With The Lorax, the entertainment industry and the federal government have joined forces to produce a candy-colored dollop of castor-oil. This woeful would-be message movie is about as jaw-dropping as a notable previous Potomac/Pacific joint effort — the pro-Stalin film Mission to Moscow ordered up by Franklin Roosevelt in 1943.
Dr. Seuss’ Lorax is a furry orange forest gnome who carries an overt anti-industry, anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalism theme, and in an effort to look as though they practice what they preach the backers of the film have lined up deals with supposedly green and eco-friendly outfits such as the detergent maker Seventh Generation, which is hawking a Lorax-branded bottle made of recycled paper. (Question: did anyone bother to measure the relative carbon emissions of making a plastic bottle versus making one out of paper, or is the overall feeling of groovy virtue all that matters?)
Another notable Lorax partner is the Environmental Protection Agency, which you might think (or fear) would have bigger things on its mind than promoting a big-screen cartoon, but the combination of Hollywood glamour (Zac Efron and Taylor Swift are in the cast) and the opportunity to push early propaganda on little minds proved irresistible to the EPA, which is using the Lorax brand to hype those supposedly energy-efficient appliances that never quite seem to deliver on their promises. (Click image at left to read.)
Unsurprisingly, given the rigid earnestness behind it, The Lorax isn’t much fun to watch. Every time you think it’s starting to get a little heavy-handed, it gets heavier still. The Lorax (voiced by Danny DeVito) features in both ascension and resurrection scenes, there is a hymn to greed called “How Bad Can I Be?” that would have embarrassed Bernie Madoff, and the bad guy, O’Hare (Rob Riggle), who wears a severely geometric ‘do suggesting the epic hairstyling errors of Moe Howard, Ringo Starr and Rooney Mara, is a loathsome little creep who has made a fortune selling bottled air.
The art department never got the memo from the Heavy Themes folks, though, and they created a delightfully Seussian candy-colored playland that hardly says “hellhole.” The skies are azure and the streets are clean, giving the lie to the opening song about how smoggy and rubbishy everything is.
More likely to repel little Jake and Emma is the forest critter and alleged hero the Lorax. Imagine the crankiness of your average Scotsman with the mustache of David Crosby.
The Lorax famously “speaks for the trees” but sounds much like a creepy Earth Science teacher who can’t stop talking about that time he met Joan Baez at a No Nukes rally. Briefly I considered reporting the little freak to the police, after he sneaks into bed with the adolescent Once-ler (Ed Helms), an initially well-meaning kid out to make a buck who falls prey to his worst instincts and cuts down all the trees to harvest a substance used in making a must-have clothing item called a “thneed.”
The Lorax (who is only the fourth most prominent character, not that I wanted more of him) fails to convince the Once-ler to be gentle on the land and the woodland creatures who live there. But he’s such a huffy little troll that it’s difficult to picture anyone taking advice from him, even before he slips himself between the sheets with a little boy. Nor is DeVito’s the voice of wisdom; the man sounds like a cabdriver in a 1940s movie, or maybe Ratso Rizzo’s less successful brother, not a sage.
And Liberals claim they don’t have religion.
Of course, their form of religion is much like some primitive tribe, in which you either rigidly conform or be burned at the stake for everyone’s amusement.
I’d forgotten about this video, but it so well highlights *exactly* that Environmentalism IS a religion to them, one quite akin to my description (above).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4
That video was awesome!! LMFAO
Thanks, Allston.
Paraphrasing Wilde (I think), one would have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter at such profoundly disturbed people. That said, one of lost children in the clip was most certainly right about losing the way — just not the way she thought.
This is a great example of how “Environmentalists” highjacked conservation. Back when I read the Lorax as a kid, the message was “don’t cut down all the trees”. (Not that any decent businessman would be so stupid)
Now the message has morphed into a wide range of dictates on how to live our lives, what we should feel guilty about, and who we should vote for.
What? You’re seriously suggesting that cutting down and replanting trees is more effective resource management of our forests than banning all cutting and then watching the forests burn? How can you be so irresponsible?
Forest Service Motto – Only YOU can prevent forest fires (because we certainly won’t do anything except allow the underbrush and dead wood to collect and then blame you for the ensuing conflagration. Burn Baby, Burn!).
There is a difference between resource management and ecosystem management.
Of course there is a difference between wanting to manage an ecosystem and actually understanding the ecosystem enough to properly manage.
And then there is a difference between understanding an ecosystem and accepting that ecosystems change over time.
Confusing these will mean falling into the same error the Forest Service and the ecostremists have.
