open season on piece of shit Frank Miller

[JackRiddler]

[SYLVESTER STALLONE AS RAMBO]: It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you and I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win. And I come back to the world and I see maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting, calling me baby-killer and all kinds of vile crap!

In the anti-war protest scene in Forrest Gump, Jenny's new boyfirend, the obnoxious dick Wesley calls the protagonist a "baby killer".

This highly unlikeable character is, so handily communicated through the dialogue, "the president of the Berkeley chapter of S.D.S."

So it is the perfect frame-up, a "important leftist student anti-war protester" showing his "true colours" by abusing Forrest verbally and Forrest's (and his, presumably) beloved Jenny physically, dressed in "ironic" Nazi gear (as opposed to Forrest's immaculate American dress uniform). And he doesn't have the stomach to fight Forrest, showing he is a coward too.

All to reinforce the same mythology. And it took me so long to fully realize this...

And of the two movies, Forrest Gump, the one made and celebrated by Hollywood's liberal majority, is far the viler propaganda. Rambo's speech could be attributed to the misperceptions of a simple, traumatized man with extreme rage and buried guilt. He speaks his own view. Whereas the third-person scenario in Forrest Gump - head of SDS! mocks an honest retard! defames the man's service! abuses a woman! in a nazi outfit! coward! - couldn't be more over the top if the Berkeley Longhairs were joined by Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Manson, Nasser and Eldridge Cleaver for a Bollywood dance number as they anticipate dropping poison in a Girl Scout troop's drinking water. Though not differing in spirit, the latter would be too obvious (and, come to think of it, funny), whereas "Gump" is aiming for the maximum possible defamation that can be dished out against "the Sixties" and still be slipped, without being widely noticed as a "political" scene, into a pretend serious and wise, Oscar-bait feel-good movie for the whole family.

More later, I want to tell a story about "hippies spitting on veterans."

.

[Harvey]

Frank, for what it's worth, I started to read Sin City one time, and I couldn't get through more than a few pages. Likewise, when I tried to watch the movie, I think I got to about 2 minutes and 27 seconds. 300? Surely I got to about a minute or so before I lost interest.

I remember thinking it was my fault.

[JackRiddler]

.

I thought Sin City was unwatchable crap from the first minute and I think we may have walked out of it, it was so tedious.

I thought 300 was irresistible visual porn, but not even crypto fascist, just fascist. Well, like in my review above.

[Harvey]

unwatchable crap from the first minute

Proof I have a stronger stomach to about a minute and a half! LOL

[MinM]

[SYLVESTER STALLONE AS RAMBO]: It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you and I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win. And I come back to the world and I see maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting, calling me baby-killer and all kinds of vile crap!

In the anti-war protest scene in Forrest Gump, Jenny's new boyfirend, the obnoxious dick Wesley calls the protagonist a "baby killer".

This highly unlikeable character is, so handily communicated through the dialogue, "the president of the Berkeley chapter of S.D.S."

So it is the perfect frame-up, a "important leftist student anti-war protester" showing his "true colours" by abusing Forrest verbally and Forrest's (and his, presumably) beloved Jenny physically, dressed in "ironic" Nazi gear (as opposed to Forrest's immaculate American dress uniform). And he doesn't have the stomach to fight Forrest, showing he is a coward too.

All to reinforce the same mythology. And it took me so long to fully realize this...

viewtopic.php?p=323783#p323783

[2012 Countdown]

FWIW, Alan Moore has dissed miller for years, he seems to have had his number a long long time ago.

Alan Moore – meet the man behind the protest mask
From Wall St to Athens and Occupy sit-ins worldwide, protesters are wearing masks inspired by V for Vendetta. Here, its author discusses why his avenging hero has such potency today

Tom Lamont
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 26 November 2011 15.05 EST

The comic-book writer Alan Moore is not usually surprised when his creations find a life for themselves away from the printed page. Strips he penned in the 1980s and 90s have been fed through the Hollywood patty-maker, never to his great satisfaction, resulting in both critical hits and terrible flops; fads for T-shirts, badges and shouted slogans have emerged from characters and conceits he has dreamed up for titles such as Watchmen and From Hell. "I suppose I've gotten used to the fact," says the 58-year-old, "that some of my fictions percolate out into the material world."


But Moore has been caught off-guard in recent years, and particularly in 2011, by the inescapable presence of a certain mask being worn at protests around the world. A sallow, smirking likeness of Guy Fawkes – created by Moore and the artist David Lloyd for their 1982 series V for Vendetta. It has a confused lineage, this mask: the plastic replica that thousands of demonstrators have been wearing is actually a bit of tie-in merchandise from the film version of V for Vendetta, a Joel Silver production made (quite badly) in 2006. Nevertheless, at the disparate Occupy sit-ins this year – in New York, Moscow, Rio, Rome and elsewhere – as well as the repeated anti-government actions in Athens and the gatherings outside G20 and G8 conferences in London and L'Aquila in 2009, the V for Vendetta mask has been a fixture. Julian Assange recently stepped out wearing one, and last week there was a sort of official embalmment of the mask as a symbol of popular feeling when Shepard Fairey altered his famous "Hope" image of Barack Obama to portray a protester wearing one.

It all comes back to Moore – a private man with knotty greying hair and a magnificent beard, who prefers to live without an internet connection and who has not had a working telly for months "on an obscure point of principle" about the digital signal in his hometown of Northampton. He has never yet properly commented on the Vendetta mask phenomenon, and speaking on the phone from his home, Moore seems variously baffled, tickled, roused and quite pleased that his creation has become such a prominent emblem of modern activism.

