Reprehensible Movies

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Really, everything's fine up until the point that God enters the story. I loved Desperation up until that point. I loved The Stand up until that point. Then the preaching starts and my eye begins twitching. The really annoying part is that most of the stories, the characters admit that this God is all powerful, yet letting all this crap happen anyways, and they they still jump to the conclusion that it must be a good god while giving no fucking reasons for it.

I'm not sure that that is the theme of Desperation. God is one of the villains in that book. He's absolutely sadistic to the characters, but they have to come crawling to him because the alternative is worse. They state flat out, over and over, that God is cruel and God is an asshole. Sure, they sometimes say God is love, too, but the depiction I got was more of an abused child rationalizing his father's behavior.

The depiction was very much in line with the book of Job, but I don't think it was done that way to paint God in a positive light.

[Oskuro]

But how the hell does beauty and the beast spread the elitism?<snip>

I think it has something to do with the castle's servants being punished for their master's offence and not only having no indication that this shouldn't be, but having the servants act as if they can't possibly imagine doing anything other than waiting on their noble-blooded master for their entire lives.

I'm not the one who initially raised this objection, though, so maybe Oskuro meant something else.

Exactly what I meant, thanks. I do get that the villian is a subversion of the Prince Charming archetype, and Beauty and the Beast in general is a good movie, but the situation with the servants kind of got to me.

[Darth Wong]

But how the hell does beauty and the beast spread the elitism?<snip>

I think it has something to do with the castle's servants being punished for their master's offence and not only having no indication that this shouldn't be, but having the servants act as if they can't possibly imagine doing anything other than waiting on their noble-blooded master for their entire lives.

I'm not the one who initially raised this objection, though, so maybe Oskuro meant something else.

Exactly what I meant, thanks. I do get that the villian is a subversion of the Prince Charming archetype, and Beauty and the Beast in general is a good movie, but the situation with the servants kind of got to me.

That criticism applies mostly if one assumes that the wandering witch is portrayed as a noble character in the film. Considering how cruelly vindictive her punishment was, I see no reason to adopt that conclusion.

[Setzer]

Fairytale movies that knowingly or unknowingly promote gender or social roles to children.

The most egregious example that comes to mind is 'The Little Mermaid', where a Princess that has everything she could ever want, with infinite possibilites, just has to throw everything away, including the relationship with her family and loved ones, to become a man's wife. Even when I liked the movie, I hated how utterly stupid and submissive Ariel is, and most fairytale movies do this in one fashion or the other, although recent movies like 'Princess and the Frog' do try to fix that.

I agree that the original fairy tale may have been like that, but Ariel from the movie was a major admirer of human society. That was kinda the point of the "Part of Your World" sequence. It isn't that she's running away to marry a man she just met, she's joining a culture she loves already. It's not really shown well enough, but it's not entirely how the Nostalgia Chick put it.

[Dragon Angel]

Mehh, at least The Prince of Egypt had this really awesome song. Even if it played to the wanton cruelty of God against the Egyptians, all because of their Almighty Leader...

For my addition into the "reprehensible movies" list, I nominate The Candy Snatchers. It is, basically, a female exploitation film that involves a kidnapped Catholic school girl, three rag-tag ransom criminals, and an autistic boy as the only witness to the crime...who is also, ultimately, the school girl's only hope. Anyone that is a fan of abuse / teen bondage / rape fantasies would probably enjoy this movie.
Spoiler

Her fate is also left very open in the end, possibly grim, when she is left buried alive in the middle of nowhere...and all of her captors are dead.

[Oskuro]

That criticism applies mostly if one assumes that the wandering witch is portrayed as a noble character in the film. Considering how cruelly vindictive her punishment was, I see no reason to adopt that conclusion.

What really got to me wasn't exactly that the servants got caught in the curse, at first I took the servants' attempts to help the Beast break the curse as a logical attempt to free themselves, but as the movie goes on you see that they actually care for their master despite what he's brought upon them, and faithfully serve and help him without truly confronting him. That rubbed me the wrong way, but I agree it's a minor complain to the whole movie.


As for Ariel being submissive, once she gets her legs and meets the Prince, she is pretty much pulled around like a pet, with her doing absolutely nothing to achieve her goals save smiling. It is her animal sidekicks who almost get her to kiss the Prince and do all the work for her.
And don't tell me her love of human culture justifies her actions. She did have interest in human culture, and had dreams of exploring their world, but she was happy collecting items from her friend seagull and poking around sunken ships, it was when she met THE MAN that she chose to do the stupidest move possible and went to see the witch. And please remember that she was a fully-fledged princess, not some downtrodden abused stepdaughter desperate to escape a life of servitude and sorrow.
Really, Ursula's "Poor unfortunate souls" song is so delightfully ironic it's awesome.

