Unfortunate Implications/Film: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Times where movies portray things in an [[Unfortunate Implications|unfortunate way]].

* The climax of ''[[Scrooged]]'' teaches us that it's perfectly okay to threaten innocent people with a shotgun, as long as you're spreading Christmas cheer!

** Or if they're pompous jerks trying to steal your job.

** Plus their age difference--Edward is a hundred-year-old vampire, while Bella is a teenage girl.

*** A hundred-year-old vampire with the physical and emotional maturity of a seventeen-year-old.

** Depending on the telling, moreso than others. Given that the original story was encouraging arranged marriages, the implications in ''that'' probably were intentional.

** In the original telling the Beast was very polite and courteous as he tried to make up for his hideous appearance.

{{quote| '''Orderly:''' You feeling okay, Mr. Suby?<br />

'''Suby:''' Ha! What do you care? You know how many of your kind I killed in Korea?<br />

* ''[[Film/Rules Of Engagement|Rules Of Engagement]]'': Someone guns down a crowd of protesters in Yemen... and later on it's revealed that it was okay, because the crowd ''was all armed and attacking''. Even a ''four year old girl'' is shown to be armed. Did we mention that when they show the crowd, they try to make all the Arab people as alien and as evil as possible? This may be an [[Unreliable Narrator]] at work, but it's all rather vague. As Mark Freeman said:

{{quote| "The message of Rules of Engagement is the necessity to kill all those who actively oppose the United States and that the murder of women and children is acceptable in such cases."}}

** Rules of Engagement doesn't have [[Unfortunate Implications]]- it's simply straight up racist. Shortly after a time when thousands of Iraqi civilians were being killed or crippled by American troops every week- a movie where we are shown how even a five year old Arab girl is pointing (sort of, the extra can't properly lift the prop) a desert eagle at American troops, so gunning her down is a-okay. Saying "but the crowd was armed!" would be like making a movie where every black person is a drug dealer- and saying it's not racist because "they were all dealing drugs!"

** ''Tales of the Fallen #6'' makes the attempts at comedy with these two seem much more insensitive, due to the fact that Flatline messed around with their processors, the Cybertronian equivalent of a brain. With this in mind, [[Dude, Not Funny|the film was making fun of brain-damaged black stereotypes/brain-damaged wigger stereotypes]].

* Apparently, ''[[Natural Born Killers]]'' teaches people that no matter what you do, as long as you’re doing what you love and are also famous for no reason people will obsess over you. [[Evil Feels Good|Even if what you love is gleeful slaughter]]. Because of this, it inspired troubled yet otherwise harmless crazies to kill other people, and Oliver Stone [[Laser-Guided Karma|was sued for it]].

* In [[North]] the character North stays with ridiculously stereotyped versions of several cultures (including African people ''[[Darkest Africa|living in grass huts and swinging on vines]]'') over the course of the film; the only foster family he feels comfortable with (and leaves for plot reasons instead for the sake of a joke) is nuclear, upper-middle-class, and white. Of course, this ''also'' adds an undercurrent of "you can never be happy with anyone who isn't your blood family", which pretty much spits in the faces of any adopted/foster parent viewers out there.

** Given the time period Archaeologists often were going around simply raiding temples and grave robbing, hunting for gold and sculptures and frequently destroying irreplaceable pieces of history because 'it was just some cat mummy' or the like. They aren't like that now but it's pretty spot on for the day that the standard wasn't as enlightened about the value of everything as it is now.

** [[The History Channel|A History Channel]] program about Archeology credits the Indiana Jones films for inspiring them to become archologists and explains that in its day Archeology WAS grave robbing (As mentioned above). Making this more a case of [[Values Dissonance]].

** Given that it followed the formula of following the movie styles of its time period, that could be more of [[Deliberate Values Dissonance]].

* ''[[I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry]]'', which can best be described as the most homophobic pro-gay rights anything ever. [[Adam Sandler]] took the original script and twisted it so that every gay character (except Ving's, and even then he sings 'I'm Every Woman' while taking a shower) in the movie was a flat-out [[Camp Gay]] stereotype who needed the [[Adam Sandler]]'s, um, straightness to save the day!

** That issue is also present in the [[Laurence Olivier]] version of ''Othello''. It doesn't help that Olivier likes to use lots of make-up, which also led to him wearing a huge fake nose when he played the Jewish Shylock in ''[[The Merchant of Venice]]''.

* In ''Look Who's Talking Now'', a movie where we hear the thoughts of dogs and other animals, the main family is at one point besieged by a pack of wolves. The wolves all seem to speak in stereotypically "black" voices.

** It can also be seen as that he encouraged the white prostitute to turn her life around and take over his music business. So she did, selling a black man's music.

** Or, you know, you could be annoyed at the movie's postive portrayl of prostitution and pimping.

** And then there's the overall theme, especially in the sequels, that piracy is synonymous with liberty. Liberty meaning I can rape, kill, pillage and nobody should stop me at all!

*** A lot of the people who were once considered "pirates" simply didn't agree with overly restrictive trade companies and struck out to do business on their own. Not very many of them were criminals at all.

