Oh wow. That film “Margaret” sounds like a film made to torture people like me who don’t take kindly to sociopathic Liberals. You are like me though, and saw through that even though they tried to show her as a “good person” after all… there was no way you were buying it. That movie would be like Chinese torture to me!

Hugh Jackman! I love Australia and the Aussies but to me, he has always seemed so poncey! Not my favourite Australian…by a country mile and he does NOT have the talent of Guy Pearce or Joel Edgerton…or Geoffrey Rush and the recently deceased (but greatly celebrated!) actor Bill Hunter…a national treasure. I’d prolly only enjoy his Aussie accent breaking through. It’s one of the hardest accents to do as well as tamp down. Although a good Brit actor (Cary Elwes) also had a hard time keeping the bugger out of his Yank roles.

Sexist George Clooney. Such a righteous uber-Liberal who can’t help but ooze out all he wishes to keep hidden. Such a compulsion to confess. I always enjoy watching his latest chippy thinking that she’s all kool-and-the-gang with him, but anyone with a brain know good, old Liberal George doesn’t respect women and he will dump her cute arse as soon as a new chippy comes along. And so it goes…tick-tock, tick-tock…

Skunky on October 7, 2011 at 6:27 pm

Real Steel or lifesize Rock’em Sock’em Robots?!..remember those, kids? I really wanted that toy but my parents were too cheap to buy it.
Anyway, they could have easily explained the Aussie accent in a sentence or two, you know like he just spent the last ten years studying the mating habits of platypusses or something.

DS: “It’s based on a “Twilight Zone” episode, starring Lee Marvin, about a down-and-out man who operates an old, out of date boxing robot, and when the robot doesn’t work, he poses as a robot and fights, himself.”
Weird ’cause I thought I knew Twilight Zone like the back of my hand but I don’t remember that one. Anyone recall the title?

As for looney Clooney, any chance he might be a closet Conservative posing as a liberal to keep in good standing with the other loons in Hollyweird?…just a thought, but probably NOT.

theShadow on October 7, 2011 at 10:40 pm

Real Steel is executive produced by Spielberg and it seems like his kind of movie: dumbed-down, simple-minded, sloppily sentimental, with lots of gadgets and special effects. It panders narrowly to the eight-year-old-boy demographic, presenting Dakota Goyo as a street-smart tyke who gets his way (at one point) by threatening to throw the car keys down the sewer grating if his dad doesn’t do his bidding. In general, the film is a power fantasy for boys who think owning and controlling a robot and at the same time teaching their dad important life lessons would be cool. I found the story boringly obvious on the one hand and unhealthily anarchic and narcissistic on the other in the way it presented kids as smarter than their parents.

Ides of March for me was unrelieved torture–just as Margaret apparently was for you, Debbie. Clooney plays a Democratic candidate with a saintly vision: to eliminate the internal combustion engine “within ten years.” In that way, terrorism will naturally just evaporate because there will be no more dependance on Middle Eastern oil. See how that works? Of course. There were many scenes showing how backward Republicans were for opposing gay marriage and not wanting to elect atheists into the presidency. It was pointed out also that redistributing wealth isn’t really “socialism”–that’s just an evilly concocted word to “scare people.” It’s not really socialism, but rather…ummm, uhhh… well, it’s really just caring about the less fortunate. Yes, that’s it. In other words, the film was an excuse to propagate slickly packaged, Hollywood-favored Democratic talking points.

Clooney frequently plays people who begin as flawed characters caught up in dirty, conservative systems but who eventually become spiritually reborn as uncorrupted and spiritually enlightened liberals. Examples of this paradigm are the Clooney films The American and The Cleaner–and Up in the Air follows this plotline, too, except the end is bittersweet because the Clooney character never finally “gets it” even though he should. This film reverses the dynamic, though, showing how certain characters who begin as liberally enlightened and pure idealists eventually get caught up in the “dirty” mechanics of real-world politics. But the basic assumptions are the same and it’s the other side of the same coin: liberals-as-victims caught in a world of conservative greed and dirt, woe be to them, if only they could free themselves from all this mud of unwashed bitter-clinger fly-over-country attitudes, they and we could finally enter a kingdom of unicorn-and-rainbow liberal-fascist heaven.

Burke on October 8, 2011 at 1:43 am

I don’t know why, but I usually never listen to critics. For some reason, I respect your overly critical reviews. I just wished you covered more.

Forsberg on October 8, 2011 at 2:30 am

Real Steel aka “Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots the Movie”.

Might go see it, though…

Alan on October 8, 2011 at 3:29 am

Although it doesn’t show in the credits, Ides of March was also shot partially in Cincinnati, Ohio & Oxford, Ohio. The fawning of the talking heads & reporters on Cincinnati TV news, as well as the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper, has been, & continues to be, nauseating. I’m not a George Clooney fan, never have been, & never will be. He’s just another brainless, out-of-touch, reality-challenged lefty who would fit right in with the “Occupy” mob.

