I didn't really like Donnie Dark. It was to slow paced for me. Very odd movie. The smurfs reminded me of the name Gargamel. Here's a fun fact.
According to French sociologist Antoine Buéno, Gargamel is suggestive of a stereotype of a Jew,[5] having a big nose, magic powers, love of gold, and keeping a Mezuzah by the door of his hut (clearly identifiyable in several panels of the comic).
In addition, Gargamel's cat Azrael’s name in Hebrew actually means “God is my helper” (in Israel he is called “Hathattul” which is composed of the Hebrew words `Hat` - which is fear in Hebrew, and `hatul` - cat; literally meaning "fearsome cat"). In both Jewish and Muslim tradition, Azrael is the name of the angel of death.
check out Donnie Darko the directors cut. It will all make sense!
meanwhile, per Watchmen I could probably write an entire dissertation on the movie 'Watchmen' and its intellectual content, but I like to keep things relatively short here. So I want to make this a multiple part series, not in successive order, but I’ll periodically revisit the subject to go over some ideas represented by the characters of the universe. The first in this series is going to focus on The Comedian.
He’s a fairly fucked up character. It’s odd because he’s supposed to be a hero, since he fights on the side of the Watchmen who generally fight for justice in a perpetually unjust world. He hurts civilians, he blew away some Vietnamese chick he impregnated (while she was pregnant with his child), and he tried to rape the original Silk Spectre (another member of the Watchmen). Why the hell is he considered a hero?
His whole purpose is to portray the irony of imperfect justice in an imperfect world. He’s a gritty, nasty, and unsavory person who is tasked with protecting people from injustice, even if that means protecting the people from themselves. As he’s firing canisters of tear gas at rioters who are revolting against the authority granted to the Watchmen, the Night Owl, almost pleading for him to stop, asks “what happened to the American dream?”
“It came true. You’re looking at it,” he responds.
The unintended consequence of liberty is that eventually society becomes so free that even the slightest infringement on liberty is seen as an aggregious affront to freedom. Machiavelli knew that the only way one could avoid civil unrest entirely was to repress the people. The American Dream, the idea that democracy and a sovereign people is realized in a society, means that unrest will eventually foment, even for the stupidest reasons. The freer we are to allow human nature to surface, the uglier it manifests.
“The Comedian saw the true face of human nature and chose to be a parody of it,” opined Rorschach. The Comedian knew that human nature was an ugly thing, capable of perpetrating horrifying evil. And to deal with that, perhaps to prove a point, he personified that and lived that irony. We often glorify those who fight for justice, sometimes not realizing that they might be just as awful as the people they’re putting away, and that’s the joke.
We have some who say that although people ought to be free, ultimately they’re too stupid to make the right decisions, so government needs to just make the decisions for them; who cares if they don’t like it? Who cares if they don’t agree with it? They should be made to agree, and if they don’t then they must be stupid.
We have some people who swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, and then they go off an waterboard people in secret prisons, torture inmates in Abu Ghraib, or shoot civilians in cold blood without provocation.
The Comedian came to the conclusion that the world is hopeless. How can there be hope when even the heroes are villains, when the saints are sinners? That's a conclusion that I came to myself not too long ago. For a long time I agonized over the state of humanity. It's a pill that not many are willing to swallow, and even fewer are willing to do so with a smile.
It’s all a joke, and what can you do but laugh? I said that to a friend of mine—a good bleeding heart liberal—in a discussion we were having about politics. I was trying to convey the idea that it’s all one big ass joke, and she frustratingly scoffed at me, “well it’s not a joke because it affects people’s lives!”