** If the film is trying to say that relationships could be better with less of a focus on sex, why does it end with the protagonist and his love interest having a marathon sex session?

** The film portrays 40 days without sex or masturbation as a horrible ordeal. There are many people (religious and otherwise) who go years or even ''their whole lives'' without either. At that, there are people who go forty days without sex/masturbation and don't even notice!

* ''Rising Sun'', based on a novel by Michael Crichton and starring [[Sean Connery]] and Wesley Snipes, is filled with racial stereotyping that is so blatant it's quite hard to imagine how they got away with it. The film portrays the Japanese as either sticklers for archaic tradition, ruthless gangsters and murderers or a combination of the two: Japanese characters are shown with American prostitutes, brandishing guns and katanas and trying to steal away American corporations. There is also shown to be a lot of background politics, backstabbing and nepotism in Japanese business dealings. And in the end, the designated Japanese good guys have to be bailed out by two cops played by Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes.

** And mind you, this is all actually ''toned down'' from the novel, which is pretty much an [[Author Tract]] about how much the Japanese suck disguised as a murder mystery. The film even changes the identity of the killer in its desperate attempts to be less offensive!

** The casting. It started with white actors being cast as the East Asian and Inuit-inspired heroes, then the villains were cast as dark-skinned, minority actors only playing either extras [[Mighty Whitey|who couldn't do anything until the heroes intervened]], [[The Mole|a poor villager revealed to be a spy]], or just a plain foot masseuse, etc.

** Most of the prominent [[Action Girl]] characters have either been removed (Suki, Smellerbee, June) or lost their badassery (Katara). Even the agency of most female characters is gone, as Yue goes from making the decision to [[Heroic Sacrifice|sacrifice]] herself to resurrect the Moon Spirit (like in the cartoon) to basically being told to do so by Iroh.

** And anyone, including officers who are doing their duty, who gets in the way of your vengeance are acceptable targets. They'll even forgive you for it later.

** That's a bit of an oversimplification of the story as a whole. The true focus of the story is not so much the specific outcome of the case but a general study of how prejudice and various socioeconomic factors impact both the idealized and actualized form of what we consider legal justice. The film leaves itself open to some measure of interpretation - at one point, a character states outright that regardless if Carl is vindicated or not that justice would be served in some form. Considering the novel is based on the author's own experience of being witness to a child rape victim's court testimony, it can be seen as something of a personal rumination on the nature of intrinsic, moral justice (a man kills the rapist of his young daughter), which upholds internalized, human principles, versus civil justice, which upholds social law and, by extension, order. (And possibly whether the latter can exist fairly and equitably in a world where prejudice and racism exist.)

** Not helped by the fact that he did in fact prepare to relocate a group of Native Americans in "Journey's End."

* In ''[[The Lost Weekend]]'', the main character tries to hock his typewriter for booze money, but finds that every pawnshop in the city is closed for Yom Kippur. Not that every pawnshop is [[Greedy Jew|owned by the Jews]], mind you. Some are owned by the Irish, who close for Yom Kippur so that the Jews will close for St. Patrick's Day.

** [[Truth in Television]], to some degree: keep in mind that when the film was made, it wasn't so long ago that Irish and Jewish people were discriminated against for jobs. Still unfortunate, though.

** And that's actually not the only objection: they're also getting married after knowing each other for an absurdly short time.

** Early in the movie, Christina (the girl's mother) fires her white assistant for being rude to the couple and openly contemptuous of the marriage, but merely scolds the family's black housekeeper for being just as rude and contemptuous. The film treats the assistant as being borderline villainous, while the housekeeper is the [[Plucky Comic Relief]].

** There's also the fact that the only prominent non-white characters in the movie {{spoiler|are killed off or join Magneto}} within the first twenty minutes of the movie.

** And both prominent female mutants {{spoiler|end up with Magneto at the end.}} Apparently you have to be born white, male and American to be a proper X-Man.

** There have been plenty of Asian villains, but the only "good" Asian character is Jubilee, whose scenes were deleted. It's extremely egregeous because some villains were either [[Race Lift|race lifted]] to become Asian or, in the case of Psylocke, changed from a good guy to a villain.

** Also, while Soviets (for once) are portrayed as decent human beings who are being fooled by Shaw just like the Americans, it should be noticed that there's only one Communist mutant, which is Azazel. Not only he's among the villains, he looks like a devil.

{{quote| It's not that Boll didn't put competent female characters in the movie. He just didn't make Rayne one of them.}}

* [[Million Dollar Baby]] Implies that disability means that life is not worth living, or worthy to live.

** The real Ephialtes wasn't Spartan or deformed, and only wanted a reward, but [[Frank Miller]] strongly changed this aspect of the story. The physically deformed, "defective" Ephialtes now "lives down to his physical unfitness" by betraying the athletic - and correspondingly morally upstanding - heroes to the Persians. This element was added to give Ephialtes a more interesting motive than simple greed, but also seems to suggest that their systematic eugenic cleansing practice (directly inspiring similar practices by the Nazis) was fully justified, and the problem was simply that one of them got away; along with [[Beauty Equals Goodness]]. The [[Unreliable Narrator]] justification doesn't work for this one.

