I didn't write the post I'm about to link this blog to, but it is something that absolutely needs to be read.
I would like to think that any decent human being would do all that they can to help out a victim of domestic abuse, but many people don't seem to understand exactly what that entails. We would like to think that it's a simple matter of giving the abuse victim a place to stay or to help them escape a bad situation, but it's not that simple. Without going into any concrete details, I'll just say that this is something my wife and I are learning about first-hand.
Fortunately, my wonderful wife wrote this handy guide to providing assistance and shelter to a victim of abuse. It's kind of a long post, but I would encourage everybody to read it. You can find it here.
This November, a modern day remake of the Cold War era classic Red Dawn will be hitting theaters.
For those of you too young to know what I'm talking about, the original Red Dawn was a 1984 war movie in which the United States is invaded by the Soviet Union. The Soviet army takes over much of the country, but a group of teenage resistance fighters calling themselves the Wolverines fight back and go to war against the invaders. It's not a bad movie, and it certainly hit a nerve with people who believed that such an invasion could happen. I was only four when the movie came out, so I didn't see it until it was broadcast on TV a few years later. Even at a young age, I heard the movie's message loud and clear. It was totally believable at the time, almost to the point where I had to remind myself that what I was watching was fictional. It's as blatant as propaganda gets, but I have to admire any movie that can grab its audience and make them believe what they're seeing.
As for the remake, well...take a look at the trailer yourself:
The trailer looks like what I would expect from a Red Dawn remake. Most of the elements that I remember from the original seem to be present. There's an invasion from a foreign country, teenage rebels calling themselves Wolverines and lots of stuff blowing up. Sadly, there are no Russians this time. The threat of the Soviet Union is twenty years gone, so the Wolverines will need new commies to kill. Originally, that role was going to be played by the Chinese, but somebody thought it was unwise to make a movie depicting the country that is poised to become the next major world superpower as the enemy, so they did the next best thing.
Instead of an invading Chinese army, we get an invading North Korean army. After all, nobody likes North Korea, right?
*Sigh*
Where do I begin?
First of all, a Red Dawn remake set in the present day seems pretty pointless. Like I said before, the original Red Dawn worked because it took place during the Cold War when a Soviet invasion seemed plausible. It played on people's fears and added a healthy dose of "Die, commie! Die!" jingoism in the process. While a war against North Korea could conceivably happen, chances are that they don't have the resources to actually invade us like they do in this movie. A war against North Korea would most likely be fought on Korean soil, making a movie about a powerful North Korean invasion force taking over a large part of our country laughably unrealistic.
Second of all, the decision to turn the invading Chinese army into an invading North Korean army came so late in the film's production that editors had to digitally alter much of the footage. Chinese flags and uniforms had to be changed to North Korean flags and uniforms, and any dialogue that was originally in Chinese had to be re-dubbed into Korean. No effort was made to make the Asian actors playing the invading Chinese army look Korean. They're Asian, and that's all that apparently matters to us dumbass Americans who believe that all Asians look alike.
Finally, the thing about all of this that bothers me the most is that people are going to get the wrong idea about this movie. North Korea was chosen as the enemy becauseany remake of Red Dawn needs evil Communists, and the real North Korea is the Communist nation most likely to be hostile towards us. And yet, what I'm seeing is a movie where good, heroic, mostly white Americans fight off an army of evil Asians. Maybe I'm wrong and the movie will be much more racially sensitive than I expect, but any movie with a trailer that has a white man point at an Asian man while telling his kids to "kill this piece of shit" probably isn't striving for political correctness. Something tells me that this movie could very well have been called Yellow Peril without missing a beat.
When I was a child in the 1980s, I believed that Russians were inherently evil. I learned that from movies and TV shows that said as much, and that includes the original Red Dawn. I seriously doubt people will develop that kind of hatred and fear for North Korea or those of Asian descent after seeing the Red Dawn remake, but I can't help thinking that it will at least encourage the most xenophobic and racist people in our country.
