blade

my landlord's wanted me to see this movie. he thinks it's the real shit. i'm kind of amazed how normalized torture is in action movies. blade straight up tortures at least two people in this movie, and, in the movie, it's a necessary, even hilariously righteous thing. he burns one guy's entire body, and when he later refers to him as mr. crispy, it's super funny. and the guy's a vampire, so it's cool. but that's incredibly insidious.

the bedrock of legitimating torture, of improbably making it funny, is the assurance that it's happening to a truly evil person. (there are some radically terrible people who love concocting hypothetical situations to try to argue that it could be cool to torture people, but that's some next-level appalling shit)
so long as you're fighting vampires (or soviets, muslims, nazis etc.) there's no other side to the argument because it's certain they'd do the same to you, and that their moral-vacuum-ass has no right to rights. this kind of thinking leeches into the real world, however, and before long you've got enhanced interrogation and everything is terrible.

blade hasn't aged so well because CGI blood-glooping has really come a long way since 1998. the opening scene with the club in the meat club is a fantastic idea, and it's just like slaktuset (sp?) in stockholm, where everything smells a little like sausage, so that touch made me really happy. the idea of vampires as nighttime clubbing leches is great, though there is one truly bizarre scene in a bar with lots of asian businessmen and asian women singing like little school girls that i guess just tried to hammer that point home. it's great that it stars a black people; there's lots of sci-fi racial tensions; talk of "half bloods;" the villain calls blade an uncle tom because he says he's not a vampire. all the interracial relationships get violently axed. meh