I've seen a lot of people who thought that Meryl Streep's character was based on Hillary Clinton.
I took her as an amalgam of Obama (smoking), Hillary (pics with Bill), Trump (rallys)
I figured the point of the pictures with Bill and other famous celebrities was to point out that while Streep's character was headlining rallies for the common man, she was actually just another well-connected elite climber.
Yeah I guess it could have been cus Trump was friends with the Clintons for a long ass time before he was pres.
With him and Bill being all over the :epstein: flight logs
In the movie they do show Meryl Streep's character in a picture cosying up to Bill Clinton so it's fair, I didn't even expect the movie to lampshade Clinton so that was based
All presidents are the same. If you get past the individual traits, or them being a person. They are all a bunch of sickos merchants of death, servants of capital, and perverts who don't know how to sext or be horny in private.
It's well document that Preisedent's politics change when they become president. Part of becoming the defender of the establishment.
that doesn't necessarily contradict what I have said, if you are in the role of president you are pressured or encourage to think and choose certain things. Your options are pre-determined long before they get to your desk, or you sit in for a meeting. I have read Robert Gates memoir, The Operators by Michael Hastings, and Nightmare Scenario (I know three books are not the best sample size) but one of my key insights is that they predetermine a lot of the options for the president long before he even hears "the problem" and is given a solution. The political machine doesn't start with them, it's all around them and he just has the privilege of being blamed when he pulls the (wrong, in our perspective) levers, all the time. And when the president chooses wrong or goes off-script, the amount of inertia in the machine just grinds his bad decision to a halt. So he is both "the most powerful person" and the "weakest" in the administrative sense. It just takes a certain kind of psychopath to wanna be president.
I've seen people who thought the comet was a metaphor for Trump 2016.
And yet some people thought it was too blatant and not subtle enough. Liberals want to feel smart for consuming certain media and being the only ones able to decipher it
lol, awesome reference and great example! Contagion came out around the same time and it also paints a much more flattering picture of US institutional response to a deadly pandemic [everything is fully remote, people do not have to work / national guard doing essential food distribution].
people accept a vaccine like its nothing and then everything is fine again. like as hopeless as that movie felt at the start of the pandemic, it feels way more optimistic now
in credit to the movie, they did have the Jude Law character spreading misinformation to make money from his conspiracy freaks. but absolutely agree: the movie feels optimistic compared to reality, despite it being essentially a procedural horror movie. like in the movie, the conspiracy crank was investigated, arrested, and charged with fraud.
can you imagine if we went actually after wealthy assholes for that?
but the dude was spreading misinfo and wearing a hazmat suit, that's what is so funny.
Crazy how rapidly those institutions have decayed. I genuinely believe Bush would’ve done something about covid in a way none of his successors could have, would have, or had any desire to. It would’ve been the US army handing out care packages to “at risk seniors” or something insufficient that coincidentally included a huge payout to black water in the funding bill, but there was will for the state to actually do something back then. I think Iraq showed that the only power the state has left is to kill en masse so that will has been dashed and dissipated. Now we only expect idiocy at best or malevolence at worst
Bush Jr's horrible response to Katrina is the ur example of the modern US government's inaction during a crisis, so I'm gonna disagree that he would have done anything with a pandemic. The institutional capacity to do something was eroded under earlier administrations, and with each new crisis we're seeing the response fall to a new low.
I think Katrina is the opposite example. It's the example of government action failing and being insufficient coupled with the nightmares unleashed by hitting every problem with the military hammer or even worse using mercenaries instead. Bush would've acted on covid and used it to unleash the patriot act v2. Now the federal government just says "that's on y'all lol" anytime a hurricane destroys the gulf or some other disaster arises. That's why I think Bush was the last president that would've acted on covid. Not because he's a unique individual but because he burnt that bridge himself and no one after him had the legitimacy to actually act on something like that. Certainly not succeed though. The US absolutely did not have the capacity to face the challenge of covid successfully like China did. But maybe you're right, maybe the structure was already too eroded by 2000 for any action to happen.
Obama's response to the swine flu was basically "wash yo hands nasty ass" and that was really it. It's amazing we dodge that fucking Ebola outbreak and it didn't get significantly worse here, but ebola has LOWER transmissibility because it is so lethal.
I think you make a good point. I was a kid during Bush Jr so my memory/analysis could be too presentist. We won't know because it's impossible to go back in time and check though.
I've avoided all the discourse for this movie until now, because I just watched it. Is it part of the satire that Adam McKay thinks no other country would try to do anything about this world ending scenario? All China did was text the president? Is that part of the joke or is Adam McKay that far up his own ass? I'm genuinely asking.
It's implied that the US sabotages other efforts to stop the comet. The movie is focused on satirizing the US specifically.
There's one point where Russia and China send a missile or something to divert the comet, and the US blow it up because Bash wants to extract minerals from it.
It was pretty strongly implied that it was sabotage, at least from how I interpreted it.
China and Russia (and I think India) do attempt a joint mission to stop the comet after the US decides not to, and it’s heavily implied that the US sabotages their launch.
Actually they do and afair the Elon Musk parody actively lobbies for the president to fuck them over and one of the breaks in the main character's brains is when the Russian/Chinese/Indian program to stop the asteroid is shut down?
They should've gotten even more ridiculous, like Doctor Strangelove levels, and I would've liked that. Like, put "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" in the soundtrack.
Any American made political satire that isn't Dr. Strangelove just doesn't compare.
It’s a movie made by libs for libs. They get to hate on chuds and look like the heroes and say only reason everyone dies is because of the Don’t look up campaign.
It also bothers me that it’s a bunch of celebrities pretty much mocking us. The point I got out of it is, The world is burning and there’s nothing you can do about it, but be entertained by us.
I don't think that's the moral of the movie. Chuds don't even really make an appearance except when dicaprio is doing twitter slapfights. It pretty clearly names the establishment as the main culprit of the whole situation.
The President character has some Trumpy moments, like the rallies and stuff, but I don’t think she was super explicitly a representation of Trump and could’ve just been any President.
The movie doesn't make libs look like heroes, it just doesn't do a good enough job showing the opposite. But it's pretty funny if you already hate liberalism. The whole concert thing was pretty funny.
They should’ve done some Sacha Baron Cohen shit and tricked an actual lib senator or congressmen into walking out onto the stage with Grande and plug a campaign or something
So if the libs are figuring out that their precious institutions are hopelessly corrupted and people are too misinformed to address anything even if there was a mechanism to do so, does that mean they'll follow the vanguard, or are they just going to watch depressing movies like they've been watching Jon Oliver complain between jokes that aren't funny?
:vote:
Eco-nihilism in the imperial core until the supply chains run dry and material conditions for the average worker deteriorate even further. I agree with Matt’s take, the social contract of neoliberalism is that you don’t get to make any decisions at all but the treat line is endless so you can replace those political decisions with decisions about which type of Netflix slop you like
What's funny is that the main characters did all the shit libs want activists to do to make changes (networking, fundraisers, social media), and they still get fucked over. Funny what that says about how liberals actually think their democracy works (i.e it doesn't but oh well you get to die with your families- like, great, I'd like my family to live thank you).
Also realizing that all the animals die (and seeing a floating whale head in space) hit me really, really fucking hard, also that scene with the siberian shaman, too.
Fuck, can anyone recommend some bright-futured socialist movies to watch instead?
