The audience knows. The audience experiences in their minds what's happening onscreen. It's meant to demoralize and scandalize the audience and, as Christians, our thoughts can be sinful.
Some subversive films have their characters in dream sequences doing things that "aren't really happening," but it's all happening for the audience. For example, in American Beauty (1999), Kevin Spacey's character has an infatuation with his under age daughter's best friend, Angela, played by Mena Suvara,
And during one of Spacey's fantasies, he pretty much has sex with her in a bath tub covered in red rose petals, but not quite. There's a repetitive clip of Spacey's hand going under the surface of the water between Suvara's legs.
And towards the end of the film, outside of any dream sequence or fantasy, Spacey's character removes the underage girl's top without touching (he undoes the buttons), and is about to go further, then stops, so he doesn't actually commit statutory rape, but for the audience it's meant to titilate, demoralize and scandalize them.
It was never said in the film that she was underage...and since we don't know where this took place, you can't be sure if she was underage or not as each state has its own law.
She could've been 19 and most people still would've had an issue with this because the media keeps pushing the belief that May-December relationships are "wrong."
Ironic, isn't it that all of this sexual perversion is shown in our media (like the gay couple in this film) but a man lusting over a much younger woman is taboo.
At any rate, I don't believe there was manipulation going on here like you think there was. I believe the scene with the younger woman was simply meant to be provocative and act as a catalyst for the Kevin Spacey character to make a change in his life.
What I don't understand is why you say it's included to demoralize the audience. How?
My biggest issue with the film is the manipulation of the viewer (through the father character) to question their own feelings of possibly being gay because the character acts straight but is disgusted by other gays. This is a classic ploy by the Left to claim those who harbor a hatred of this type of relationship is only because they are secretly gay themselves.
I thought that was innocent. It was one of those situations in a situation comedy. He had no interest whatsoever in any kind of thing with her, and she couldn't possibly know it was her son.
Agreed. I too thought it was quite innocent and in one scene, Doc Brown actually explained this: He called it the Florence Nightingale effect. This is when the nurse falls in love with her patient.
The mother, too, explains this in the beginning of the movie when she describes how she fell in love with the father: that he seemed so helpless, like a lost puppy, and her heart just went out to him (when the father was knocked down by the grandfather's car and was brought into the house where he was nursed by the mom).
It was never said in the film that she was underage...and since we don't know where this took place, you can't be sure if she was underage or not as each state has its own law.
She could've been 19 and most people still would've had an issue with this because the media keeps pushing the belief that May-December relationships are "wrong."
Ironic, isn't it that all of this sexual perversion is shown in our media (like the gay couple in this film) but a man lusting over a much younger woman is taboo.
At any rate, I don't believe there was manipulation going on here like you think there was. I believe the scene with the younger woman was simply meant to be provocative and act as a catalyst for the Kevin Spacey character to make a change in his life.
What I don't understand is why you say it's included to demoralize the audience. How?
My biggest issue with the film is the manipulation of the viewer (through the father character) to question their own feelings of possibly being gay because the character acts straight but is disgusted by other gays. This is a classic ploy by the Left to claim those who harbor a hatred of this type of relationship is only because they are secretly gay themselves.
Moral confusion and ambiguity is the most common technique of demoralization in Hollywood/Western films and it's used in American Beauty (1999), where every character is a basket case, except for the two open sexual deviants are perfectly happy and contented in every way. While realism has been popular for a long time in favor of moral archetypes, morally ambiguous protagonists and other characters in the story create confusion in the mind of the audience and that's the primary vector of demoralization in this story.
We live in a world where a feminism-inspired nonsense taboo about older men and younger women exists and, even though I agree with you that this taboo is wrong, it is the moral status quo now, so transgressing it is demoralizing. We are also to believe that sexual deviants should be celebrated and, as you noticed, the only stable couple, and pretty much the only well-adjusted people in the entire film, are the two jogging neighbors who swing by in order to demonstrate just how happy they are to be the perfect citizens, one a tax attorney and the other an anesthesiologist, bringing smiles and gifts, and also inspiring Lester (Kevin Spacey) to get into shape.
As you also noticed, they made the Nazi an unhappy and cruel, closeted sexual deviant, whose mental stress from trying to maintain a failed normal relationship with his wife and son leads him to eventually make a completely unexplained pass at Lester, and then murder him in unrequited frustration, a senseless killing that occurs immediately after Lester makes his only correct moral choice in deciding not to deflower Angela, which is a nihilistic plot twist emphasized by weirdo Ricky bizarrely ogling Lester's spilt brains like he does everything else in the film.
