Suffering the Stupid Person
I know, I know, lots of movies feature their action heroes kick-boxing and blowing away bad guys to save others, but this is just different. For one thing he does walk across broken glass causing his feet to bleed badly. In everything he does he is a sort of living sacrifice and employs great courage and tenacity to give of himself to get the job done.
Plus he uses tremendous insight, knowledge, and wisdom to make the things happen he must make happen to do that job.
Just amazingness from an action hero throughout.
But this is not the only reason the movie so thoroughly enjoyable.
It is because it is filled with phenomenally stupid people who get theirs at some point in some delightfully gratifying way.
And I'm sorry, but if you're paying attention you cannot help but know of these people all around you and how much this film's stupid people remind you of those stupid people. For the most part you can't really do anything about the stupid people you're around because you're supposed to be nice and all, and I get that.
But when you watch a movie like this, you just know every stupid person on that screen should be getting what they get.
And you cheer.
Very justifiably and quite reasonably so.
The stupid people in the film, let's just talk about them for a moment.
The first one, really, is Hans Gruber himself (played exquisitely by Alan Rickman), the main villain who seems to be very very smart. but really, when you look at him and what he does, is very very stupid. The movie does a fantastic job of pulling us into his sophisticated criminality, but he makes so many stupid mistakes throughout, capped off by (spoiler alert!) standing too close to the window before McClane shoots him with such force that he falls out of the building to his death. Before moving on you could include all of Gruber's henchmen who are simply too stupid to keep from getting blown away by McClane.
Secondly we are introduced to a boneheaded hostage who fancies himself quite the negotiator. He is smooth, debonair, and dressed to the nines, but foolishly attempts to play the part resulting in contemptible failure when Gruber just gets tired of his schtick and shoots him dead.
Next we get the law enforcement personnel, both local and federal. The local guys pretend to be all that and try negotiation as well as a pathetic attempt at a coordinated assault on the terrorists-- both fail miserably.
The feds who come in a bit later looking like the baddest-ass dudes do even worse, which again makes the movie. Watching people like this think they're hot shit but you know they aren't and divine justice is well on the way-- if a movie can carry this off well it is wonderful to behold. Needless to say they are dusted when their helicopter explodes in a stultifyingly stupid attempt at a rescue.
Then there is the television reporter whose idiotic grandstanding actually further endangers the lives of everybody. He is so obviously contemptible that, while not dying in the end still gets summarily slugged by McClane's wife.
Stupid person after stupid person after stupid person. A splendidly rapturous conga line of stupid people.
I will admit I feel I have to call them "stupid people" because Jesus warned us of calling them fools. It'd be easier to do so, certainly, but I believe He told us this because we must keep in mind we can be the worst kinds of fools too. I would get into all the theology of this but I'm just not going to now.
I am going to touch a bit on another movie, a brand new one, American Fiction -- kind of why I put up this post here today. I saw it was getting a bit of attention much because from what I can tell it goes at least some measurable way to dialing back the woke wretchedness that is rampaging through everything these days.
From what I can tell a black writer is tired of being patronized by being considered some literary genius because he is black, instead of being respected just because he is a good writer. He sees the way black people are treated in this way -- merely as objects of other people's virtue signaling about how much they are not racist, and decides to write a book making fun of all that.
It seems the book is taken seriously by people as a paean to the all the woke stuff we're all supposed to embrace in order to prove to everyone how much we can use racism to be anti-racist. In one very brief part of the trailer, after a reader up on a stage shares a section of it -- remember, this is from a book that was written expressly for making fun of the idiocy of the anti-racist tropes -- an older white woman is the only one in the audience who stands up and cheers.
Thing is, will Hollywood really disabuse itself of -- really, in a very real sense -- of being the full embodiment of that kind of a person?
I'm not so sure. I've seen some people say this film could be something of a start for Hollywood and much of the rest of the power-brokers who shape sentiments of World inhabitants to distance themselves from the truly ugly wokeism all about.
I've also seen a lot of people say it ain't happening, it has simply gone too far, it has embedded itself too deeply in the mainstream. I mean, really, loud exhibitionist self-absorption is as old as... well... as old as Cain and Abel.
For you must remember, Cain was really the very first loud exhibitionist self-absorbed individual there was. Murderously so. And if you further remember, God sent him out of His presence for that, but He knew people would look at how stupid Cain was and want to murder him for it, so to protect him God gave him a mark for easy identification and allowed him, after he wanders a bit, to build a city to administer justice from a System established for the very necessary purpose of managing the evildoing of people who would refuse to call on the name of the Lord.
So yeah. I just don't think all the elements of the Roman Catholic Ecclesiocracy, responsible for today's administration of Cain's divinely authorized duties, are going to dismiss the tremendous advantages of wokeism any time soon. It is too good for propagation, and too good for riling up everyone about how stupid it is. It works both ways -- hey, a raging culture war is precisely what the ordained mandarins of World System governance have established and continue to foment.
Hollywood, the mainstream mass news media, the university system, the federal government, the banking system, the megacorporations, and definitely the non-profit tax-exempt organizations including all the churches registered as such -- no matter how much they say they'll back away from DEI and SEL and ESG and any other woke-a-cratic thing, they won't because it compromises their ability to virtue-signal at the behest of the World Ops who insist upon it.
And if they do sometime in some way slither away from the presently marketed ones, those World Ops will invent some other imaginative ruses to keep their charges mobilized.
Oh, and yeah, the only way out of it all? In fact the only way out of your own distressing insecurities and destructive proclivities and difficult circumstances and debilitating woundedness and just plain diabolical evildoing -- that would be
The Kingdom.
You know That Guy with the nail-scarred hands is still there, just waiting for you to answer the door. He's there. For every stupid person there is, me, you, that other guy so annoyingly stupid -- He's there.
Always will be.
At least until the world melts. Might be sooner if your physical death is just around the corner...
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The first picture is a screen shot of the film Die Hard. It is a 20th Century Fox promotional image taken from Nerdist in a web story about, yes, whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The second is a screenshot from that trailer for the film American Fiction.
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