When my first thought upon hearing that the Olympics had begun was that it’s time to rewatch Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-era Olympia, this was not a comment on Chinese oppression. I’m interested in the intersections between Nazi culture and our own, and there are many of them. The strongest fascist undertones and imagery I’ve seen in a recent movie was in 300, but if we stripped our imagination of every fantasy that Nazis tried to impose on reality, we would be culturally poorer. (Star Wars copied from Triumph of the Will, and its story, like much fantasy, is implicitly elitist.) Olympia is the greatest sports movie ever made, and its lack of overt Nazi propaganda has made some people claim that it isn’t “really” Nazi at all. Why, Riefenstahl didn’t even edit out Jesse Owens! Which goes to show how easily confused people are by bad ideas in nice clothes. The Nazism in Olympia is not in the occasional shot of Adolf Hitler, it’s in the athletic ideals themselves, in Riefenstahl’s worship of strength and discipline as something mystical and beautiful. The Nazis imposed these ideals onto real life. We don’t, we just enjoy them on TV. It’s a gradual difference, morally significant but the esthetics are the same. Which to me is a reminder that nazism and fascism aren’t dead, only hiding in our imagination, waiting for new words to escape to reality through. You may not be at risk, but what about your grandchildren?

Oh yes, once again with the corporate intrigue and the greedy soulless men in suits. The aborted 1996 series Profit is a charming entry in the psychopathic protagonist genre. It foreshadows the kind of cable series that a few years later would be praised as dark and complex, series like The Sopranos and Deadwood, but Profit is really not that complex: This is soap opera, only better written and with an inverted moral scale. It’s fun, but a lot of my enjoyment came from its historical value. They’re trying to do something unusual here, but they’re not quite there yet. 90’s TV conventions make this a “bad deed of the week”-kind of thing. Now if someone made this today .. well, they did, and it’s called Dexter. And when the BBC (always ahead) made this in 1990 they called it House of Cards. Both of them are better, but I admire the attempt, and I’m not surprised to learn that one of Profit‘s creators, David Greenwalt, went on to the Whedonverse, where he co-created Angel. (Speaking of the Whedonverse: Yes! Yes! Yes!!)

Half of my interest in Generation Kill is watching people’s reactions to it: Those who support the Iraq war, those who don’t, those who have been in the military, and those who haven’t. To get the obvious out of the way: This is a great series by the creators of The Wire, and you should watch it for that reason alone. Yes, but how accurate is it? The series portrays Marines in a partly negative and unheroic light, so the best people to point out flaws would be ex-Marines themselves. In that respect, the discussions here and here are illuminating. Scroll past the “stupid Hollywood elitists hate the military”-comments, and you’ll find comments along the line of “uh, I was actually in the Marines, and this is pretty much what we’re like”. The funny thing is that Generation Kill does not come off to me as an indictment of American Marines, at most it’s biased against the commanders. It shows regular people making mistakes, it shows civilians getting killed, but that’s what you get when you go to war, any war, even the justified ones. The crime of the Iraq war was the decision to launch it, but if you have to fight a war, the people in Generation Kill would be the right people to fight it. What the series does is present the unavoidable chaos and screwups of war, and it does it so well that I think it will set the standard for this genre for a long time.

More random movies, all of them from 1968, (why? why not?), which means they’re prefiltered by 40 years of film fans and are actually mostly interesting:

I Want Him Dead – Revenge themed spaghetti western. Crappy but fun, like most revenge flicks, (though not up to the Japanese classics).

Petulia – Some sort of sophisticated socialite sex comedy, interweaved with traumatic memories and a touch of sci-fi? Hm what? Watched: 12 minutes. IMDB reviewers say Petulia is underrated and misunderstood. Count me as a misunderstander.

Psych-Out – Haight-Ashbury exploitation, and Jack Nicholson with a ponytail. A lot of fun, but by the time it’s all over you’ll really, really hate hippies, (this may have been the purpose). IMDB reviewers say the hippie scene wasn’t like this at all. Aww.

Spider Baby – Plan 9-style intro speech and bad acting. Watched: 5 minutes, then fast forwarded through the rest. IMDB reviewers say it’s a self-parodic cult classic. Okay, but still.

The Night They Raided Minskys – Quick-witted comedy about a burlesque theatre in 1920’s New York, telling the urban legend version of how strip tease was invented, (by accident, your honor, I swear!) Works when the plot steps aside.

Danger: Diabolik – Italian crime movie where the hero is some sort of Batman supervillain who dresses like a ninja. And he’s a political radical too. Absolutely awesome. IMDB reviewers say it’s based on a comic book, which makes sense.

My favourite libertarian skeptics, Penn & Teller, are back with a sixth season of Bullshit on Showtime. In line with my finger argument, Penn & Teller make anger and personal attacks a central part of their exposes of supernatural and puritanical beliefs. The tone is mocking, and will certainly alienate those who sympathize with the victims, but that doesn’t bother me as much as it once would have. There’s a time for having a calm and rational argument on whatever common ground you have with the other side, and there’s a time for rudely demonstrating how little common ground you actually have, as when in the recent episode on internet pornography and those who’d ban it they don’t argue that it’s beneficial or harmless, but rather that there’s no proof that it’s dangerous, so let’s just go with what’s fun, (an argument they then underline with plenty of nudity). Like all libertarians Penn & Teller have their cranky ideas, (climate skepticism is a popular one), but “being right all the time” is a silly standard for pundits and documentarists – I’d rather take smart, witty and interesting. Other themes this season: new age medicine, NASA, sleep and .. uh, dolphin superpowers? What?!

I like to watch the first five minutes of randomly downloaded movies. Find ten movies I haven’t heard of, see the beginning of each, and usually one of them will be worth watching to the end. The discovery is more enjoyable for it being random, the movie becomes your own in a sense a “you have to see this!” movie never can. You also get to appreciate the movie on its own terms, not knowing any plot points in advance. I found Altered States this way, a real gem. Of course, most of these movies are shit, but even the bad ones are interesting as little glimpses into the backstreets of movie history. Today’s movie: Lawman (1971), which I did give up on after 5 minutes, (it opens with a generic Western brawl and a stranger riding into town, so I figured I could save myself some time and just imagine the rest), but then I found some positive reviews and decided to give it a second chance. Glad I did, it’s a fine western, just the way I like them. And now I have five more unknown movies to try out next. (Yes, I do buy the good ones.)

Where have all the movie heroes gone? Drawing social lessons from pop culture is a risky game, and so is pretending to know better than Hollywood execs what people will or will not pay money to see. James Bowman fails to convince me that the clean, inspiring heroes of classic Hollywood are gone, but I wouldn’t much miss them if they were. There is no such thing as a hero. There is such a thing as a heroic act, but the people who perform them are ordinary, and I would rather that everyone realize their own heroic (and villainous) potential, than believe this to be reserved a distinct kind of pious human. Nor are clean heroes particularly interesting as characters. One exception was Roj Blake in Terry Nation’s Blakes’ 7, because his heroism was contrasted with the more realistic world around him, and the ordinary selfishness and cowardice of his followers – his idealistic actions were often ineffectual or counterproductive. This is not to say that the solution is to be “dark and gritty”, a macho style for teenage boys that despite some original freshness is now a boring cliche. Show me real, flawed people doing good and bad things. Show me that regular, selfish, cowardly people like me can choose to do the right thing. Inspire me, if you like, but there’s nothing inspirational about Jesus Christ the son of God with a cowboy hat coming to town to clean out the garbage. Now Judas or Peter, there’s a character.