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Stupid_Young_Fellow
Reviews
Devils of War (2013)
Inglorious Turds
Take one Tarantino fanboy/film school dropout director, some WW2 re-enactors armed with airsoft replica firearms, two washed up bimbo strippers, a couple of B movie stuntmen/actors and a few of the director's geek buddies as assorted Nazis and Satanists. Add some horrible CGI backdrops, airplanes, front projection scenes and bullet hits and a cheezy misplaced spaghetti western synthesizer soundtrack, guzzle it all down and puke it up and you get Devils of War. This is not worth 75 minutes of your life. Leave it in the Redbox and go into WalMart buy a decent WW2 movie in the 5 buck bin. This makes the cheapest 70s exploitation war movie you ever watched look like cinematic gold by comparison. Ugly, stupid and cheap.
Game of Thrones (2011)
Rousing entertainment for our baser natures
I am enjoying this series immensely, but at the same time I feel a little guilty about that, as it is very, very shrewdly and deliberately calculated to be a kind of "carnival of depravity" appealing to all our baser instincts.
It's probably a combination of the work of both George Martin and the TV writers, but virtually EVERY situation and almost every character is calculatedly twisted to come up with the most unsavory or grotesque slant possible.
Just off the top of my head and in no particular order:
(SPOILERS HERE) A cunning, duplicitous courtier is also an accomplished and cruel pimp; a seemingly noble order of watchmen is made up mainly of rejects and rapists; an elderly holy man is dragged out of bed with a prostitute and revealed to be a deceitful liar; a mad queen breast-feeds her too-old-for-it and obviously mentally disturbed child while giving audiences; almost all plot exposition is delivered while characters have vigorous sex with prostitutes; A beautiful Queen and a handsome Knight are revealed to be incestuous twins and unspeakably evil monsters who cripple an adventurous little boy; an exiled Prince is a loathsome selfish jerk who wants to pimp his sister out to a savage barbarian warlord; that warlord kills an enemy by ripping his tongue out of his throat and pours molten gold over the jerk-Prince's head; an exiled knight is a slave-trader; a prodigal son comes home to his abusive family and unwittingly sexually fondles his sister; a brutal warrior had his face hideously burnt in childhood by his even more brutal brother; when the brutal brother loses a joust, he hacks off his horse's head; a favorite knight of the ladies is revealed to be the gay lover of a king; a clever, disenfranchised younger son of a ruler is also a whore-monger, an alcoholic AND a dwarf for good measure; a beloved ruler is executed abruptly; a young king turns out to be a Caligula-style psychopath; a gentle retarded man is shown hopping around nude with a giant dangling sex organ; a ruler of a wilderness castle rapes and impregnates his daughters, granddaughters AND great granddaughters and leaves his male offspring in the snow for monsters to take; every other throne room seen looks more like a dungeon than a place used for running a kingdom... It's SO over-the-top grotesque it's almost laughable. I could go on and on with these types of examples, too. There are dozens of little shocking moments like these in every episode. About the only gross medieval cliché they don't pile on is The Black Death.
The show is fancy, expensively made exploitation for a mass audience that outdoes in shock value even the kind that in the more refined and restrained past was presented only in cheap lurid grindhouse and drive-in flicks. It's exploitation, but it not so much exploiting any particular person or group, as it is exploiting our natural human appetites for the bizarre, the disturbing, the tragic and the twisted. It's the same set of primal impulses that made the Roman arena such a blockbuster. It's the same instincts that make us slow down and rubberneck for blood and bodies when we pass a traffic accident.
People look at this kind of ultra-violent, depraved stuff and assume it is very historically accurate and realistic to "the way it was" in our own medieval times, but to tell the truth, it's greatly exaggerated. It's taken in the same way that people claimed the "mud and rags" graphic approach to the Italian spaghetti westerns of the 60s was realistic, even though that genre was just as far fetched in its own opposing way as the ultra-clean cut westerns of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. It would be like people in the far future thinking that Rambo movies and porno flicks were accurate representations of life in the late 20th and early 21st century, because "civilization wasn't as advanced back then".
Game Of Thrones is pretty much the famous gory "Black Knight scene" from Monty Python & The Holy Grail, only running for dozens of hours, & played not for laughs, but in dead seriousness. It tries SO hard to constantly outdo its own horrors and titillation and exuberantly and gleefully wallows in negative images and emotions.
Don't get me wrong, I am really entranced by the show. Being human, I am not immune to vicariously enjoying strife, sex, violence and grotesqueness, but I can't help feel a little sad that the envelope has been pushed yet further and to nervously wonder what even greater vileness will come to our screens in the future.
This is very low, crude and base entertainment, cynically made by jaded imaginations to cash in on our inner savages. It's not at all uplifting, enlightening or inspiring. But it certainly is entertaining. If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will LOVE.
I would definitely not allow anyone younger than 18 to watch this. I don't feel this way about too many mass market movies or TV shows, but I definitely think this series could be harmful to a child or young teen's psyche.