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Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
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Garrison Dean: R.O.A.C.H.
05/09/09

In reply to Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
Annalee, Annalee, Annalee. I think you may have made a couple of good points, but sadly my friend, Tiny Dr. No, disagrees with you.

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Evil Tortie's Mom: R.O.A.C.H.
05/09/09

@Garrison Dean: R.O.A.C.H.: I'm liking Tiny Dr. No. Can I get a version of her (pretty sure that's a girl, being all in pink) with just the NO! and not the other text? I feel she'll be useful everywhere I go on the net.

(could also say "NO! You are so wrong!"

(PM me a URL, and is she going to show up in tomorrow's IAD post?)
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Garrison Dean: R.O.A.C.H.
05/09/09

@Evil Tortie's Mom: R.O.A.C.H: maybe!
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JohnnyZito
05/09/09

In reply to Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
There's a lot of fetishistic soldier as super hero lately. Probably has more to do with the protracted land wars.

The citizen super hero will make a comeback thanks to Obama's social work.
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Garrison Dean: R.O.A.C.H.
05/09/09

@JohnnyZito: The Citizen Superhero is doomed! So says The Potentate of ROACH!!!
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dry-roasted-peanuts
05/08/09

In reply to Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
Watch Where Eagles Dare (1968). Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood kill an entire castle and outlying base of Nazis, uncover 4 moles in MI6 and bust an entire spy ring while never even getting a scratch.

Superman ain't got shit on either of them.
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Garrison Dean: R.O.A.C.H.
05/09/09

@dry-roasted-peanuts: One of my favorite films of all time. Truly badass.
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Zack Stentz
05/08/09

In reply to Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
I think the closest thing to a straight up war movie you're going to see this summer is Terminator: Salvation. And what makes the Terminator war mythos so interesting is that it puts American audiences in an unfamiliar position-- rooting for the rag-tag, outgunned guerrilla fighters instead of the high-tech, armored empire with air supremacy and all the battlefield advantages. (We actually made this fairly explicit on the Sarah Connor Chronicles, borrowing tactics like the use of EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) to knock out armor from the Iraq war and loosely modelling the Resistance vs. Skynet tactics on the Hezbollah vs. Israel conflict in southern Lebanon (with one side raining down destruction from the skies and the other hunkering down in a network of concealed bunkers.)
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Bill Farrar
05/09/09

@Zack Stentz: Red Dawn and Star Wars say hi.
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Zack Stentz
05/09/09

@Bill Farrar:

Red Dawn while novel wasn't a major cultural artifact and Star Wars is actually a bad example. The Rebels there had fighter craft and by Return of the Jedi their own fleet of capital ships able to go toe to toe with the Empire. Hardly a way of putting yourself into the shoes of the Viet Cong or the Taliban.

Compare this to movies like Aliens and Starship Troopers, which get a lot of their tension and fear from high tech soldiers underestimating a technologically primitive enemy.
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lightninglouie
05/08/09

In reply to Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
I think you can get away with a lot more subversive material if the movie is seen primarily as a superhero or SF film and only tangentially as a war film. For all their vaunted "realism," most of the post-Saving Private Ryan war movies have been essentially pro-war and pro-military; Black Hawk Down, for instance, always struck me as Verhoeven's Starship Troopers minus the giant bugs. Maybe that's because modern war movies always concentrate on the combat experience at the cost of everything else, so even a bad genre movie like Wolverine is gonna have more substance.
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omgwtflolbbqbye
05/08/09

@lightninglouie: I thought Black Hawk Down can't really be consider pro-war; it mainly just sorta focused on how a group of soldier's basically went through the modern warfare equivalent of Murphy's Law... Like Bana's character says at the end of the film, When you're in a warzone, everything you believed about politics and morals gets thrown out the window. There's no higher values in play. It's just you and the guy next to you trying to get the job done and not die.
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lightninglouie
05/08/09

@omgwtflolbbqbye: Yeah, but that's the problem with most war movies. There's seldom any inquiry into why or how the characters ended up in a combat zone. The result is that wars get treated as like an act of God, as opposed to the end product of specific policies by specific powers.
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omgwtflolbbqbye
05/08/09

In reply to Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
This will come full circle once the WWII Captain America movie comes out...
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Theoutlet
05/08/09

@omgwtflolbbqbye: The thing I love about Captain America is that he's just a boy scout on super steroids. He's the perfect American Hero!
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crashedpc - Haifisch
05/08/09

In reply to Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?
Lord of War... I enjoyed that movie a LOT.

I just realized that I said something positive about a Nic Cage movie. I... I'm going to go into my corner now.
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omgwtflolbbqbye
05/08/09

@crashedpc : ゴキブリ and 蟑螂 division: Like Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation, God of War is one of those movies where his shtick actually works.
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omgwtflolbbqbye
05/08/09

@omgwtflolbbqbye: Er, "Lord of War"... Cage would be a terrible Kratos otherwise.
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crashedpc - Haifisch
05/08/09

@omgwtflolbbqbye: No no, I think Cage has enough crazy in him to pull of Kratos. Imagine Cage ripping a griffon apart with his bare hands!
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His_Steveness
05/08/09

@crashedpc : ゴキブリ and 蟑螂 division: Nic Cage is a good actor, he just insists on taking roles that don't fit him at all. He's about as well suited to be an action hero as Danny De Vito is, and yet he refuses to take a hint. If he stuck with comedy/drama, he'd be brilliant.
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Slatz_Grobnik
05/09/09

@His_Steveness: I agree, with the slight alteration that he often ends up in plain bad movies, which has given him a bad rap.
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