"I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction."

--
David Lloyd, V for Vendetta's co-creator, has admitted going along to a demo in New York to see the masks in use. The extent of Moore's own activism has been "a good moan in the local pub"; he does not see himself donning a mask ("Be a bit weird, wouldn't it?"). But his sympathies are with the protesters, and there is a clear sense of pride for him that so many people – if not "the 99%" then a great, unignorable bloc – have caused such a stir. "It would be probably be better if the authorities accepted this is a new situation, that this is history happening. History is a thing that happens in waves. Generally it is best to go with these waves, not try to make them turn back – the Canute option. I'm hoping that the world's leaders will realise this."

Back in the early 80s, approaching the end of Vendetta's epic 38-part cycle, Moore was struggling to think of another "V" word with which to title a closing chapter. He'd already used Victims, Vaudeville and Vengeance; the Villain, the Voice, the Vanishing; even Vicissitude and Verwirrung (the German word for confusion). "I was getting pretty desperate," he says.

He eventually settled on Vox populi. "Voice of the people. And I think that if the mask stands for anything, in the current context, that is what it stands for. This is the people. That mysterious entity that is evoked so often – this is the people."
--

full-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/no ... sk-protest

[Harvey]

History is a thing that happens in waves. Generally it is best to go with these waves, not try to make them turn back

History is also replete with Canute figures, but we have to hope that the 1 percent in their gated communities will come down from behind their fences and share in the love. We don't even want what they have from my point of view. We don't seem to value money the same way they do. In fact, the less we value it, and the more we value each others skills, each others stories, and just, well, each other, the less relevant they become.

The only reason the accountant can earn so much more money than the baker or the lathe turner is because he has a concrete ability to benefit from an abstract value system. But if we valued money less, the baker has no difficulty counting his own loaves of bread once he's not worrying about money so much, and the accountant has to be more reasonable in his demands if he still wants to count stuff for us.

The Banksters too. Once we stop valuing what they can do for us, they may have a very hard time discovering their true worth, so it might be in their interests to help us to value them more, by being a little more human and using their skills to build, to create, and to share, rather than to strip, to ravish and to destroy.

If they bring down their own house of cards through greed, well then, we really won't need them anymore, along with all the old imperial stories. Frank miller be warned.

[Harvey]

To echo Moore once again but from a different direction, some interesting words from Edmund Burke in Reflections On The Revolution In France

The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I believe, for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the two last years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate."

As I've said, I believe no revolution brings anything better than that it sought to remove, the clue is in the name, it merely brings us full circle, instead of balancing the books.

[Twyla LaSarc]

I didn't last long with Sin City.

I tried,at first, to be open to frame it mentally in the place I view Burroughs, and then the position from which I enjoy Raymond Chandler, but Sin City was ultimately truly too dark, ugly, and hating of all humanity for me to watch for long.

And the black and white rotoscope animation gave me a blazing headache. CGI, etc will do that to me. Suffice to say, I made it about 20 minutes.

The fact that my then-roommate loved it and watched it multiple times (and wouldn't fucking shut up about it's 'greatness') probably reveals some of the underlying psychological differences that make him not only an ex-roommate, but also ex-friend.

[2012 Countdown]

Alan Moore Responds To Frank Miller’s Occupy Wall Street Remarks – When Titans Clash
December 3, 2011
By jimsterna
--
So recently when Miller gave his view on the Occupy Wall Street movement on his blog, I wondered if the ever opinionated Moore would give his thoughts about the protest movement or remark on Miller’s statement. On Honest Publishing.com he does both:

“Well, Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past twenty years. I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny, 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time. Since I don’t have anything to do with the comics industry, I don’t have anything to do with the people in it. I heard about the latest outpourings regarding the Occupy movement. It’s about what I’d expect from him. It’s always seemed to me that the majority of the comics field, if you had to place them politically, you’d have to say centre-right. That would be as far towards the liberal end of the spectrum as they would go. I’ve never been in any way, I don’t even know if I’m centre-left. I’ve been outspoken about that since the beginning of my career. So yes I think it would be fair to say that me and Frank Miller have diametrically opposing views upon all sorts of things, but certainly upon the Occupy movement.

“As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.”

http://comics-x-aminer.com/2011/12/03/a ... ans-clash/

====

Alan Moore Reacts To Frank Miller – “We Have Diametrically Opposing Views”
Submitted by Rich Johnston on December 2, 2011 – 6:03 pm

“Well, Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past twenty years. I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny, 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time. Since I don’t have anything to do with the comics industry, I don’t have anything to do with the people in it. I heard about the latest outpourings regarding the Occupy movement. It’s about what I’d expect from him. It’s always seemed to me that the majority of the comics field, if you had to place them politically, you’d have to say centre-right. That would be as far towards the liberal end of the spectrum as they would go. I’ve never been in any way, I don’t even know if I’m centre-left. I’ve been outspoken about that since the beginning of my career. So yes I think it would be fair to say that me and Frank Miller have diametrically opposing views upon all sorts of things, but certainly upon the Occupy movement.

“As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.”

Of course Alan has his own ideas on what exactly does need to change in our political system…

“Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century.

“We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.”

More here
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/12/02/ ... nk-miller/

oh, and