[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
My trial membership expired minutes after I last hit “Submit Reply”. I did a panicked “subscribe now!” move just to respond to this. I’m not saying you owe me $15, but if we ever meet face-to-face, you can buy me a Big Gulp. 
Rather than hijack this thread, I started a new one.
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Thats how pushers always get you, the first one is free. Now you’re hooked.
George Orwell found much to admire in Kipling even though his own politics, values and world-view were drastically opposed to Kiplings. And I agree. (Of course, I mainly know Kipling’s poems from musical settings of them, i.e., Leslie Fish filksongs.)
One of the best sport documentaries ever made is ‘Olympia’, directed by Leni Reifenstahl and commisioned by Adolf Hitler.
[QUOTE=Loach]
As well as listening to his music and hearing him on TV I also saw him personally at a lecture at my university. I certainly wouldn’t put him in the conservative category. I would place him on the liberal end of libertarian. He certainly was no fan of the Republican party and Reagan in particular. I have a pretty good idea how he would feel about GWB. I’m not sure what category he put himself into if any.
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I could agree with that. Zappa defies classification. I guess my point was that I don’t think it’s odd for you as a conservative to like Zappa. Hell, I think everybody who likes music should like Zappa.
Atlas Shrugged- Absolutely adore the book, but even if I do agree with her on some points, could she just do a little shut the heck up and focus on Dagney? I swear, I have reread this book more than any other, and there are at least 90 pages I have never read.
Contact: I didn’t like how religious it got. I didn’t even understand why religion was there in the end.
I’ll echo the West Wing sentiments and I justify it because in THEIR world, it’s the better way to be, but that isn’t our world. Now bring on the CJ!
I hate when good stories get sidetracked by the writer having a message or a good story that they are neglecting to espouse their beliefs. blahblahblahSTORY!
(ot)I hate Mary Higgens Clark, just thought I would throw that out there, to me, it’s never a bad time (/ot)
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
Did you roll your eyes because of its anti-Communist, pro-American message, or something else?
I’ve always been a huge fan of Breaker Morant, about Australian soldiers charged with war crimes during the Boer War. The author of the book and play on which it’s based has since changed his mind, after seeing previously-secret UK Ministy of Defence documents, and decided that Morant and his codefendants were probably guilty after all. I still like the movie, though, and probably still rationalize on some level that maybe the author got it right the first time…
[/QUOTE]
Even though the movie made Breaker Morant look like a fairly admirable man (perhaps more admirable than he was in real life), the movie never suggested that Morant and his men were innocent.
Rather, the suggestion was that Morant and his men were doing exactly what their superiors wanted them to do (in effect, their orders were “Squash the Boers, and we don’t care how”), and that it was hypocritical for their superiors to pretend they were just murderous madmen acting on their own.
That is, Morant and his men might not have been tried at all if they’d stuck to killing Boers, and hadn’t killed some Germans (creating conflict between the UK and der Kaiser) in the process.
There is a huge amount of The Carroll Myth that has been published recently. Karoline Leach’s 1999 book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild and this website http://www.lookingforlewiscarroll.com are the places if you want to research the Carroll myth.
Difficult to sum it up but many people have seen Carroll as a ‘pedophile’ while Karoline Leach and others call this the Carroll Myth.
[QUOTE=Auntbeast]
I’ll echo the West Wing sentiments and I justify it because in THEIR world, it’s the better way to be, but that isn’t our world. Now bring on the CJ!
[/QUOTE]
Hopefully naked CJ. I’m with Charlie Young there: watching CJ get undressed would be a good thing.
CJ?
Really?
CJ?
…huh…
-FrL-
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
Did you roll your eyes because of its anti-Communist, pro-American message, or something else?
[/QUOTE]
Yes, that was pretty much it. I could only take so much of the “Evil Empire” vs USA! USA! without some serious eye rolling. Baryshnikov’s dancing made up for it, but it was a near thing.
[QUOTE=Sage Rat]
For instance Cradle Will Rock was about as close to a call for socialism as I’ve ever seen since the fall of the USSR, and I would personally bet that anyone who didn’t walk into the movie pro-Commy is going to walk out anything but bored and dumbfounded.
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I don’t really think that was so. It’s message I felt was more of a celebration of the FDR style social reforms, and a criticism of the “red scare” paranoia of the times. Especially the deliberate blacklisting of people (particularly Welles) who the government felt threatened by.
Well, I think the premise of Oliver Stone’s “JFK” was absurd.
I also think Jim Garrison was a real bozo.
The whole movie was a mishmash of unrelated, unsubstantiated, paranoid conspiracy theories.
And yet… it was a hell of a film. It kept me glued to the screen for 3+ hours, even though I wasn’t buying any of it.
Loach and Astorian, you’re right that the movie “Breaker Morant” doesn’t show Morant and his men as “innocent,” as such. They were fighting a counterinsurgency and using harsh methods at least tactitly approved - if not outright encouraged - by the brass. Nevertheless, they’re shown as essentially noble and principled warriors, doing the best they can in a nasty situation. From what I’ve read, though, the author later decided that they were far less admirable than he’d initially thought they were, and came to the conclusion that they had not, in fact, been scapegoated by the British Army.
Still a great, great movie.