Carolyn (Annette Benning) has an affair with the real estate king, Buddy Kane, and the daughter Jane is involved with the Nazi's son, Ricky, who is a drug dealer and a little bit off his rocker as well, obsessing over dead birds and "theoretically" agreeing to off Jane's dad at the opening of the movie while in bed with his girl. Everyone at school recognizes that Ricky is a weirdo and to be avoided, but he is presented in the film as a morally superior agent who gets the girl due to his unexplained confidence and rejection of social mores. Considering Ricky's family consists of an unpredictably violent and abusive father, as well as a conveniently catatonic mother in order to hammer in the point that all the normies are bad, but the deviants are good, his confidence does not fit the circumstances at all.
To top this off, Lester is a married man lusting after his daughter's best friend in high school. Lester's sexual fantasy with Angela (Mena Suvari), and his partial disrobing of her in preparation for coitus, that the audience experienced vicariously, is demoralizing because Lester is married and Angela is likely under age, to be otherwise would be the exception, so I'm going with the rule.
All of these demoralizing plot elements are hidden behind other, more uplifting plot elements, like Lester wanting to improve himself because he was suddenly awoken by an attraction to Angela. It's good that Lester decides to get jacked, demand respect from his wife and that he sticks up for himself at work, but then he extorts $60K from his company when they were about to fire him, so we're demoralized by this contrast, falling into the moral trap of being dismissive of someone for stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving children.
Lester gets high and loosens up, but his dealer is his neighbor, a minor who is having sex with his daughter, and who risks both jail and retribution from his father for dealing, which Lester enables, albeit without knowing the full consequences at the time, but the audience does know.
Came across this great BlackPilled movie review from 2018, and you might find his take on American Beauty[/URL] to be interesting. He's got a lot of great film reviews that explain various tricks of the trade that Hollywood uses to deceive and harm its audience.
Yes Blackpilled has very accurate analysis of Hollywood as demoralization, I recommend any of his video analyzing films. American Beauty is for sure highly subversive. His video on The Pawnbroker and how it was used to get rid of the moral film codes in American was very enlightening:
About a week age on News Years me and my friends went to see Zootopia 2. While it is a kids movie I saw the first movie with my friends back in college so we thought it was worth seeing.
The movie was good overall, but nothing too special. However it was from a financial standpoint the most successful US movie of year and was the most successful animated Disney movie ever.
Overall seeing my friends was a fun time overall especially considering some of the forum drama that occurred earlier so this helped to lift my mood up and was a good start to 2026.
My kids are grown and I never even heard of Zootopia or Zootopia 2. Sales dollars are BS IMO when assessing how “big” a movie is compared to all time movies…should solely be based on ticket sales volume in proportion to population numbers where movie theaters show the film released. That’s true apples to apples. Something like that anyway. I seriously doubt Zootopia 2 had lines wrap around the block at every theater in the US like for the early 3 Star Wars Films, ET, Jaws etc.
I ran across this tweet saying the Tom Cruise character in Rainman is autistic. Everybody knows Dustin Hoffman's character is autistic, but nobody notices that Tom Cruise's character is as well.
The thing is, autism was much less understood back then. Hoffman's character is extremely autistic, and he has that idiot-savant thing going on with card counting and doing math in his head. Cruise's character is more what most people think of as autistic today. A man who tends to be socially oblivious, who gets fixated on certain patterns and obsesses about details. Nobody even thought of that kind of behavior as autistic when the movie came out. Cruise's character seemed like kind of a selfish jerk to me when I first saw it, but now I do see how he is autistic in his own way.
My kids are grown and I never even heard of Zootopia or Zootopia 2. Sales dollars are BS IMO when assessing how “big” a movie is compared to all time movies…should solely be based on ticket sales volume in proportion to population numbers where movie theaters show the film released. That’s true apples to apples. Something like that anyway. I seriously doubt Zootopia 2 had lines wrap around the block at every theater in the US like for the early 3 Star Wars Films, ET, Jaws etc.
Exactly. There is a serious lack of options at the theaters these days so it's easy for some of these tent pole films to do well at the box office. I'm not impressed at all by whatever cruddy Disney movie that breaks box office records.