The book can be read as an example of the tragedy of the commons. If the onceler actually owned the trees, he would never have cut them down without replanting them. Since the belonged to everyone (and therefore no one), he knew if he didn’t cut them down as fast as he could someone else would beat him to it, and the trees would still be just as gone and he wouldn’t be able to profit from it.
I notice many children’s shows (I have 4 kids) attempt to preach a pro-socialist worldview, and yet trip over themselves by showing the natural outcomes of such views. They try and try to show how private ownership is bad, and only prove that it really is the only possible way for civilized man to interact with each other without totally ruining the world. Funny thing is they don’t seem to appreciate the irony.
“(Not that any decent businessman would be so stupid)”
Amen. The original lesson wasn’t really anti-capitalist except in a bizarre straw-man kind of way. The lesson was supply chain management.
it’s the acolytes following the Man from Saul – virtually everything from Obama is straw man in nature; no wonder his minions would concoct similar arguments. It is the only way through which they can make a dishonest case.
Liberals have a warped view of how business utilizes natural resources. Industries that rely on natural resources have more incentive than an eco-Marxist urban dweller to preserve and protect the environment. Where woud sod and paper companies be if they weren’t good stewards of the forests? Their zealotry drives up the cost of everything for everyone. But maybe that’s the gal.
I hate iPad autocorrect.
…where would wood and paper companies be…
…But maybe that’s the goal.
You can turn it off in the settings and still leave spell check on! Same for iphone. Yea I can pspell but cnanot type. Egad and now can barely see.
Once again, the “Hollywood” progressives have turned a story from my childhood into a dreary, earnest parable (“Earnestness is Stupidity gone to college” – P.J> O’Rourke) against the “capitalist system” (never mind that pollution was much worst in the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc). I’ve seen IHOP commercials with tie-ins to this movie which I think is rather curious, seeing that IHOP is not the type of restaurant where environmental types like the “creepy Earth Science teacher” referenced in the article would eat. And speaking of creepy – the highly unpleasant Danny DiVito as the voice of the Lorax? What, Al Gore wasn’t available? After watching part of DiVito’s latest sitcom, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, there’s no way that I’d drag some kid to see this movie.
This review was laugh out loud, knee-slapping, hilarity. Everything that I suspected the movie would peddle was mentioned. While the original book promoted environmental responsibility, it was done in an artistic and reasonable fashion.
Frankly, you could have done without that last bit about theism. Its hardly an intellectual sin to be unconvinced regarding the evidence for the existence of Yahweh, or of any other God, so long as that is your actual reason for not believing.
Seriously, when theists can answer Epicurius’s argument about evil:
(“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”)
without forgetting that their God is omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient, I’ll reconsider believing in him. The God you pray to is not like a mortal creator in any way: he is FULLY aware of the exact implications of his creations, and thus is morally responsible for them. Since evil exists, it means that God created evil.
No question the environmentalists often behave like its a religion, but yours is not less wishful thinking than theirs if your argument consists of “It’s bad to not believe in God”. Consequential thinking does not bring us closer to truth.
If you don’t think it is a religion, then I suggest you read “Ecoscience” written by our “science” czar John Holdren. Particularly the chapters about changing religious and cultural institutions. My favorite paragraph in the whole book has the subtitle “Individual Rights”, in which they go on to make the case that these rights only apply to the right to choose to have an abortion, not the right to choose NOT to have an abortion. Happy happy joy joy.
The outside of the candy is covered in pretty rainbows and lollipop dreams, the inside is filled with blooy fetuses and forced abortions. Pretty isn’t it?
Thank you. I was right there with the author until he felt the need to attack people who have the utter gall to think for themselves when it comes to religion.
Ok, the why do God permit evil is a fairly simple question to answer: we were granted free will, which would not be possible if we were not permitted to do evil.
As I understand it, the Eastern Orthodox take on it is we’re permitted to chose what we do while we live, and are not once we are dead. The souls of the dead are obligated to do only good, and are not permitted to do evil. If you were someone who loved good while you were alive, then being prohibited from doing evil is a very nice thing, but if you were someone who loved evil, it is, literally, hell.
You assume evil is something we are supposed to be protected from; something which is not supposed to exist. If that were the case, we would be in heaven.
Perhaps evil is something we are intended to learn, and to grow, from.
Ever think of that?
Am going to this movie Sunday with 26 kids and parents for my grandson’s birthday party. At least we will soon know who is conservative and who is not!