Now, bear in mind that it is easy to question a movie you dislike, but I actually liked The Little Mermaid, and even consider it one of my favourite Disney movies, yet find it very reprehensible.

And did I touch on Pocahontas' whitewashing of the Native/Colonist conflict? No, since I haven't seen that movie, just a few reviews, including Nostalgia Chick's first review. I do share some of her opinions, although I think her qualms with The Little Mermaid movie are more about the effect it had on how animated movies were created afterwards, that is, cinematographical complaints, rather than moral.

[Lusankya]

As for Ariel being submissive, once she gets her legs and meets the Prince, she is pretty much pulled around like a pet, with her doing absolutely nothing to achieve her goals save smiling. It is her animal sidekicks who almost get her to kiss the Prince and do all the work for her.

Yeah. She should have just told the prince what was going on.

To be honest, it's a bit harsh to judge her based on her actions after she got her legs. I mean, if I was thrown into a culture that I wasn't really familiar with, and was unable to communicate due to my voice being taken away/not being able to speak the language, I'd probably let myself get pulled around a bit for the first three days too.

And don't tell me her love of human culture justifies her actions. She did have interest in human culture, and had dreams of exploring their world, but she was happy collecting items from her friend seagull and poking around sunken ships, it was when she met THE MAN that she chose to do the stupidest move possible and went to see the witch. And please remember that she was a fully-fledged princess, not some downtrodden abused stepdaughter desperate to escape a life of servitude and sorrow.
Really, Ursula's "Poor unfortunate souls" song is so delightfully ironic it's awesome.

You mean, when she met THE MAN and then had her father completely destroy all of her stuff with lightning and scariness.

What really got to me wasn't exactly that the servants got caught in the curse, at first I took the servants' attempts to help the Beast break the curse as a logical attempt to free themselves, but as the movie goes on you see that they actually care for their master despite what he's brought upon them, and faithfully serve and help him without truly confronting him. That rubbed me the wrong way, but I agree it's a minor complain to the whole movie.

I thought that for a while, but then it occurred to me that a) the curse had been in place for about 10 years and b) the curse would become permanent when the Beast reached his 21st year. This means that the Beast was cursed because he was a bratty eleven year old. Now, while it's not great that he was a bratty kid, I can see people getting over that fact, especially if they managed to grow up in the intervening years.

This does leave a different bad taste in one's mouth regarding the enchantress cursing an 11 year old and his entire household just because the eleven year old was a brat, but it is par for the course for fairytale enchantresses.

[Darth Yan]

Where did it say it would become permanant on his 21st year? He looked like a grown man in the flashback.

[Oskuro]

Lus, I'm not questioning the validity of the character's reactions inside the story, after all, Ariel is a 16 year old girl with a crush, and her stupidity is par for the course for teenagers. And your point about the servants getting over it because he was a bratty child that was punished in a disproportionate manner is actually good.
My concern is with the authors deciding to set the characters in situations that send out a questionable message.

Now, to be fair, most fairytales are adaptations whose originals were dripping with moral lessons that don't mesh with today's sensibilities, and even if the authors of the new material try to fix it, some of it might slip by, so my objection is mainly aimed at the messages this stories tend to convey, rather than at Disney itself.



Oh, another movie I had some trouble with was Shrek, of all things. It bothered me that, after all the heavy handed message about how people should not be judged by their appearance, Fiona is turned into an Ogre, and when I say "why couldn't the Ogre keep the princess?", I get weirded out reactions about how they shouldn't be together if they are not of the same kind... Wich to me is not too far away from "they should be of the same race". And they pair up a Donkey with a DRAGONESS of all things, it's not like the Ogre/Human relationship would've been so traumatic.

Where did it say it would become permanant on his 21st year? He looked like a grown man in the flashback.

The dying rose is kind of the timer for the curse, I think the details are explained in the intro, with the stained glass windows (Unless I'm thinking of another movie).

[Tiriol]

The Beauty and the Beast enchantress is definetely a cruel, vindictive little piece of dog turd instead of a noble, character-building fairy princess many mistake her to be (mostly because she just so happened to masquerade as a feeble old woman and then reveal herself to be a beautiful, near-ethereal beauty queen). Disney had already given us one evil sorceress/enchantress who was basically beautiful but still evil as all hell (Maleficent - whose movie, Sleeping Beauty, has a far weaker Princess character than Ariel ever was; so much even that I consider the fairy god-mothers to be the central characters of the film).

