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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27884 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I wish we had more tony starks and bruce wayne characters out there. Billionaires are portrayed terribly in recent movies.

Knives out has some fun twists. The plot is a bit unbelievable, but that's how murder mysteries are supposed to go, it's a chain of extremely unlikely events. It's a shame the characters felt so cheap, it made the the murderer rather predictable, other choices wouldn't have been as morally/politically satisfying.

I wish we had more tony starks and bruce wayne characters out there. Billionaires are portrayed terribly in recent movies.

They're never portrayed as good for being billionaires though. For both of those characters, the wealth is largely a way to explain why they have high-tech gadgets. They're shown as good because they act morally, not because they made money.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd like to see small-to-medium size businesspeople as the heroes. Instead of a greedy land developer underhandedly swiping property from impoverished local residences, how about an overall pro-social depiction where an underutilized plot of land is recognized by a developer, he carefully negotiates with all the owners and stakeholders to acquire the rights to build there, and ends up employing many locals and assisting them with certain life problems and ultimately boosts the prosperity of the area while making himself a modest profit.

It's a Wonderful Life is my favorite Christmas movie, and one of my favorite movies, period, in part because that's almost exactly what it portrays.

I don't mind Billionaires as protagonists, and I think "extremely wealthy people can do a lot of good with their money" is a valid message, but I am cautious of the "ONLY billionaires can actually do good/save the world" motif that some films or series fall back on.

Instead of a greedy land developer underhandedly swiping property from impoverished local residences, how about an overall pro-social depiction where an underutilized plot of land is recognized by a developer, he carefully negotiates with all the owners and stakeholders to acquire the rights to build there, and ends up employing many locals and assisting them with certain life problems and ultimately boosts the prosperity of the area while making himself a modest profit.

There ain't enough suspension of disbelief in the world for that. And if there were... well, it would be like a film about a man who disentangled the Gordian knot, spending most of the film on the intricacies of rope manipulation. As Alexander might say, BORE-ING.

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