Tony on October 8, 2011 at 1:08 pm

Every time I hear Clooney’s name, I think of that South Park episode “Smug Alert”. Best South Park ever, right up there with the “Night of the Living Homeless”.

pitandpen on October 8, 2011 at 9:38 pm

I read that “Margaret” was delayed from release for some 6 years due to legal reasons, sounds like it should’ve been permanently delayed.

No offense, but I have no interest in movie about New York Jews, or pretty much anything New York for that matter. I guess to movie makers, all that’s required for a movie “compelling” is to set it in New York City or maybe Los Angeles and have a bunch of scumbag characters that no one in real life would ever want to be around (SEE also one of the worst Oscar winners ever “CRASH”. )

Reel Steel vs Fake Flakes on October 9, 2011 at 9:34 pm

““Margaret“: Possibly THE most annoying movie I’ve ever seen”

More annoying than “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”?

Solomon2 on October 10, 2011 at 9:55 am

Personally, though a conservative, I don’t care what George Clooney’s off-camera politics are. On-camera is where it counts. And the trailer, at least, looks great.

The trope about “liberal propaganda” is way overdone. Everyone has a point of view — novelists, painters, playwrights. Movie-makers are no different. They’re not here to reinforce imagined preexisting mass viewpoints, as though a movie is nothing more than an “uplifting” political rally. Film has to be understood in the context of the filmmaker.

I also must rise in defense of Steven Spielberg. His sentimental father-son bonding side is but one aspect of his filmmalking; he also made “Minority Report,” “The Terminal,” “A.I. (“Artificial Intelligence),” “Saving Private Ryan” and “Catch Me if You Can.” I don’t see an “E.T.” there, although “A.I.” came a little close.

Seek on October 10, 2011 at 11:31 am

I always enjoy your comments, Seek, and I think you do a particularly good job of articulating your point of view this week. You are not only consistent in this argument of yours, you also have excellent film knowledge as well. I appreciate that.

As for Spielberg, I like several of his films, two of which you mentioned (A.I. and Minority Report). However, in my opinion, many of his movies do have certain unpleasant qualities which I listed, and if you don’t want to take my word for it, just read what commenter PitandPen above wrote–that I “nailed it.” Debbie, of course, liked Real Steel; and, also, by the way, she liked Super 8 (which I hated)–proving that there’s something more to film evaluation than looking merely at its politics.

The basic plot of E.T. is that a kindly alien (in type representing the liberal professorial class) is harassed and tortured by the U.S. military. The basic plot of Super 8 is that an innocent alien (in type representing noble savages which liberals have taken on as mascots) is harassed and tortured by the U.S. military. Structurally the films are the same, then; also, the narcissistic manner of making the children’s world the world of the film is the same.

Debbie’s posts are all about seeing the political and cultural subtext of a film, and she points out values that are implied by this subtext. For example, she’s aware of the lewdness and profanity in a film and believes that’s part of a film’s value-structure. Along these lines, last week she reviewed What’s Your Number where the main character played a self-satisfied slut. I suppose you think that her “judging” such a film on the basis of the moral qualities of the main character is somehow wrong because movies shouldn’t be intended to be an “uplifting cultural rally” (adapting your own phrase) that reinforces good, sound morals and behavior. Or do you think there’s a place for criticism of the moral subtext of a film along with further observations made about what this indicates about our culture’s general degradation? If you do think it’s okay to be critical of the subtext of morals in a film, why isn’t it okay to be critical of the subtext of political assumptions in a film? In Ides of March, there’s a non-stop barrage of phony liberal arguments intended to knock down straw-men conservatism. Do you think simply noting this fact along with the fact that the film’s auteur Clooney who wrote, directed and produced is a hard-left liberal with a political axe to grind is so completely irrelevant to the film’s analysis?

Obviously Debbie looks at more than simply the politics of the actors, directors and producers, otherwise she wouldn’t recommend and speak positively about films like Ides of March, Super 8, Midnight in Paris, Up in the Air and many others made by socialist filmmakers. At least, though, she’s more honest and upfront about her views than the sneaky weasels in the mainstream media who pretended that Avatar was a masterpiece despite its crude and clunky liberal shibboleths and didacticism yet universally panned the film Atlas Shrugged even though it was a fine interpretation of an important classic.

I might mention in passing that my own particular favorite movie of this year by far is Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, and there is perhaps not any film so suffused with left-wing views and philosophy or originating from so hard-left a filmmaker. But what I liked is that the film was originally stated and created– more than just a list of smug talking points which Hollywood accepts as fact, but something new, executed with daring concept and style. I think in general Debbie feels similarly (although she loathed that particular film): sometimes greatness or unusually compelling entertainment value transcends a corrupting subtext. That’s not close-mindedness; it’s simple honesty.

Burke on October 10, 2011 at 4:42 pm