Malcolm is a good guy, but is the philosophy promoted by the show a “good” one?
Western settings typically have a three-way conflict: law (the federal government), outlaws (often ex-Conderate) and natice Americans (sometimes portrayed as inherently violent and brutal). So not only do we have Mal filling the niche of Jesse James; we also have the Reavers filling the niche of the Native Americans, in a very old-fashioned stereotypical way.
Revenge of the Nerds went too far by even 80s standards. My friends and I were in the target audience of the show when it first came out in theaters. During your mentioned rape scene, it was very uncomfortable and one of my friends even said, aloud, “Does anyone else have problem with this?”.
We were not ‘woke’ teens nor enlightened. Were were typical 80s boys and as crass as they typically were…and that scene at the time it came out…was bothersome.
Spoiler for a movie from 1986 called She’s Gotta Have It by Spike Lee. You are warned. But cripes it’s a 36 year old movie.
There’s a rape scene in it, which a lot of people complained about at the time, but were sort of poo-poohed as being too sensitive. The rape is comitted by the “good” boyfriend that most of the audience it rooting for, until this happens-- and that’s the point of it-- it’s meant to knock him off his pedestal. But there could have been another way to do it.
Anyway, Spike Lee was asked about this scene in an interview in the early 2000s, and he gave an answer I liked-- and which was a pretty obvious dig at the re-editing of the Star Wars movies.
He said he didn’t like the scene either. It was a mistake by a first time filmmaker, who was young. If he made the film now, he wouldn’t use the scene. But neither would the 21st century Spike Lee go back and change it, because that would be inauthentic-- essentially, a lie. The film needed to remain as it was made.
I don’t think Mal is supposed to be a good guy, for that matter, he doesn’t consider himself one. But he is certainly a sympathetic protagonist. But I see it as completely deliberate - as we have a wide array of alignments on the crew from someone like Inara (arguably lawful good) to Jayne (arguable neutral evil [with chaotic tendencies]). Mal is somewhere in the middle, but overall I’d say he’s neutral good (with chaotic tendencies). He believes in -people- just not organizations, religions, and governments.