Personally I've always been a little uneasy when around 300, mostly because it feels so racist and filled with neurotic masculinity. Of course the entire movie is told by a storyteller who basically did everything in his power to depict Spartans as freedom-loving fighters against tyranny and Persians as murderous, barbaric near-animal perverts. It is indeed just propaganda from his mouth, but at a casual glance it isn't so obvious. This doesn't make the movie reprehensible per se, but it does move it towards that corner.

[Darth Yan]

I think that the Shrek ogre relationship was played for laughs. You know, they are subverting the whole "princess becomes beautiful and they all live happily ever after." Besides, it was also showing that Fiona shouldn't be ashamed about what she was. An ogre. I think that is what they were trying to say. Fiona should be able to accept who she was, after her nuerotic behavior about it through the whole movie.

As for the enchantress. Even if she was vindictive, she still changed the Beast for the better.

[Flagg]

As for movies I find problematic from a moral perspective, I have to nominate The Lion King. It's got great music and animation, but I don't like the blatant anti-hyena bias.

Surely you can find more compelling victims of negative stereotyping in movies than hyenas.

Hyenas are actually really vilified in the minds of alot of people because of how they are portrayed as nasty evil scavengers as opposed to the majestic noble lions. In reality it's like 180 degrees opposite. Plus in that movie IIRC all the Hyenas had "black" accents.

[Jim Raynor]

300 being a biased story from an unreliable narrator sounds like an excuse made up to address criticisms after the fact. The Spartans were the heroes of the movie. If there was any indication that they were wrong, it was only subtext picked up by the audience because they didn't agree with things like the baby killing. Which was even "justified" later in the movie because the mutant hunchback proved himself to be weak and unreliable.

I never read the original comic, but I've heard that the Persians being Orcs and shit wasn't in it. Is that true? If so, then it's even worse that Zach Snyder decided to portray them like that in the movie.

[The Dark]

Plus in that movie IIRC all the Hyenas had "black" accents.

The two hyenas with speaking lines were voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin, both of whom have a distinctive manner of speaking in normal life. It was casting, not writing, that caused the accents.

[The Spartan]

Which was even "justified" later in the movie because the mutant hunchback proved himself to be weak and unreliable.

Even worse, he wanted to help the Spartans in spite of having been cast out. Wanted to help, but he was cast aside, again, for a reason that could have been valid on some level had it not been promptly discarded so they could break formation to pirouette in slow motion.

If anything that just proved the Spartans were even more colossal pricks than we've given them credit for.

[Shroom Man 777]

To be fair, Leonidas did say that he was unfit for combat and could better work in fetching water or other support roles because - seriously - that guy was going to be shit in phalanx fighting.

[The Spartan]

Well, that's the thing. In phalanx fighting he would be, but, at least in the movie, they all but immediately broke the phalanx to do the aforementioned slow motion pirouettes.

I really think the character would have been better as the frightened, local farmer that he likely was in reality who had to choose between helping the Persians and having his entire family killed. It would have served the Heroic Freedom Fighter narrative better as well. "See what the Persians do? They would have murdered his children! Think of what they'll do to the rest of Greece!"

[Jim Raynor]

The hunchback not fitting into the phalanx formation was a half-assed excuse from the writer who didn't want to bother with creating plausible explanation for his betrayal, even if you ignore the stupidity of the Spartans breaking their own formation. So this guy is too short to shield the man to his left? Then put him all the way on the left. Or in the back. Or in the front, and let him die gloriously (the greatest honor a Spartan can attain, supposedly) after taking out several Persians with the strong spear thrusting skills that he demonstrated. Or let him throw shit from the hills. Or stick him with those Arcadians.

But logic was not a priority in the writing. The movie was intent on glorifying its physically perfect Spartan supermen.

[The Spartan]

Just about any of that would have been better. I really think they botched that entire story because of taking the unreliable narrator thing to a ridiculous extreme.

[Steve]

Seems like a good thing I didn't watch 300....

Bleh, if they give the slavering, brutal militaristic Spartans a movie of glory, they should give other deserving figures one. Maybe one about the Pylos Campaign, where Demosthenes and the Athenians triumphed over Spartans and, shock and scandal, took Spartan prisoners.

