I also want to give props here to Dirty Harry. Jason Apuzzo shares with the world the same right wing rhetoric as Harry did but he doesn't have Harry's style. Need proof? Compare Apuzzo's post on the new trailer for The Day The Earth Stood Still with a post written by Dirty Harry on the same subject. All Apuzzo can think of to say is that it's "awful" and make some snarky remark of Hollywood's penchant for global warming films. BO-RING! Harry, on the other hand, finds a way to take this movie and slip in his desire to nuke both New York and Los Angeles.
So here I am, both feeling pity for the guy and finding nice things to say about him at the same time. It almost makes me not want to once again tell the world why he's a total douchebag. Almost.
With that, let me point out his recent post on Roger Ebert's review of Triumph Of The Will. Ebert took on the difficult and thankless task that he could have easily avoided, reviewing the famous Nazi propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl. Seeing it through fresh eyes, Ebert damned what is considered to be, despite its subject matter, a monumental achievement in cinema. Ebert, seeing it through fresh eyes after many years, does not share that opinion. Harry, for some reason (I suspect it's something along the lines of "Ebert's a liberal so I must disagree with him"), decided to devalue Ebert's review by selectively quoting the review and pretending that Roger Ebert hated Triumph Of The Will because it didn't show Nazis taking a crap.
From Ebert's review:
Try to imagine another film where hundreds of thousands gathered. Where all focus was on one or a few figures on a distant stage. Where those figures were the object of adulation. The film, of course, is the rock documentary “Woodstock” (1970). But consider how Michael Wadleigh, that film’s director, approached the formal challenge of his work. He begins with the preparations for this massive concert. He shows arrivals coming by car, bus, bicycle, foot. He show the arrangements to feed them. He makes the Port-O-San Man, serving the portable toilets, into a folk hero. …
By contrast, Riefenstahl’s camera is oblivious to one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg rally, which is how it was organized. Yes, there are overhead shots of vast fields of tents, laid out with mathematical precision. But how did the thousands eat, relieve themselves, prepare their uniforms and weapons and mass up to begin their march through town? We see overhead shots of tens of thousands of Nazis in rigid formation, not a single figure missing, not a single person walking to the sidelines. How long did they have to stand before their moment in the sun? Where did they go and what did they do after marching past Hitler? In a sense, Riefenstahl has told the least interesting part of the story.
I like Ebert. Glad he’s healthy. Glad he’s back — but he’s missing the point of Riefenstahl’s infamous masterpiece. Showing jackboots dragging porta-potties to the Nazi rally wasn’t exactly the stuff of myth-making, and that was Riefenstahl’s job, to transform Hitler from The Little Corporal into the mythical god who would lead his people out of the humiliation of WWI.
Geez. Harry, even when you take that quote out of context, its meaning is obvious to everyone but you and your comments section. See if some glimmer of reason breaks through the right wing fog when you read the next paragraph in Ebert's article:
By contrast, Riefenstahl's camera is oblivious to one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg rally, which is how it was organized. Yes, there are overhead shots of vast fields of tents, laid out with mathematical precision. But how did the thousands eat, relieve themselves, prepare their uniforms and weapons and mass up to begin their march through town? We see overhead shots of tens of thousands of Nazis in rigid formation, not a single figure missing, not a single person walking to the sidelines. How long did they have to stand before their moment in the sun? Where did they go and what did they do after marching past Hitler? In a sense, Riefenstahl has told the least interesting part of the story.
Ebert does not believe that Riefenstahl had to show Germans using the Little Nazis Room. His point was that, unlike Woodstock, TOTW never rose above the level of propaganda, and rather boring propaganda at that. Michael Wadleigh could have done nothing but show Woodstock's concert footage and would probably have still had an entertaining movie. Instead, he showed us the back story, the moments before, after and lifted the film above the level of Every Other Concert Film Ever Made. Leni Riefenstahl, on the other hand, left all that out and created an interesting propaganda film but nothing more than that.
Ebert explains this very well in his article and I encourage all of you to read it. In the meantime, we can all thank Harry for missing Ebert's point and using the conclusions he drew from that to accuse Ebert of missing Leni Riefentsahl's point, thus giving us all a fine example of irony that we can all show to future generations.
*Actually, Manimal sucked which is the reason it went into the endless limbo of hiatus. I thought it sounded better if I expressed some secret love for it. If any of you reading this actually did like Manimal, please accept my apology for insulting your beloved show and also please accept my suggestion to hit yourself in the head with a hammer until you have throughly forgotten that this piece of crap ever existed.
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