{"id":712,"date":"2007-06-24T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-24T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp\/2007\/06\/invisible_allegories\/"},"modified":"2007-06-24T04:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-24T08:00:00","slug":"invisible_allegories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/2007\/06\/invisible_allegories\/","title":{"rendered":"Invisible Allegories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Film\/Pix\/gallery\/2006\/06\/20\/cutler3.jpg\" align=\"left\" alt=\"Tom Hollander\"><B>East India Trading Company Shrub<\/B><BR>Two recent movies are blatantly allegorical, but most reviewers blinked. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rottentomatoes.com\/m\/pirates_of_the_caribbean_3\/\" target=\"_blank\">PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN<\/a> opens by hanging a ten-year-old boy in a cruel Gitmo scenario that poses a radical question: with brutes like Cheney in charge, wouldn&#8217;t you want to sing the other guy&#8217;s song? Based on Disney&#8217;s global marketing strategy, how many Americans sense the director is playing to the gallery? The movie doesn&#8217;t follow these metaphors through, but the Cheney figure does get skull-rape by Bill Nighy, and Kiera Knightley makes a Hillary Clinton presidency plausible (minus the sex appeal). And when the imperialist stooge of a captain, Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), is struck dumb as his crew begs him to change strategies while sinking, it&#8217;s like a red light flashing &#8220;Iraq Iraq Iraq.&#8221;<br \/>\nSimilarly, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rottentomatoes.com\/m\/evan_almighty\/\" target=\"_blank\">EVAN ALMIGHTY<\/a> struck me as a thinly veiled fantasy about holding Washington accountable for hurricane Katrina, complete with aerial shots of houses swept under by flood. The plot&#8217;s culprit wasn&#8217;t so much real estate greed as it was CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT. The picture is a dud, but it&#8217;s weird how so much flies under the radar these days. When I was a kid, George Allen made a more plausible God; it&#8217;s the kind of movie that starts you meme-ing to yourself: who&#8217;s more exposed than John Goodman and Morgan Freeman? Fresher talent might have rescued at least some of the tired dialogue.<br \/>\nSomebody let Wanda Sykes host the Oscars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>East India Trading Company ShrubTwo recent movies are blatantly allegorical, but most reviewers blinked. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN opens by hanging a ten-year-old boy in a cruel Gitmo scenario that poses a radical question: with brutes like Cheney in charge, wouldn&#8217;t you want to sing the other guy&#8217;s song? Based on Disney&#8217;s global marketing strategy, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-712","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}