which_chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
which_chick) wrote2004-11-01 02:41 pm
which_chick) wrote2004-11-01 02:41 pm
(no subject)
Couple of items... saw The Punisher on PPV at La's house on Sunday. It was a not-exceptional superhero movie (Spiderman II was better) but didn't entirely suck. I grant this film some cred for using opera (Verdi's La Donna E Mobile from the opera Rigoletto) but I can't give full marks. While the melody is certainly appropriate for beating the shit out of someone (classical music and violence have gone well together for me since I saw Clockwork Orange), the words come out to something like "Woman is fickle like a feather in the wind." and that doesn't at all suit the action on screen. Call it half a loaf -- it's certainly no worse than the use of the Anvil Chorus (from Il Trovatore) in Bad Santa.
There's also a tiny, tiny little (30 seconds, if that) spot in the film where the bad guy's consiglieri slams some cute young thing up against a wall in an alley and kisses him senseless. (Lest there be any confusion in the studio audience, both the consiglieri and the cute young thing are guys in this scene.) As I was watching this with La, she was like "Oh, God, that's disgusting" at about the same time I was thinking it was quite lovely.
It'd be nice if I could chalk this up as Chacon a son gout (from Die Fledermaus, an opera by Strauss), but things are rarely left to be that simple. People insist on complicating shit. Anyway, at that point I stopped watching the movie and started contemplating hypocrisy, specifically, mine.
Is it okay for me to quietly tolerate stuff I don't agree with in the interests of getting-along-with-others? How much of an axe do I have to grind, here? How much of an obligation towards axe-grinding do I have? It's kind of dishonest to not-say-anything when I don't agree with or am offended by the status quo, innit? *sigh* Prolly if I were a true believer, I'd be championing the cause and stomping out the brushfires of bigotry everywhere I went... and I'm, er, not. What the hell kind of true believer am I, then? (Enjoy beating myself up with this fight? Hell, yeah. I do it all the time.)
The way I see it, this is a small, conservative community. It will not tolerate an endless amount of agitating for change and there's a limit to the amount of deviation it will suffer. If I push too hard or too often, I'm going to wind up a pariah. Also, isn't gettin' along with others by way of a little quiet hypocrisy pert near all about what it means to be a Merkin? Lookit the whole religious freedom thing -- no way would that wash if everybody was as gung-ho as those folks flying planes into the WTC. People frequently have to peacefully tolerate ways and views that are different from their own, even though they don't agree with 'em. It's the Merkin way, the civilized way. Anything less would be uncivilized.
There's also a tiny, tiny little (30 seconds, if that) spot in the film where the bad guy's consiglieri slams some cute young thing up against a wall in an alley and kisses him senseless. (Lest there be any confusion in the studio audience, both the consiglieri and the cute young thing are guys in this scene.) As I was watching this with La, she was like "Oh, God, that's disgusting" at about the same time I was thinking it was quite lovely.
It'd be nice if I could chalk this up as Chacon a son gout (from Die Fledermaus, an opera by Strauss), but things are rarely left to be that simple. People insist on complicating shit. Anyway, at that point I stopped watching the movie and started contemplating hypocrisy, specifically, mine.
Is it okay for me to quietly tolerate stuff I don't agree with in the interests of getting-along-with-others? How much of an axe do I have to grind, here? How much of an obligation towards axe-grinding do I have? It's kind of dishonest to not-say-anything when I don't agree with or am offended by the status quo, innit? *sigh* Prolly if I were a true believer, I'd be championing the cause and stomping out the brushfires of bigotry everywhere I went... and I'm, er, not. What the hell kind of true believer am I, then? (Enjoy beating myself up with this fight? Hell, yeah. I do it all the time.)
The way I see it, this is a small, conservative community. It will not tolerate an endless amount of agitating for change and there's a limit to the amount of deviation it will suffer. If I push too hard or too often, I'm going to wind up a pariah. Also, isn't gettin' along with others by way of a little quiet hypocrisy pert near all about what it means to be a Merkin? Lookit the whole religious freedom thing -- no way would that wash if everybody was as gung-ho as those folks flying planes into the WTC. People frequently have to peacefully tolerate ways and views that are different from their own, even though they don't agree with 'em. It's the Merkin way, the civilized way. Anything less would be uncivilized.