This whole thing is especially troubling to me because I have members in my family that are of Korean descent. My wife is Korean, and her two sons are half-Korean. My youngest stepson already has idiots at school telling him things like "We kicked your ass in the Korean War." What's going to happen when these kids or others like them see stuff like the new Red Dawn and start to think that they should watch out for those shifty Koreans? I know I'm probably just being paranoid, but the fact that a movie that could so easily be interpreted in this way could be released in 2012 is a little disturbing.
The new Red Dawn has got to be the stupidest idea to come out of Hollywood in some time. Not only is it the latest in a long line of pointless remakes, but the whole thing comes off as insensitive or even offensive to me. I'm not calling for a boycott of this movie or anything like that, but it's safe to say that I'm going to pass on it.
This should come as a surprise to nobody who has known me for longer than a year, but I love superheroes. I grew up reading comic books, and I've enjoyed most of the superhero movies that have made it into theaters since they practically became their own genre a decade ago. In fact, my last post on this blog was even a review of The Amazing Spider-man. I'm that geek who gets more excited than anybody really should whenever a new superhero movie comes out, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Despite the fact that we seem to be in a "golden age" of sorts of superhero movies, I can't help but think that there are still some people who just don't get what makes these movies work. I remember when every movie based on a comic book was expected to be a mindless action movie that appealed only to kids and adults who acted like kids. This approach has fallen by the wayside and deemed disrespectful to the source material, but in some respects it seems like people are expecting the complete opposite. Right now, it seems like critics and filmmakers who don't know any better seem to think that the best way to make a superhero movie is to try to make it "gritty" and "realistic." Yes, Christopher Nolan's Batman movies ran with this approach and turned out to be some of the greatest superhero movies of all time, but part of the reason why that approach worked so well is because Batman is (mostly) a gritty and realistic character. It's always been part of his appeal. Batman is a normal guy who just happens to have undergone enough training to hold his own in nightly fights against criminals. Anything he cannot do himself he makes up for with the kind of state-of-the-art crime-fighting equipment that only a billionaire can afford. The idea of Batman has always been that he could exist in the real world, so the Nolan Batman films benefited from a more realistic approach.
The kind of realism of Nolan's Batman trilogy doesn't work so well for other superheroes, however. I was more than a little dismayed when Spider-man was going to get a similar treatment, but I was pleasantly surprised by the results. The Amazing Spider-man was the closest anybody will ever come to a "realistic" take on Spider-man, and it was still about a teenager who gains superpowers from a spider bite and uses them to fight a giant lizard man. It was a smart and believable take on the classic character, but in the end what worked was that the director just ran with the fact that the movie was about a teenager who gains superpowers from a spider bite and fights a giant lizard man. That's not a realistic concept, but it fit the world of the movie.
That's really what makes a superhero movie work: it's set within a world where characters like Spider-man, Batman or Superman can believably exist even if that world isn't our own. Superheroes aren't realistic; they cannot exist in the real world, so they need to be placed in a world where they can exist. I think the most satisfying superhero movies so far have been the movies made by Marvel Studios, and the reason why I believe that is because they exist in their own world with their own rules. Yes, those rules are very close to those of our real world, but they are just different enough to have a billionaire fly around in a robotic suit of armor or a mild-mannered scientist turn into a monster when he gets angry. It's the stuff of pure fantasy, but it fits perfectly in the Marvel Universe. The filmmakers commit to this world and its rules, which is why the colorful heroes that inhabit it never seem silly or out of place like they would in our world. The world is taken seriously, and by the third act of The Avengers (a.k.a. the most satisfying superhero movie ever made) I was able to suspend my disbelief even as the heroes were fighting off an army of aliens led by the Norse god of mischief in New York.
Aside from Nolan's Batman films, superhero movies shouldn't be realistic because superheroes themselves aren't realistic. They cannot and should not exist in the real world, but they can exist in their own world, and it's the commitment to this world that makes superhero movies work. Sadly, with Hollywood being the way it is, I can't help but think we'll bee seeing a lot of really poor attempts at "gritty realism" in movies starring the colorful heroes of my youth.
