Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Shocking News - People Like Good Characters" video.

  1. I felt like the "sides" taken by Captain America and Iron Man in "Civil War" didn't make much sense. There was the duty-bound Captain making the case for liberty and the anti-authoritarian Iron Man making the case for bending the knee. It just didn't fit their characters, in my opinion. They barely managed to pull it off - I guess - with their character arcs, but it seemed pretty forced and artificial, because they really wanted "Civil War" to be a thing.
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  2. Hollywood USED to have rules - I think it was even federal law - against bad guys winning in movies. I don't recall the particulars, but you couldn't show a crook prospering by their crimes, etc. "Hollywood endings" was an actual thing. Then you started seeing them chip away at that with anti-heroes. Clint Eastwood wasn't the first to come along with an ambiguous kind of hero in Westerns. But he stands out among the first few who had anti-heroes in it, with movies like "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," and "High Plains Drifter," etc. Part of Eastwood's appeal in those Westerns was he was "edgy." And against the cultural backdrop of the time, it WAS edgy. But when it becomes FASHION, it's no longer edgy (or brave). It's a new form of brain-dead conformity in its own right. Nowadays, you have mediocre (and just plain bad) writers, who think that "subverting expectations" is "art." First of all, it's insipid, copy-cat writing. Then throw in the heavy-handed political messaging, and it's as if your Sunday-School teacher got ahold of the script and injected all kinds of Christian messages in a film, only these guys' religion is left-wing identity politics. That's the weird thing about movies and other art forms. There's ALWAYS been "a message" built into almost all of them. It's ALWAYS been an establishment-elite sort of message, and was no better or worse, when establishment elites were over-the-top nationalistic, my-country-right-or-wrong types or over-the-top anti-capitalist globalists. The only difference is the intersectionality just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. You might argue that Christian-nationalist messaging doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but in its day, when 80%-plus of the country WAS Christian and WAS very nationalistic, there wasn't much push-back against it.
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