Movie: American Crowd Pleasers Hall of Fame

By Xah Lee. Date:

The following are some movies i hate. Mostly, they are movies of the WASP sentimentality. In general, these are American made movies with American values, but done in such a innocent way that acts as a brainwashing machine.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) Buy at amazon , directed by Steven Spielberg. (American) Chauvinist pigs' grand epic, in bloody color and fictitious moral. Good film-making, stupid everything else. Steven Spielberg is the show monger: scenery making he can, cerebration he falls short of.

First of all, there's this fuckhead general who gave the command to save private Ryan. (quoting Abraham Lincoln for the drama.) War is not children's game. It is suicidal to dispatch foolish actions risking defeat. Losing a war may mean death for all. Secondly, if a community is at war, then it is the duties of the members to protect or win the war. When a soldier enters a war, forfeiture of life goes with it. If i were a mom and send off my children in defense of my country, i would be insulted to have my 4th son returned in the midst of war just because my 3 other son died. The above points out the problems disguised by the crowd-pleasing happy-ending epic. The most offensive thing about this film, is Steven Spielberg. In World World II era, Adolf Hitler had many evil schemes including genocide of the Jews. One must note that it takes a whole army to fight for Germany, not a single person. How did the mass of German soldiers came to follow Hitler's atrocity? That's achieved by social-engineering (aka brain washing). One of the propaganda method is film.

Triumph poster
Triumph of the Will

Triumph of the Will (1934) is a successful major film that sells Hitler's vision to Germany. Similarly, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan uses drama, emotion, good-filming techniques, and happy-ending that implicitly instilled jingoism and sentimentalism to vast number of uncritical American. What's with that flag waving at the beginning and ending of the film? The American Flag stands for freedom and liberty, not nationalism, patriotism, foolish sentimentalism, or victory in war.

Gladiator (2000) Gladiator A soap operatic epic. A movie can suck one hundred ways, but this one breaks creativity and suck 101 ways. Flat story line, one dimensional characters, simplistic acting, contrived dialog, predicable throughout, but what about the visuals? At least that must be bloody good? Bloody implied, good no; Spineless visuals pleases those who haven't seen much. This is a multi-million-buck film that's fairly lame in every way. What a better Roman Empire movie? Try Julie Taymor's Titus

See also: Time Mag's review:

[The Empire Strikes Back By Richard Corliss. At http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,44021,00.html]

The Blair Witch Project (1999) This movie is not scary in the least bit, and not convincing to anyone who have a working brain. The trashing map is ridiculously unbelievable, but when the story comes to the magical cycling path part, it's pure bogus. It offends the intellect to have been cheated by “documentary” of mumbo jumbo. It offends the educators that the masses are again given a superstition to imbibe on.

The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project is however a scary movie to those dump ass Americans who sit on their fat asses watching tube medium for too long. In their rich-living induced tofu brain, they never experienced the word “scary”, and when something like Blair comes up, the nation cries “Wow, what a master piece of blunt eeriness! Wow, witchcraft documented! Wow, I'm scared!”. For anthropologists, this movie documents fat American's inability to recognize primitive fear correctly. For a fat industrialized culture, hunger and impinging death and danger in wilderness are alien. Instead, they recognize fear thru fairy-tales of witchcraft and camcorders, in movie theaters.

Forrest Gump (1994) Directed by Robert Zemeckis. A heart-breaking reverie for big fat middle-class American. Enters Forest Gump (Tom Hanks), the square to dumb down the world with brainless honesty and righteousness. This is a film that encourages stupidity at all costs.

Forrest Gump