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ACF#26: Blade
Let’s talk about black heroes at the movies. Wesley Snipes was one of the last action heroes–remember when American heroes could be working class and villains tech millionaires?–and he reached his peak with Blade, the best Marxist story of a generation, as Pete says. Here’s how Marxist “wake up and smell the exploitation” stories work: Remember The Matrix? Well, we have lots to say in praise of Blade and we continuously connect it to the shocks in American politics now, especially the Bernie-Hillary class conflict.
We talk a lot about David S. Goyer, the remarkable artist who wrote:
- The Blade movies,
- Batman Begins and Man of Steel, with Christopher Nolan,
- and the existentialist sci.fi-noir movie directed by Alex Proyas, Dark City.
We also talk about Guillermo del Toro’s direction of Blade II and what Pete calls “body horror.”
Of course, seeing as how Pete mentioned Roddy Piper, I’m contractually obliged to end with this:
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Published in Podcasts
I enjoy your reviews and discussion of these movies enough that I want to keep them all as part of my reference library.
However, there’s something wrong with either your production of the podcast or my receiving of it. The sound quality is pretty bad. The last one was okay for your mic, but I couldn’t make out anything the other person was saying.
I hope you can address this, because this could become one of my favorites. Very frustrating to not be able to hear.
(Huge Blade fan, can’t wait to hear your thoughts, BTW)
Thanks, Gentlemen. Much as you say some are disturbed by Dark City because they cannot articulate why it bothers them, I have always enjoyed Blade and never fully explored why I thought it was good beyond its cinematic elements. Your analysis is much appreciated.
Glad you liked it! It’s easier to bring people around to reflection on stuff they like rather than stuff they find alarming, so we took a chance on Blade, but maybe one day we’ll get around to Dark city, too!
Yeah–someone pointed out that the levels on one of the tracks were bad; I fixed that one–the Groundhog day podcast, right?
Production isn’t always easy & sometimes we make stupid mistakes like that one. If you guys point them out, here or on facebook or twitter, or wherever you see our podcasts, we can usually fix them fairly quickly.
Lemme know if you’re ok with the sound on this one!