cucurbit

Here's the thing, though: this podcast does nothing of the sort, and your politics are all kinds of crazy if you think that's what's happening here. It's left-liberal hipsters patting themselves on the back for calling other people out on their privilege or whatever. Practically every other episode is prefaced with some variation of "look, I didn't do any research coming into today's topic, I'm just going on these vague intuitions that are entirely a product of the petty-bourgeois milieu I hang around." By the way, the whole premise of your argument in this thread so far has been one huge tu quoque. If racists are all about stereotyping and hasty generalizations, how does it make any kind of sense to flip that around, as if that were an effective tactic... aside from, you know, the standpoint of smugly patting oneself on the back?

Red Tails, Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty are all horrible, execrable and straight up indefensible movies on both aesthetic and political levels (not that the two aren't mutually penetrating). Chalking up the failure of a steaming dog turd like Red Tails to institutional racism requires such tortured, muddle-headed logic I don't even know where to begin. I can't imagine the headspace you'd have to be in to think a movie whose trailer featured the bog standard hyperkinetic yet soporific visual language of contemporary action films, playstation-cutscene CGI, inane dialogue and celebration of American militarism and imperialism, all set to fucking dubstep would be even remotely close to watchable. At the risk of going on for pages and pages about all the things disgusting and moronic about Zero Dark Thirty and its left-liberal apologists who are okay with setting the Middle East ablaze so long as Democrats and "analytical people" like Obama are the ones carrying it out, I'll just say that you're pretty much lost at sea politically if you think there's anything "ambigious" about this sub-Riefenstahl CIA bootlicking. I guess for the hosts, how you cast Samuel L. Jackson is more evidently "reactionary" than the very existence of a product of the military-intelligence-entertainment complex such as Zeo Dark Thirty. For serious though, as far as movies made last year about race and politics go, Lincoln is hands down the better one even though it's got its own flaws - most notably, the occasional lapses into the stentorian and sentimental, and the typical liberal's indifference towards the role of the masses in popular politics by placing undue emphasis on the politicking and "bipartisanship". Of course, with art, there's always what the artist consciously hopes to accomplish and what s/he unconsciously expresses. In spite of their conscious attempts to make the movie a quasi-allegorical message about bipartisanship and compromise presumably as "advice" to the Obama administration, the filmmakers are sufficiently serious about their craft that their very representation of the revolutionary scope and drama of the Civil War and its protagonists refuses to be reduced to fit the their own political narrowness of vision. Misteps aside, it's actually a reasonably well-made movie, more of a rarity than ever in Hollywood these days. Here's some words more worth reading than my own ranting: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/22/defe-f22.html