The Rock feat. Seamus Turner-Glennon
Added 2022-11-17 18:17:59 +0000 UTCCo-host of My Rifle, My Podcast and Me Seamus Turner-Glennon joins us to discuss 'The Rock', a slam-bang action thriller that transcends its patchwork of familiar tropes by way of three pitch-perfect lead performances and the singularly brazen stylistic flourishes of its helmer, Michael Bay.
We discuss the film's singular collection of great movie guys, explore the political undertones of Bay's films (and his intriguing skepticism of systems of power), and try to articulate what the "secret sauce" behind Bay's continued success might be.
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Watch Michael Bay's episode of Le Vidéo Club.
Watch Guy Maddin's film 'The Green Fog'
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Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.
Comments
...the "The Rock" and Iraq-invasion connection is clown-shoes, yes, but I think the "right way" of looking at it, is that the invasion was a done deal, and would always have happened. It's more depressing for sure, but I think it's also the truth of the matter. If it came out that the entirety of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasion was literally drawn whole-cloth from a scooby-doo episode - and officially admitted as such - it probably, genuinely, wouldn't have mattered. I think some listeners are probably too young to remember, but it was a truly psychotic time, where you ran the risk of tanking your entire political career just by raising the question of "..is this really what we should do?". So, the glass-bead thing is incredibly stupid, and embarassing, but the truly depressing wrinkle in the whole thing is how far past any kind of course-correction things were at the time. The invasion was going to happen, and no amount of public shaming about being unprofessional in your due diligence intelligence-gathering was ever going to change that. ..and it's probably not even anything unique to the US. In another universe, where Denmark is unoffically recognized as the hegemon-nation of Earth, Denmark would probably have reacted similarly; they simply would "have had to". It's sorta baked into the idea of being a hegemon, that you can't "be cool about it" when something spectacularly dramatic and embarassing happens to you, in front of everyone's eyes. So, in that sense, the calculation that Bin Laden (supposedly) made about the inevitability of an outsized retalitation, was fairly astute.
Jesper Ohlsson
2022-11-18 18:17:55 +0000 UTC
