<\/a><\/p>\nMovie that made you realize you’re a smart adult, not a dumbass kid<\/h6>\n
James<\/strong>
\nIf I saw The Dark Knight as a kid, I would have left the theatre jealous and told my parents they should have been richer and then murdered when I was seven so I could be Batman. (And I like my parents.) Instead, I saw it at age twenty and had a much different (and probably healthier) reaction. While I enjoyed the action, the Joker, and everything else most people love about the movie, I was also looking into some of the political ideas that it explored. Days after seeing the movie, I came across some film critics who picked up on the same things that I had: that the movie can function as commentary on Bush era politics. Gotham (America) is in danger from the Joker (Iraq\/al Qaeda), a man who cannot be reasoned with, is pure evil and only wants to watch the world burn and it\u2019s up to Batman (Bush\/Cheney\/military) to stop him by any means necessary, even if that means listening to its citizens without them knowing (Patriot Act, wiretapping, censorship), ignoring international law and taking witnesses from other countries (rendition) or a painful physical interrogation (waterboarding, Abu Ghraib). The one hitch about this metaphor isn\u2019t that I don\u2019t think Christopher Nolan sees it that way. I doubt that\u2019s what he had in mind when he made this movie and if I had to gamble, I\u2019d guess he was against the Patriot Act, waterboarding and the war in Iraq but that doesn\u2019t really matter. I believe that once the movie\u2019s done, the viewer can interpret it anyway they want. What made me feel smart wasn\u2019t that I figured out Nolan\u2019s politics by seeing his movie, but that I saw something in his movie that maybe he didn\u2019t see, or I at least saw a different way to look at it. I knew there wasn\u2019t just one way to read a movie, which can be applied to anything from the most personal feelings to the geopolitical climate. Or, I can find think George W. Bush is thata rich dude in a batsuit punching people. Whether I like it or not, this is how I will consume all media for the rest of my life.<\/p>\nAlex<\/strong>
\nThis happened for me in the winter of 2007, probably. I saw Gone Baby Gone in October and thoroughly enjoyed it, but didn\u2019t get much out of it other than, \u201cDamn that was a pretty great movie.\u201d A month later, I saw No Country for Old Men, and felt pretty much the same way. In January 2008, I saw No Country again, and realized a number of thematic elements that I loved about it, things I still love today. And when I caught twenty minutes of Gone Baby Gone on television about a month ago, I realized what an incredible movie it is, filled with a wide variety of interesting themes that I never caught onto back in October 2007. I don\u2019t know what happened between October and January, but I suspect it can only be referred to as \u2018growing up.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alex and James look at some of the most notable moments they’ve witnessed in film over the years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[600,537,602,601,603],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3097"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3149,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097\/revisions\/3149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}