Bad cinema and worse excuses

Yeah: Being Blogged... isn't. It's been neglected while I spent a week writing an essay on the Holocaust and giving testimony in court.¹ With all that out of the way, though, I'm going to say a few words concerning last week's 'bad cinema' topic--but only a few, because I thought about it a lot last week and unfortunately my attention/retention span is pretty hey I feel like blueberry pancakes, look at that funny monkey.

No; actually one was plenty, thanks.

However, rather than reiterate a lot of what people said in class last Thursday about cinema in general and Kids in particular, I'm going to briefly zero in on the binary issue of controversy and censorship.

Now, I have a theory that 'controversial' films are made controversial almost entirely by people who haven't seen them. From observing the kind of folks who get involved in PublicOutcry™ pants-wetting over film, TV, books, video games and so on (and so on), I've come to believe that at least 99% of them are personally ignorant of their subject matter. They start out with some specific sociopolitical axe to grind--usually something to do with their religion/morals/right-to-never-ever-be-offended by anything being under threat--and simply seize on various forms of creative media as pretexts for inflicting their batshit obsessions on the rest of us. A generous selection of fatuous drivel posing as artistic critique, whose raison d'être is actually to discourage its readers from making up their own minds about anything, provides them with all the 'information' they feel they need.²

They then form protest groups and quite often get things banned--especially in this country, whose government has historically been just about the most repressive Western 'democracy' in terms of prohibiting films and literature even without any public pressure.

¹ These two incidents were, I assure you, totally unrelated.
² I should mention, in the interests of fairness, that many comparative reviews don't have any such agenda; in fact, some of them manage to have no apparent rationale whatsoever. Disney's Aladdin as one of the 25 most controversial movies of all time? Right...