Somehow, The New York Times manages to invoke Godwin’s Law in a review of The Polar Express, Movies > Movie Review | ‘The Polar Express’: Do You Hear Sleigh Bells? Nah, Just Tom Hanks and Some Train” href=”http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/movies/10pola.html?oref=login&oref=login”>a Christmas movie:
It’s likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters’ faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus’s North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of “machinery and tall chimneys” in Dickens’s “Hard Times.” Tots surely won’t recognize that Santa’s big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” But their parents may marvel that when Santa’s big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.
For the Times, Michael Moore, whom many Red Staters would actually consider to be the second coming of Leni Riefenstahl (except that Leni was a better filmmaker), is “a credit to the republic“, but in an animated Christmas movie, they manage to find not just subliminal Nazi references, but Freudian phallic symbols (well, scrotal symbols(!), to be accurate) as well.
Merry Christmas, all you simple hicks living in the Red States, from the enlightened, compassionate elites at the Times!
(Via a comment posted on VodkaPundit.)
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