True, I took the children to see Zootopia 2 because there was naff all else for them to see. I think they enjoy the popcorn more than the films they watch. I found it tremendously boring, and it's not just because I'm old because I've taken them to see other children's films that I thought were okay.
We were spoiled as children, that's why I keep a DVD collection of the classics.
I ran across this tweet saying the Tom Cruise character in Rainman is autistic. Everybody knows Dustin Hoffman's character is autistic, but nobody notices that Tom Cruise's character is as well.
The thing is, autism was much less understood back then. Hoffman's character is extremely autistic, and he has that idiot-savant thing going on with card counting and doing math in his head. Cruise's character is more what most people think of as autistic today. A man who tends to be socially oblivious, who gets fixated on certain patterns and obsesses about details. Nobody even thought of that kind of behavior as autistic when the movie came out. Cruise's character seemed like kind of a selfish jerk to me when I first saw it, but now I do see how he is autistic in his own way.
I think people use the term autistic too carelessly. Every time I see this thrown around it basically just means either an introvert or someone impersonal, candid, or focused. It is my personal opinion that personality traits have been pathologized by the invasive psychiatric occupation.
I think people use the term autistic too carelessly. Every time I see this thrown around it basically just means either an introvert or someone impersonal, candid, or focused. It is my personal opinion that personality traits have been pathologized by the invasive psychiatric occupation.
Yes, that's what it's become. Anyone who is cerebral, or eccentric in the slightest. Basically anyone who's not an NPC normie.
The thing about Cruise's character in the movie was that he had some of the traits pointed out, but he was also a cocky frat boy Type A personality as well, which is on a totally different personality axis.
I've seen Good Time and Uncut Gems before by the Safdies as well as Smashing Machine by the other bro.
This movie was like a combination of everything they've done before but tightened by having some of the hallmarks of the 'inspirational sports movie' genre as well. Unlike Good Time and Gems, which features one awful event after another leading to a character's downfall, this movie has all these terrible mistakes and misfortunes ultimately part of a goal to achieve success in the sport of ping pong. This balances out the doom chronicling of their other movies and give the film a wider range of emotions. The character of Marty is an archetypal striver. The pacing of the script is rapid meaning there's never a dull moment and the final scene - suggestive of a future more human and less individualistic Marty - gives the film a final heartbeat that recontextualises what came before. It's quite an achievement and my best movie theater experience since Parasite in 2019.
I'm slowly getting more and more into watching indie independent films. They can't afford to be poorly executed and lack expensive sets, talent, and special effects. I kind of like it, they have to work harder at saying or showing something. Many of these films are leftist, but not nearly as repulsive as the big Jew films. In fact, I feel like a lot of these films are the missing "white man" culture and media rightwing grifters used to opine out (maybe they still do). I wish people on the right made good indie films, and maybe they do and I am ignorant of it, but here a few I've watched in the recent past that I enjoyed. While maybe not everything I've listed here is an actual independent film, some are, others are very low budget. I watched all of these on Tubi.
Molly and Max in the Future - a sci-fi that's actually a romantic-comedy (I didn't realize it until I was in too deep). It's based off of When Harry Met Sally (never watched, but maybe YOU have) but for a more modern, aka woke-sjw-reddit, audience. Some parts of the film I enjoyed, mostly the fact they actually had honest conversations about things and made an effort to respect the audience's intelligence. Something lacking in a lot of other films.
Zero Charisma - about a DnD nerd who is obsessed with his campaign he created and he alienates and abuses his close friends who fall for a cool nerd who joins their group. It's a hilarious movie and the protagonist was almost a carbon copy of a guy I worked with before who was an insufferable know-it-all DnD dungeon master. Solid movie about a loser.
Jules - about an alien that crashes to Earth and is taken care of by an old man. I appreciated the use of an old white man as the protagonist. He's a kindhearted and simple salt-of-the-earth American and the movie has an old-person sweetness to it.
Free Time - about a 30 year old guy who quits his job because it's suffocating and then discovers being free in the big city to be just as suffocating and empty. Good portrayal of how absolutely annoying modern gen Z urban liberals are.
Puzzlehead - a take on Frankenstein. A guy makes an android in his own image. The movie was made in 2006 but it looks like it's from the 60s or 70s. Overall I thought it was decent.
Day Zero - features some big talent and it's about three friends who get a draft notice. Set in the 2000s, they wrestle with the reality of them going off to fight in Iran. I didn't think it was that great, but it did show some of how these guys will just be used up and tossed out, especially how Elijah Wood's character comes off.