** Hell, the whole movie is teeming with such implications. Just for starters, there's the contemptuous description of Athenians as [[Paedo Hunt|"boy-lovers."]] That becomes hypocritical (not to mention hilarious) when you remember how prevalent homosexuality was among the Spartans themselves. ([[They Just Didn't Care|Not that Miller cares]], though, making them all heterosexual.)

* In the 2010 remake of "[[Clash of the Titans]]", almost everyone in the hero's party was a character or creature from Greek mythology. However one of the party members was a [[Fantasy Kitchen Sink|Djinn,]] [[All Myths Are True|a creature from Islamic mythology]] which appears in neither the original myth the movie is based on nor the original 1981 version of the film. During the confrontation with Medusa, the Djinn gets close to Medusa and [[Action Bomb|"uses black magic to explode his core" as a means of attacking her]], [[Suicide Attack|killing himself in the process]]. [[Fridge Horror|In short]], he was a [[Religious Stereotype|Muslim]] [[Unacceptable Targets|suicide bomber]]. Not may people I know [[Getting Crap Past the Radar|picked up on this.]]

** Keep in mind that the Djinn was a good guy blowing up an evil monster, which raises a whole new set of Unfortunate Implications.

* [[Braindead]] (aka [[Dead Alive]]) has a few very prominent racial stereotypes in its opening scenes. We have a "gypsy-like" family with outrageous accents reading tarot cards, the female lead immediately stalking the male lead thanks to reading said cards, aboriginal people who could have been in a fifties pulp fiction story, and a black man dancing off with money paid reluctantly to him by a white authority. It's [[Uncle Tomfoolery]] and exploitative of Roma stereotypes.

* In [[Tyler Perry]]'s movies, interracial marriages are usually adulterous relationships between a couple of douchebags. Another common theme is the dark-skinned character being an evil white-collar worker who probably beats his wife, and the "right" man is a light-skinned blue-collar worker who is a good Christian.

** Justified when you consider that it turns out Ben Stiller's character knew Eddie Murphy's for most of his life--therefore it wouldn't have mattered who was acting that role.

** Additionally, there are two African Americans and one Latino on the initial heist team, it's just bad editing that kept them out of the trailer.

** [[Science Marches On|Um, modern-day birds are now considered by scientists to be the last surviving dinosaurs, so they're not "totally" extinct]] Though, the unfortunate comparisons of a mass genocide still remain in the special.

* [[Sling Blade]] has some major ones about gender roles. The movie seems to be saying that women are passive and not responsible for their actions, so it is up to men to be the master of the household and decide things for them. Even a mentally challenged man is better at this than a woman. If a man is abusive to a woman, the proper course of action is not to persuade her to leave the relationship or call the police; it is to use deadly force on the abuser and have another man take his place as the head of the household. What's more, the movie seems to say that even a gay man is obligated to assume a husband's role for a woman, to live with her and protect her and her children.

** Not even close. {{spoiler|Irene is [[Stuffed Into the Fridge]] because she was a major character in the previous film who by all appearances played an important role in Holmes' life. After kicking ass and taking names throughout the first movie, she's snuffed out in the first few minutes for no other reason but to motivate Holmes through revenge, which is the very definition of the trope.}} All the men Moriarty kills? We only barely hear of them before they die. They're not characters, they're ''[[Red Shirts]]''.

* In the original A Christmas Carol, Dickens left Scrooges profession open ended, and his hatred of Christmas came from a series of past misfortunes, as a child he really rather enjoyed it. However, in A Muppets Christmas Carol they change the character ever so slightly for some Unfortunate Implications. This Scrooge is a miserly money lender ... with a Hebrew name ... who has never celebrated Christmas ... It's obviously unintentional, but considering modern audiences are probably more familiar with negative Jewish stereotypes than they are with 19th century Puritans, it seems like the writers could have done a LOT more to distance themselves. Especially as the most damning elements are the ones that they added in themselves.

** Forrest is never outright stated to be retarded, and he's more intended to be a [[Good Ol' Boy]] who doesn't entirely grasp the depth of the situations he's in. Moreover, with his help as a kind person, most of the intelligent people in the film end up being fairly happy in the end.

* The movie ''Christmas With The Kranks'' has the protagonists decide not to celebrate Christmas. The reaction this gets is pretty insane to say the least, with the neighbors harassing the Kranks endlessly to celebrate it and put up decorations like the rest of the neighborhood. They finally give in when their young adult daughter decides to come home to visit. The very fact that not celebrating Christmas is seen to be some kind of unforgivable sin is bad enough, but then the film hammers home the idea that fighting against the established conformity--no matter how much you disagree with it--will get you nowhere and you should do never do otherwise. [[Roger Ebert]] [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041123/REVIEWS/41116002/1023 noticed].

* In the Disney movie ''Ice Princess'', Gen Harwood (Hayden Panettierre) accuses "evil" figure skater Zoey ''[[Ambiguously Jewish|Bloch]]'' of having "eyes in the back of her ''horns''"; this is playing with the judeophobic myth that Jews have horns.

** Or she's just accusing her of being the devil.