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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   42063 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Look, as an Irish person, it's very funny to have Alison Doody (Irish actress) playing the evil Englishwoman, and I'm sure she got a kick out of it for the exact same reason: it's the Brits versus the rest of us.

Is the nationalistic Indian movie being even-handed to the former colonial masters? No, you say? Oh let me fall back on my fainting couch in shock. Yeah, no surprise there. It's not a documentary, it's a rousing action-adventure movie that's about as historically sourced as any mid-20th century movie about Davey Crockett or George Washington. The two main characters never met in real life, but why let that get in the way of a good story to get the audience going "hell, yeah!" It's in the same spirit as Mise Éire (except we didn't have tigers).

Julie Davis of "Happy Catholic" gets it: review here, podcast here.

The over-the-top aspect also applies to the depictions of the British Raj which, to be fair, we've seen matches in some other South Indian films. The Raj are usually like the Nazis in our own movies — big, bad, and making you long for their demise.

All I could think about was if a ended with a musical dance number praising Abe Lincoln, Roosevelt, Grant, every american hero with big statues of guns, it would be the most conservative movie ever made.

I thought it was fun!

I haven't seen The Patriot, but isn't the way the British are portrayed in that movie similar?

Mel Gibson has form. Braveheart is an even better example. (Obviously English are the villains in Braveheart, not British, but I don't think that distinction matters to Irish-Americans.)

I'm reminded of the Monkey Dust "Jerry Brickhammer" parody of a fictional Hollywood production of Diary of Anne Frank with all the Nazis as Englishmen and the Jews as literally Irish, but it seems to have disappeared from the Internet along with a lot of other Monkey Dust material.

Or the typical A Very Irish Film.

Reminds me of this definitive encapsulation of Finnish cinema.

It's more one particular civilian/children/wounded/prisoner killing colonel. The film does a skilled job at rousing a ton of hatred and focusing all of it on Jason Isaacs.

Is the nationalistic Indian movie being even-handed to the former colonial masters?

Yeah but anybody with a cursory understanding of Indian history knows how silly a lot of this stuff is. I've watched Lagaan and there's the mild hilarity of the Raja being held up as caring for the people and part of the proverbial furniture when he's most likely from an invasive Mughal lineage.

Probably I'm just being uptight and oversensitive, and would have appreciated the movie more if I was a kid or something. I just feel like the movie is a little conflicted in going between "hell yeah, grenades on arrows!" and "Oh my God... racism...". Am I supposed to take it seriously? I thought I wasn't, but in that case, why is a good third of the movie dedicated to showing how bad the British were? But I also take your point, I'm probably overthinking it.

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