Charlie Rose

REMant  01/12/2010 04:50 PM Report

Sounds like shlock to me, fake too, like Titanic with its cardboard ship and characters and elevator soundtrack. I am sure a lot of people will like it. It had 3000+ IMDb votes and it hasn't even opened here. But I wouldn't. I'm sure some ppl, too, will say it's just what we need to get the entertainment industry moving again. I think we need ppl who can write a sensible, insightful script with a pencil and paper, that can be staged in front of one camera and for a whole lot less. Anyone who worked with Roger Corman has got to be not only nuts, but kitschic and pandering, too. He does seem to have Corman's sense of humor: the earthlings are there after "Unobtanium." If memory serves Corman also messed with 3-D. The plot is unexceptional, familiar sci-fi fare, whatever contemporary allusions it might also have. And I understand this was released preliminarily as a computer game for Wii and Xbox. It will appeal to the anime types in the virtual world. These things strike me as essentially vicarious like the Japanese Godzilla movies. Those are alleged to be sublimation, but I rather think they tend to separate ppl from reality, which can only have undesirable consequences, as for instance in the business of piloting drone aircraft. The message of this film is that the natives can prevail, BTW, and that was his point about Iraq, but the fantasy works in the opposite direction, just as it does in many of the games.

Invasions, tho, harm the invaders as much as or more than the invaded, the winners as much or more than the losers. The major increase in the powers of the Federal govt have occurred as a result of war. Long before Eisenhower's farewell address, Lincoln said: "As a result of the [Civil] war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated into the hands of a few and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war." Wilson (WWI), FDR (WWII), LBJ (Vietnam) and Reagan (Cold) vastly increased the size of govt, and the size of our debt. The income tax was passed and nonconvertible paper currency first issued to pay for them. War was the means by which the bankers gained control of monarchies and eventually displaced the aristocracy, too.