Better yet, someone should make a film about Epaminondas, the Battle of Leuctra and the resulting breaking of Spartan hegemony over Boeotia, and the following invasion of Laconia and liberation of the Messenian helots held as slaves of the Spartan state. They can even end the movie on the somber note with Epaminondas' death at Mantinea after yet another victory over the Spartans and allies and the Roman Plutarch finding his memorial years later and reciting it:

"By my plans was Sparta shorn of her glory
And Holy Messenia at last received back her children
By the arms of Thebes was Megalopolis fortified
And all of Greece became independent and free."

And that ends the brief off-topic rant. Hrm.... reprehensible movies.... Dammit, I thought I had an example at the tip of my tongue, not yet mentioned by anyone else, but I forgot.

[Vastatosaurus Rex]

Plus in that movie IIRC all the Hyenas had "black" accents.

Actually, of the three hyenas who had voice actors, only one was voiced by a black person. The second one was voiced by a Hispanic and the third by a white guy.

That said, The Lion King does have racist undertones, even if they're not directed at any particular human ethnicity. The movie implies that it's a good thing that the hyenas were forced by Mufasa to live in a barren, geothermically unstable elephant graveyard and that letting them into the Pridelands, where there was more food for them, is bound to cause a drought. In other words, keeping an entire race in a ghetto is morally acceptable, letting them mingle with your own race is bad.

I never read the original comic, but I've heard that the Persians being Orcs and shit wasn't in it. Is that true? If so, then it's even worse that Zach Snyder decided to portray them like that in the movie.

IIRC, the Persians were all depicted as being black people, which I don't get. I mean, yes, since the Persian empire extended into Africa, there may have been some blacks fighting on the Persian side, but they wouldn't have been the majority.

[Tiriol]

Plus in that movie IIRC all the Hyenas had "black" accents.

Actually, of the three hyenas who had voice actors, only one was voiced by a black person. The second one was voiced by a Hispanic and the third by a white guy.

That said, The Lion King does have racist undertones, even if they're not directed at any particular human ethnicity. The movie implies that it's a good thing that the hyenas were forced by Mufasa to live in a barren, geothermically unstable elephant graveyard and that letting them into the Pridelands, where there was more food for them, is bound to cause a drought. In other words, keeping an entire race in a ghetto is morally acceptable, letting them mingle with your own race is bad.

I always got the impression that it was Scar's inability to rule wisely that caused troubles for both hyenas and lions in the long run, not hyenas per se. In fact I also had the impression that the film was criticizing Mufasa and his predecessors for being such bullies towards hyenas by showing how easily they were recruited by Scar.

However, I can see how the other impression could be born; in fact, it probably has more evidence than mine.

[Master of Ossus]

300 being a biased story from an unreliable narrator sounds like an excuse made up to address criticisms after the fact. The Spartans were the heroes of the movie. If there was any indication that they were wrong, it was only subtext picked up by the audience because they didn't agree with things like the baby killing. Which was even "justified" later in the movie because the mutant hunchback proved himself to be weak and unreliable.

No offense, but I think you have this precisely backwards. 300 precisely adopts the attitude that the Greeks themselves had about themselves, the Spartans, and the Persians. If you've read Herodotus, he pretty much depicts the Persians as the sort of effeminate, culturally barbaric and primitive but military very powerful group. Meanwhile, the Greeks are seen as democracy-loving, freedom-fighting god-men. It's not that it's an excuse: it's just that the attitudes taken are lifted directly from contemporaries rather than imposing our own moral values on the time period.

In contrast, I find movies like Kingdom of Heaven vastly more repugnant because it imposes modern moral views on characters during the Crusades. Wow. Turns out, the Crusades don't make any sense at all if all the principal characters act in accordance with modern morals. What a shocker. So rather than having complex, complete characters, they have to transform everyone into these absurd caricatures because the writer never bothered to make an effort to understand the actual motivations or politicking behind the historical events in which he bases the story.

[Setzer]

Maybe they can make a spiritual successor to 300 where 3 million Nazis valiantly give their lives to create a world free of racial prejudice.

[adam_grif]

300 being a biased story from an unreliable narrator sounds like an excuse made up to address criticisms after the fact.

I thought it's biased-and-unreliable status was obvious in that the narrative framing device was the movie was being told to Greeks by one of the Spartans. We also get other indications, like when they claim that the Persians used their "magics" on them (the gunpowder bomb things), and possibly when he said that Zeus was throwing thunderbolts at them (although this could just be him trying to be poetic).