I believe "Global Test" was defined within the same sentence as it was used in the most recent presidential debate.
KERRY: No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.
But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
I don't believe this is as difficult to understand as some people pretend, for example:
BUSH: Let me -- I'm not exactly sure what you mean, "passes the global test," you take preemptive action if you pass a global test.
My attitude is you take preemptive action in order to protect the American people, that you act in order to make this country secure.
Both candidates made the same sentiment with regards to protecting America as a first priority; to do otherwise would be political suicide. However, while Kerry acknowledged the importance of justification and accountability, Bush replied by feigning ignorance, implying that Kerry was over complicating things. Bush's repetition of the "protect America first" spiel implied that Kerry had said something different.
I don't believe that the public is incapable of understanding an 80 word argument. I don't believe Kerry needed to exclude justification just to reduce his statement to 24 words so Bush and the rest of the public could understand. I do believe that claiming ignorance over what Kerry meant by "global test," both by Bush and the above poster, is a smug mockery of a poorly chosen phrase rather than a considered objection.
I'm puzzled about the overwhelmingly negative, ad hominem, response to what I thought was a competent review. Admittedly, I never saw Bless the Child, but Chuck Russell's action movies are consistently over-the-top silliness. Everything in the movie is a cliche, but they're pushed a far too hard to be taken seriously. It's pure escapism, but in a self-satirizing manner reminiscent of such other directors as Douglas Sirk and Paul Verhoeven.
Chuck Russell was smart enough to know how to handle a personality like Dwayne Johnson. He may not have gotten many lines, but they didn't go through any effort to hide his terrible acting, nor do they try to make him look like a rugged barbarian (Mathayus probably has the closest shave and best grooming of any man alive for another two millennia). Instead, they glibly borrow from the WWF for the fighting choreography. At the end, he raises his eyebrow just enough to pay homage to his alter ego. He is purposefully using Brechtian alienation; distancing the viewer from the illusion of the film so that the viewer cannot even try to take the movie seriously. I know it worked because I was not the only one giggling in the theater. It's this utter lack of emotionalism that makes me like this movie better than most Hollywood action movies that try too hard, like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. A lot of movies are silly, but not all of them know how silly they are. The irony allows for someone like me to enjoy what is otherwise a completely child-oriented spectacle. Russell suffers from some of the other mistakes of so many American directors: cutting too quickly and zooming too closely to make the fighting coherent. The fighting still turned out slightly better than I was expecting, but I thought the last fight was terrible. He also pushed the cliches of the precocious kid and the wimpy comic relief further than I can stomach. I don't expect everyone to enjoy a movie like this, but I find most Hollywood movies so awful right now that I'm much happier with something completely meaningless as long as it's fun. Of course, I like MST3K movies better in their original format.
Feel free to make fun of people like Katz for choosing to watch trashy movies, but I think The Scorpion King is an interesting film to think about. How do these crappy, emotionless movies reflect on US and it's fixation on meaningless entertainment, especially in a time like today? What do other countries think when we export these movies to them? All the posts seem to be a variation of, "It's Akkadian, you asshole," "It's rubies, fuckhead," "The rest of the world only thinks that people like you suck, not us," and "Fuck you." ???
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I don't believe this is as difficult to understand as some people pretend, for example: Both candidates made the same sentiment with regards to protecting America as a first priority; to do otherwise would be political suicide. However, while Kerry acknowledged the importance of justification and accountability, Bush replied by feigning ignorance, implying that Kerry was over complicating things. Bush's repetition of the "protect America first" spiel implied that Kerry had said something different.
I don't believe that the public is incapable of understanding an 80 word argument. I don't believe Kerry needed to exclude justification just to reduce his statement to 24 words so Bush and the rest of the public could understand. I do believe that claiming ignorance over what Kerry meant by "global test," both by Bush and the above poster, is a smug mockery of a poorly chosen phrase rather than a considered objection.
I'm puzzled about the overwhelmingly negative, ad hominem, response to what I thought was a competent review. Admittedly, I never saw Bless the Child, but Chuck Russell's action movies are consistently over-the-top silliness. Everything in the movie is a cliche, but they're pushed a far too hard to be taken seriously. It's pure escapism, but in a self-satirizing manner reminiscent of such other directors as Douglas Sirk and Paul Verhoeven.
Chuck Russell was smart enough to know how to handle a personality like Dwayne Johnson. He may not have gotten many lines, but they didn't go through any effort to hide his terrible acting, nor do they try to make him look like a rugged barbarian (Mathayus probably has the closest shave and best grooming of any man alive for another two millennia). Instead, they glibly borrow from the WWF for the fighting choreography. At the end, he raises his eyebrow just enough to pay homage to his alter ego. He is purposefully using Brechtian alienation; distancing the viewer from the illusion of the film so that the viewer cannot even try to take the movie seriously. I know it worked because I was not the only one giggling in the theater. It's this utter lack of emotionalism that makes me like this movie better than most Hollywood action movies that try too hard, like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. A lot of movies are silly, but not all of them know how silly they are. The irony allows for someone like me to enjoy what is otherwise a completely child-oriented spectacle. Russell suffers from some of the other mistakes of so many American directors: cutting too quickly and zooming too closely to make the fighting coherent. The fighting still turned out slightly better than I was expecting, but I thought the last fight was terrible. He also pushed the cliches of the precocious kid and the wimpy comic relief further than I can stomach. I don't expect everyone to enjoy a movie like this, but I find most Hollywood movies so awful right now that I'm much happier with something completely meaningless as long as it's fun. Of course, I like MST3K movies better in their original format.
Feel free to make fun of people like Katz for choosing to watch trashy movies, but I think The Scorpion King is an interesting film to think about. How do these crappy, emotionless movies reflect on US and it's fixation on meaningless entertainment, especially in a time like today? What do other countries think when we export these movies to them? All the posts seem to be a variation of, "It's Akkadian, you asshole," "It's rubies, fuckhead," "The rest of the world only thinks that people like you suck, not us," and "Fuck you." ???