J.P. Shiel

I regard the first two prequels as mildly entertaining, nothing like the catastrophic blights on the franchise that some say, and I’m a big fan of Revenge of the Sith. I feel you could almost just start watching Star Wars with RotS and go on from there!
Kudos for going against the grain with this article.

It does seem like we are creating a society where women and men in the public eye, and thus the characters they play on films and TV, must conform to increasingly unattainable standards of physical perfection or risk being discarded. I think there’s a yawning chasm of space waiting to be filled by superheroes who look and act just like ordinary people, and I mean actual ordinary people.

1. Pulp Fiction.
2. Reservoir Dogs.
3. Django Unchained.

Never watched Jackie Brown to the end. Loved Christoph Waltz’s scenes in IB and the bar scene but the rest doesn’t do as much for me. Tarantino is an iconic film-maker, but that can be a double-edged sword. It means that he is capable of amazing work, but it also means there is no-one to rein him in when he’s being self-indulgent (IB and DU could both have been a half-hour shorter, and both would be better for it).

Overall, a good article and a fantastic, if sometimes flawed, creator.

I agree with everything you wrote and I too am sick of the cheap ‘Non-Lethal Death’ as a way of eliciting false emotion out of the audience. It’s not quite up there with ‘I Allowed Myself To Be Captured To Mess With You’ (which Skyfall, TDK and TDKR all make use of), but it’s close.

I think we’re much closer now to Brave New World than 1984. In the Western world, our focus seems to be on medical and technological ‘progress’, and I see little overt sign of the kind of totalitarian government Orwell described. That’s not to say that there’s no government control exerted over citizens, but our world today is one of consumers who mostly spurn the harsh realities of our planet in order to attain more possessions, which they believe will in turn bring them happiness.

With any minority or oppressed/post-oppressed group, the instinct of the majority is to erroneously bring every member of that group under the representation of one terrible example of it. So some stupid men are stupid enough to believe that Amy’s actions in this film must, of course, be representative of many or even all women everywhere. It’s the same process as people believing that the actions of some extremist terrorist reflect the views and values of ordinary Muslims who live ordinary lives. By grouping the entire section of society, be it women, Muslims or any other, by the actions of one or a small group of its number, the majority is able to remove agency from the oppressed group, tar every member of it with the same brush, and treat it as one homogenous block.

I don’t agree; it’s possible she could have moved onto her back without Walt being there. Also, even if he did accidentally knock her onto her back, it was just that: accidental. He didn’t intend to do it, and when he then lets her die, I still think it ties into what I’ve said in the article, which is that Walt is a man who finds himself at the mercy of circumstance, and makes his decisions in response to this. He may have caused it, but he didn’t orchestrate it, and that’s the difference I think.

Agree with every word. However we feel about his actions, the spine of the series is a man getting up off his knees and, in his view, taking back control, albeit with terrible consequences for all involved.
Anyway, thanks for reading!