Well if it’s any consolation, one of the reviews from Ain’t It Cool News–no friend of conservatism–is panning the film too. There’s another one gushing over it, but it’s so thin on detail I frankly wouldn’t give it any credence no matter what it said. The bad review said, in effect, that expanding the book’s simple message into a full feature-length film just didn’t work out, and went into depth as to why. Sadly this doesn’t surprise me, as I think modern attitudes towards the environment have shifted away from respectable, intelligent conservation to knee-jerk tree-hugging, and you could probably count the Hollywood moguls and stars who get this concept on one hand if they ever came out of hiding. We’re surrounded by passionate goons waiting to force-feed us their version of morality at every opportunity.
I useed to be a believer in the noble savage religion. These days I see the rainbow utopia more as a genocidal nightmare. I think of them less as warriors of the rainbow and more as ecojihadists. They love Gaia but they hate humans. Check out their holy book, “Ecoscience”, by our science czar John Holdren. The plan is all laid out. Get into the churches and change religions (really this is science????), if suggestive population control does not work then it should be forced. They have won. They have permeated most aspects of our culture. If only they could crush the Catholic Church (or just water it down to be meaningless), that darn ancient institution is standing in the way of their population control dreams.
my take on the “gaia” nonsense is the notion that earth needs a bunch of insignificant humans to take care of it–
Liberals are hypocrites for watching so cheesy. They are supposed to be into great arts.
Oh and they hate apostates. Sound familiar I know of another religion that hates apostates and it is not the Catholic Church. They may excommunicate (not very often these days), but they don’t try to force you to stay. I can’t turn anywhere today without having my former ecojihadist religion shoved down my throat.
“A more up-to-date, and daring, movie might have satirized the artificial resource-gobblers…”
A genuinely daring movie, if it could ever get made, would satirize environmentalism, the pseudo-science behind it, and the death and destruction it has left in its wake — beginning with the millions who have died of malaria since the banning of DDT. “I am the Humax. I speak for the humans!”
Just imagine if they could just eradicate all of us pesky procreative bitter clingers out here in fly over country, what a wild playground this country could be for the Hollywood ecojihadists, Ted Turners, and Al Gores of the world. Just imagine how big your ranch could be if there weren’t any of those disgusting little human diseases trying to utilize the land and resources to survive.
Tim Treadwell video recorded some realistic nature sounds that would have worked to give on a real sense of the forest.
This Lorax parody deserves a wider audience.
http://tobiesrandomrants.blogspot.com/2005/06/lorax-parody.html
As long as you believe you can encapsulate God by believing an all powerful Creator must be malevolent, because evil still is, you will only fool yourself.
The Bible DOES say that God created Satan, but that God made Satan a perfect creature. How could evil arise without it being the malevolence of God? What if evil is simply seperation from God? Wouldn’t that explain Satan and evil a little bit better? And wouldn’t it open a new door on this all powerful being’s motives, and purposes, whatever they may be?
Given two scenarios, yours, where a being powerful and knowledgable enough to create this universe is, if it exist, simply malevolent for not giving his pets the perfect life, and mine, that such a powerful, knowledgable being does exist, created everything, and that evil exists BECAUSE that perfect God gave his creatures free will, which led to evil being all around us I think mine is more intuitive. Wouldn’t it make sense that a God able to create the universe would be Just (balanced, fair, true), and wouldn’t it make sense that such a God gives the creatures in His image free-will? And wouldn’t it make sense that evil existing, in this scenario, does not mean God is malevolent, and that your logic is very wrong? Maybe, God has a plan. Maybe, God knew this would all happen so that he could send his Son Jesus Christ for the Salvation of the world. And wouldn’t it make sense that it was the only way to have a Creation such as ours when such a God is guided by Truth, Justice, Mercy, Love? The fact is God did create evil, indirectly. He knew it would come, but he does not create evil’s sacraments, and that is what you are actually blaming God for.
And if you say you believe nothing of it either way then why do you take the time to pull others down into your ignorance? It seems, to me, the Biblical narrative, once again, reveals the truth, and remains firm. Like it has for thousands of years.
Above was meant to be directed at John P.
“When you’ve stopped believing in God, you don’t believe in nothing, you’ll believe in anything.”
This is the epitome of the disease that leftist atheist liberals get. They refuse to believe in our own society and the religions that built it, so they choose some half baked idea and they believe in that instead. And then they write meaningless tripe and make unwatchable movies as a result.
Nobody cares. And it infuriates them. Ergo, the angry liberal.
Replace the word “God” with “spark plugs”, and your post is still true.
No African-American characters? Why?
just imagine David Crosby- …eeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww
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