"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
"Shrek 2" (2004): A radical attack on class, nation and gender oppression…Gender bureaucrat enemy of the people "Fairy Godmother" lives a life of dogmatism following the scripts in "Cinderella," "Snow White" and such books that she keeps in her library. Living off the exploited workers, and selling hocus-pocus to the people like many other unproductive sector flim-flam artists we can think of today, Fairy Godmother spreads her poisonous visions of the future everywhere and lords over even the king himself.
Seeking to appropriate the sexuality of the king's daughter for her son, Fairy Godmother does her best to spread speciesist propaganda against ogres, one of which already married the king's daughter, thus making her unavailable to the Fairy Godmother's son. The evil speciesist propaganda finds fertile grounds in the king's mind and most of the people of the kingdom.
Highly class conscious characters including Pinocchio watching television immediately see through the pigdom's entertainment media, get off the couch and rush to help their compatriots locked up while filmed for a cop show. Once out of prison, our heroes rely on a toiling baker to launch on all-out assault on the bastion of reaction, the castle taken over by Fairy Godmother's plotting.
Using the past to serve the present as Mao instructed artists, the directors of "Shrek 2" rattle off cultural references like machine-gun fire. Making Godzilla sounds and tearing down Starbucks on the way to the castle, our heroes arrive in time to do battle with the Fairy Godmother…
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"A Bug's Life" (1999): Disney and Pixar's "A Bug's Life" has as good side and a bad side. The good side is that it portrays the successful collective struggle of the apparently weak oppressed and exploited (in this case, an ant colony) against the apparently strong oppressors and exploiters (in this case, a band of grasshoppers). So it could be used as a parable about the struggle against u.$. imperialism. The bad side is that it never directly ties its oppressors (the grasshoppers) to the biggest oppressors in the real world, the imperialists.
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"Men in Black (1997)": We have no complaints about the acting or the editing, but the script is bourgeois propaganda…
Here is a species that can speak various languages instantly, fly space ships from distant galaxies, shoot advanced weapons we can only dream of and use a universe of energy contained in a marble-- and the WIB wants us to believe that the super-cockroach has not learned to synthesize tofu and that it would actually need to eat a humyn on the way back to its galaxy for food? That may fly in an imperialist country like the united $tates full of bought off bourgeois people ready to buy any excuse for capitalism and war-mongering--even without the use of memory-zapping devices—but we are sure most of the people in this world won't be taken in. All of this is not much different than the stories that the pre-galactic bourgeoisie told us about communists in order to justify capitalist profit-first, survival-rights-second ideology. The directors of "Men in Black" are just scamming us in order to justify the rulers' future rights in intergalactic patents and border control. However, we are confident the capitalist system won't be in use by other more advanced species, so thankfully, this is a work of science-fiction after all.
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