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Mbfg (Mbfg)
Username: Mbfg

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 62.255.207.128
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 05:16 pm:   

I heard an item on Radio 4’s Today news programme this morning, concerning a remake of that dire piece of gung-ho, jingoistic, racist claptrap from the 1980s, "Red Dawn".

Comfortingly, the remake sounds like yet more gung-ho, jingoistic, racist claptrap. In the 80s the Russians were the bad guys, this time round it is the Chinese...hang on, no, thanks to the digital marker pen, it’s suddenly the North Koreans.

The Chinese, very unreasonably, decided that they were deeply offended at being cast as mindless, black-hat-wearing villains and threatened not to allow the film to be shown in their country unless Hollywood did something about it.

Hollywood duly obliged by blatantly insulting another country instead. Suddenly all North Koreans are evil villains, not the Chinese...

Beyond the sheer farce of this nonsense are two very serious concerns.

A) Hollywood (I know the word Hollywood itself is a generalisation but I'm sure you know what I mean) still picking on a race of people and turning them all into villains. Okay they may be ruled by a bunch of thuggish tossers, but the average Chinese and North Korean is just trying to get on with his or her life and loving their kids and their mums like the rest of us.

B) The Chinese politburo (not the average Chinese Joe - please note) extending its oppressive fist across the ocean to make demands on private individuals in other sovereign nations.

Both sides need their bottoms slapped and to be sent to bed without any supper.
Cheers
Terry
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 213.106.77.123
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 06:19 pm:   

Can't find anything to argue about there, Terry. Though the idea of North Korea making a successful invasion of the continental USA is actually sort of hilarious. Although it's the natural offshoot of the paranoid Cold War mentality of 'if we don't annihilate every single government to the left of Hermann Goering we'll have the gawddamn Commies invading us...' that informed the original heap of shit.

Also loved the idea in the original movie that none of these highly trained Soviet paratroopers could hit a barn door with a fully automatic weapon but that a high school kid with his dad's hunting rifle/shotgun/antique Wild West revolver could wipe out several dozen of the enemy with one blast...
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.126.164.88
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 06:45 pm:   

Okay they may be ruled by a bunch of thuggish tossers, but the average Chinese and North Korean is just trying to get on with his or her life and loving their kids and their mums like the rest of us.

Curious, Terry—would you say the same thing during the reign of the Nazis, about the Germans? The Japanese during the same WWII? Do you think the average Nazi/Japanese, at those time, would be perfectly fine with any chance America-lovers among their own... or would they eye them suspiciously?

Not trying to be confrontational or provocative; just trying to pose an interesting question. If you had at the time, you'd be roundly abhorred, and probably put on a watch-list—when a nation goes into active "That's our enemy" mode, those who deviate and try to humanize them, are now the enemy within.

Maybe doing a movie like Red Dawn is a bad idea from the get-go (not to mention, a remake). But if you're a Hollywood exec, and you're gonna do it... you can't very well say, "Let's invent a country called Hrokdal, and put it on a continent called Blehygund, and make them our invaders." You gotta pick somebody... and one thing for sure: North Koreans aren't going to withhold the credit you need to fund your massive deficits, nor riot murderously in Benghazi, if they don't like your film....
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Mbfg (Mbfg)
Username: Mbfg

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 62.255.207.128
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 07:10 pm:   

Craig

That is a very interesting question. I've been watching a BBC series called "The Dark Charisma of Hitler" and it poses a similar question. Why did the average German adore that man? And DID they? And, as you indicate, the average WW2-era Japanese seemed to have seen their emperor, in whose name the war was fought - to their perception anyway - as a God and therefore infallible. So both those peoples probably generally hated the British and Americans. We, as a population, hated them. I have plenty of elderly relatives who can attest to that.

A lot of it comes down to propaganda and for people like the North Koreans, exposure to only one world-view, that of the people who rule them. The Chinese suffer this as well, but there do seem to be gaps in that particular curtain.

For me, films like "Red Dawn" sadly add to that body of propaganda. Laughable as they are, escapism that they are supposed to be, they are pernicious in wrapping up racial/national stereotypes and hatreds in a Technicolor haze. We Brits are just as guilty, for example, all our TV and film villains seem to be Eastern European gangsters or ex-Serbian soldiers etc. And as for the French, don’t get me started on them…

Cheers
Terry
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.8.24.123
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 11:02 pm:   

I ought to see Milius's original. We did recently watch Leo McCarey's anti-Communist My Son John, a rather extraordinary product of the McCarthy era and certainly not to be swiftly dismissed.
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 213.106.77.123
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 11:26 pm:   

I keep forgetting it was written by John Milius, Ramsey! Unless I've forgotten a great deal, though, it's pretty laughable stuff- certainly not another Apocalypse Now or Diry Harry.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.30.239
Posted on Friday, November 23, 2012 - 10:58 am:   

Recently re-read Robert Aickman's short story 'The Houses of the Russians', and while Aickman's politically themed stories (which are clearly quite right-wing) tend to strike me as satirical cheap shots not up to his usual standard), this is a very serious ghost story about Bolshevik crimes that followed the 1917 revolution. It's good enough not to have to 'transcend' its politics: the politics demand some respect even from the likes of me. Aickman had a way of recurrently delivering over and above expectation. If you want to turn political atrocity into fiction you have got to be serious about it – otherwise you're just wrapping a brick in the newspaper of entertainment.

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