I Like Movies - about a pretentious, irritating narcissistic kid who is obsessed with movies. Alienates his friend, is weird at his workplace, but ultimately comes of age and grows up a small bit. The kid is another loser male. A lot of indie films seem to feature loser nerdy men and I appreciate the exposure, coming from that background myself. A lot of young losers are so wrapped up in how much of a loser they are they forget how much of an asshole and anti-social figure they come across as to others, and these films might even be helpful in holding up the mirror to them so they forget their navel-gazing victimhood for a moment and see what dicks they are.
Relax, I'm From The Future - forgettable. I think it had its moments, but was overall kind of boring.
End of the World - about a guy who knows how to survive an apocalyptic event because of all the end-of-the-world movies he's seen. It was kind of interesting, what can I say?
Tim Travers and the Time Travel Paradox - about a guy who invents time travel to see what would happen if he killed himself in the past. Pretty interesting film but had some unfortunate disgusting and gory moments. I liked the entirety of it but warn you of a bizarre "The Boys" like scene (not explicit, implicitly implied) where he makes love to himself. Very weird and out of place and ruined what could have been otherwise solid entertainment.
The director, Gillo Pontecorvo, is also known for The Battle of Algiers (1965), a film about the successful guerilla uprising against the French colonists.
When this movie was airing on TV once in the 90s I was anxious to watch it, my father called it 'propaganda' and switched the channel to watch news or some other boring talk. Back then I was roughly of the age he was in 65. Before WW2 people could go to France to work in coal mines, like the family of the future party chairman from the 70s. Many stayed for good after the war since Poland had become communist.
When my father was a kid, a sister of one of his classmates' was getting married, so their cousins drove down from France. One woman's husband was a veteran of that war and still had PTSD, couldn't get any quality, peaceful sleep or rest. The Arabs used to sneak up on them and cut their throats as they were sleeping, he saw his friends die that way and saw some close quarters action fighting off the assailants.
The French OAS leaders made for great bogeymen in the papers. Their portrait pictures would take up half of the page or more, often on the front cover. A lot of effort went into finding ones that showed angry and contorted faces, like when screaming orders or delivering speeches animatedly.
The best film I can think of that I could review as a book end to Battle of Algiers is Day of the Jackal (1973), a film about French nationalist backlash to DeGualle pulling out of Algeria, so I'll do that.
I've seen the D of the J, from what I remember there were 7 attempts on DeG's life. My old man saw him live when he visited Poland, he attended an open air mass or some religious ceremony I don't remember, and the commie party chairman Gomulka, an atheist, who accompanied him, had gotten down on his knees together with CDG, every time it was time to.
When this movie was airing on TV once in the 90s I was anxious to watch it, my father called it 'propaganda' and switched the channel to watch news or some other boring talk. Back then I was roughly of the age he was in 65. Before WW2 people could go to France to work in coal mines, like the family of the future party chairman from the 70s. Many stayed for good after the war since Poland had become communist.
When my father was a kid, a sister of one of his classmates' was getting married, so their cousins drove down from France. One woman's husband was a veteran of that war and still had PTSD, couldn't get any quality, peaceful sleep or rest. The Arabs used to sneak up on them and cut their throats as they were sleeping, he saw his friends die that way and saw some close quarters action fighting off the assailants.
The French OAS leaders made for great bogeymen in the papers. Their portrait pictures would take up half of the page or more, often on the front cover. A lot of effort went into finding ones that showed angry and contorted faces, like when screaming orders or delivering speeches animatedly.
What happened to the pied-noirs in Algeria was genocide, full stop. Yes, they were "colonists," but that doesn't change anything (aren't Arabs also colonists in North Africa?). Imagine if White Americans or Canadians ("descendants of colonists") were given a choice between the "suitcase or the coffin" (literally what the Europeans in Algeria were presented with) as some kind of decolonization effort by Third Worlders. Algeria was all the pied-noirs had known for generations, and what befell them gets swept under the rug due to the post-World War II (dis)order.
I think people use the term autistic too carelessly. Every time I see this thrown around it basically just means either an introvert or someone impersonal, candid, or focused. It is my personal opinion that personality traits have been pathologized by the invasive psychiatric occupation.
It's stupid psychobabble. <<They>> invented 1358 names to ruin the lives of people that are outside of a strict medium, on their quest to multiply the useful idiots.
