Even the Rain: Sketches of Spanish Agitprop
Bollain lets us see snippets from the film in progress without a filter. There’s no camera shown capturing the action or other hints that this is a film shoot. That gives the scenes more power — and more ways to reinforces Rain’s ideological bent.
“We will enslave you … and do as much harm as we can” the film’s Columbus warns the natives in one early sequence.
Yet Even the Rain acknowledges how films like this can work on several levels, an awareness many left-wing films lack.
“This isn’t art. It’s pure propaganda,” says the actor playing Christopher Columbus in Sebastion’s film during a heated dinner conversation centered on the movie’s politics.
Often in ideologically driven films the “bad guys” aren’t allowed to speak coherently. They exist simply to let the hero appear noble by comparison. Here, one of the local officials explains the pro-privatization position without being made to look foolish.
Even the Rain shrewdly doesn’t deify the locals. When a water company car drives past them and stops, a group of angry citizens trashes it without mercy. And Daniel is far from a saint. He’s stubborn, unfriendly, and single-minded. And he uses the film’s crew with impunity.
Zinn would surely be pleased by Even the Rain. But the film’s bald ideological currents cannot overshadow the story playing out within that context.
From Das Kapital to the present, 90% of socialism in all its forms has been vilification of capitalism and predictions of its inevitable self-destruction. We now have a record of socialism in practice. It’s no longer a distant dream; it has a history and even the most devout socialist cannot pretend that this history has been one of unalloyed success.
If the socialists were serious there would be an extensive bibliography of books and articles examining its failures and recommending revisions.
There is no such bibliography.
Perhaps it is because, as with all True Believers, Marx in his haste to publish missed the crushng effect of the California Gold Rush on his principle theses — that could have save us all a lot of grief.
But that’s mostly water under the bridge; the struggle for freedom will always exist as long as we have those who want it only for themselves and can make up names and rules to suit their purpose.
I can hardly wait for “Obama, The Movie.”
If Only We Had More Entertainers Like Ben Affleck!
Entertainers, whether stage, screen, television, radio, or blogosphere entertainers, are imbued with a gift, an enviable ability infused by stardom which they often confuse with wisdom and which they often employ to inculcate in the masses a sense of righteous, often misdirected, rectitude.
We’ve grown accustomed to egotistical entertainers like Martin Sheen and Lindsay Lohan making public fools of themselves. It’s the more committed types like Sean Penn, Michael Moore, and George Clooney who take themselves so very seriously and who predicate their rants on little else than misinformation and liberal ideology who pose the biggest danger. Ben Affleck is a charter member of that club.
Thirty-eight year old actor-director Ben Affleck, born Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt, made his Hollywood mark as the third banana dumb guy in 1997′s “Good Will Hunting,” and has vainly been trying to overcome that dumb stereotype ever since.
An ardent liberal and cause activist, Affleck has campaigned for get-out-the vote drives and has worked tirelessly for the A-T Children’s Project, Feeding America, Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and the UN’s Refugee Agency, the UNHCR’s Gimme Shelter Campaign. Given all that social activism, it’s tough to see how he crams in time to make movies, but he does and they’re not all bad.
Dumped by Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez, Affleck continued his quest for personal reinvention by marrying Jennifer Garner five years ago and they’re still together. A Democrat liberal to his core, when he’s sufficiently well-heeled he’d like to run for Congress even though previous excursions into politics when he enthusiastically loaned his ego and influence to presidential losers Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton didn’t go very well.
The multi-millionaire Affleck, fresh off attacking American CEOs for their extravagant compensation and after offering his expert opinions on criminology since he starred in “The Town,” is currently on another tear, saving the Congolese, and he wants America to accomplish that salvation.
Dem-libs usually stand in vociferous opposition to any American extranational involvement, especially when a Republican is president, but Affleck is making an exception for the Congo with an African-American residing in the White House. Never reticent, he testified before Congress on Wednesday on the subject of the corrupt, warlike Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is to be distinguished from its neighbor, the somewhat less-corrupt, warlike Republic of the Congo.
In making his case for increased U.S. involvement, Affleck “told Congress that 5 million people have died from civil conflict in that country since 1998.” He didn’t reveal the basis for that catastrophic number but did insist that “The United States government can and should play an active role in ensuring that this November’s elections are free and fair.”
“He called on Congress to provide the Congo with funding for . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3854)