November 25, 2004
Three Kings
As Edward Saïd, a leading Palestinian-Western scholar puts it:
The last permissible racism here [in the United States]—and by permissible, I mean it’s okay publicly in the media and elsewhere—is to be racist against Arabs. You can say the most outrageous things in the most respectable magazines and newspapers and even on the air about Arabs, things you would never dare to say about any other ethnic or racial group..
In Three Kings, viewer positions are set up to create a sense of identification (the viewer’s feeling a sense of “self”— I’m briefly in that person’s shoes) or to see characters or situations as safely “other.”
...the film presents the protagonists as coming to a realization that the United States has failed to save Iraq and destroy Hussein’s regime. According to the film, the United States is mistaken not because it intervened in the Middle East but rather because it did not follow through in its mission to save the good Arabs and crush the bad Arabs, a mission perpetuating neocolonial ideals.
The heroes of Three Kings, in terms of the film’s logic, right the wrongs of the United States by saving a small group of Iraqi civilians, thus reproducing “the [neo]colonialist structure of the heroes’ relation to the native… [to] sort out the problems of people who cannot sort things out for themselves”
all of this review via jumpcut
other reviews can be found @ MRQE
~A dark humorous movie celebrating the 'white man's burden'. The feminists made us laughable and the free market redundant but there's places all over the world where our fathers' values rule. Dude.
Posted by Cieciel at November 25, 2004 03:12 AM