{.}

Considerable blather I wanna inflict on y’all, but a paucity of typing time. Mebbe over the weekend, although it looks to be a busy one.

In the meantime, quickly: we watched Team America: World Police. I had extremely mixed feelings about it, mostly because while it certainly was a parody of jingoist warmongering action flicks, I’m not sure that it wasn’t one, as well. Yeah, the characters were played by puppets, and the high-tech wartoys were, literally, toys. But still, stuff “blowed up real good,” and the blowing up, ultimately was justified, and the credibility of opposition to the war was undermined. Is it possible to make a movie about war that doesn’t glorify it? (Wim Wenders doesn’t seem to think so, although that’s not the quote I was looking for.)

Flying Spaghetti Monster knows, no one should expect political correctness from Parker and Stone (they of course deliver gross-outs a-plenty). If I want/need the film to take a serious stand against U.S. Imperialism, that’s pretty much my problem. I was kinda braced for that.

The gut-punch I wasn’t prepared for was a brief scene of a flood, with little puppet bodies floating in muddy water. That scene had an emotional resonance and impact on me beyond any rational expectation. There’s no viewer involvment with any of the characters elsewhere in the movie. That’s part of the point: they’re puppets, and so underdeveloped that they push one-dimensionality to its lower limits. It hit me right then that I’m never going to be able to watch or read or hear anything about a flood ever again — no matter how silly or trivial — without being yanked back to September 2005. So it goes.

Posted in film, politics, personal. You may comment on this entry.