The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:
30 Reviews in 30 Days
DAY TEN
“Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement,” wrote poet William Butler Yeats, whose words have never been more true than in twenty-first century America. In a masterful stretch of acting muscles, Hollywood weenies John Lithgow and Alfred Molina play a couple of elderly turd-tappers who tie the knot only to find that this upsets Molina’s employers at Catholic school Saint Grace Academy. Temporarily deprived of an income, the lovebirds have to give up their apartment and find separate lodgings elsewhere. All of this is treated as a terrible tragedy, Love Is Strange coming across from start to finish as some ridiculous last gasp of the moribund West’s preoccupation with First World problems.
The ethnically disinterested (((Ira Sachs))) writes and directs this bold and beautiful cultural event. Writes Gerri Miller of this alien freak at Interfaith Family:
After being together for five years, he married his partner Boris Torres, who is not Jewish, “six months after it became legal in New York State and a week before we had twins. I say that we had a gay shotgun wedding,” Sachs says. They’d met several times through friends and online before they were at the right point for a relationship, “a point where we both liked ourselves.”
Faith has never come between them, and Torres is on board for the pair’s 2½-year-old twins to become b’nai mitzvah. (Their birth mother is Seventh Day Adventist.) “Right now we’re teaching them language and how to use the potty. But I am checking out synagogues,” says Sachs, who grew up attending synagogue and was president of his temple youth group in Memphis, Tennessee.
As an established member of the Jewish community there—his grandmother’s family arrived in the 1850s, and his father’s family came in the early 1900s—he “felt no vulnerability as a Jew.” But he did experience anti-Semitism at the “very traditional old Southern white prep school” he attended in the ’70s. “I was called ‘kike’ and had pennies thrown at me. The violence scared me but the anti-Semitism seemed ridiculous.”
Today, Sachs considers himself a secular Jew. “I know that that comes out of assimilation and I’m intellectually sad to not be more knowledgeable about Judaism,” he says, though he finds Judaism “less exclusionary” than some other religions, “a welcoming fold.”
3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Love Is Strange is:
5. Multiculturalist and pro-immigration. Molina remarks favorably on the multiethnic makeup of a school’s student body, Love Is Strange being set in the magical milieu of imaginary white liberals who intermix freely with blacks and immigrants. The film features more than one “Russian” transplant, one of them played by a fuzzy-headed Jew (Eric Tabach). One assumes they had to flee for their safety from Putin’s eternally clouded heterofascist Russian Reich.
4. Pro-police. The heroes have two gay cop friends. The reader must understand that, in the eyes of Love Is Strange’s target audience, this represents the most sterling endorsement of New York law enforcement.
3. New Age. Lithgow and Molina have some kind of non-Christian, new-agey “marriage” ceremony. Love Is Strange is peopled entirely by weirdos who go in for stuff like “chromotherapy” and medicinal energy-channeling.
2. Anti-Christian. If only the Catholic Church had not been so bigoted, the two gents might have lived out the remainder of their lives together in happy fulfilment. Even so, the movie makes an unconvincing attempt to present itself as conforming to Christian values. “I still believe in Jesus Christ as my savior,” says Molina.
1. Pro-AIDS. Those enticed by the prospect of seeing not particularly sexy actors Alfred Molina and John Lithgow squish faces are in luck, as Love Is Strange features more than one such moment. They are “an example to be followed,” proclaims Lithgow’s niece Marisa Tomei. The film is at pains to present them as perfectly normal individuals and – more disturbingly – to show that they are trustworthy if left alone with children. “It’s about as family friendly a movie as Miracle on 34th St,” Sachs claimed in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session. In Love Is Strange’s most ludicrous moment, Tomei scolds her son (Charlie Tahan) for talking about fertilizer at the dinner table. “Joey, your uncle’s still eating.” Like some guy whose idea of a sexual pleasure center is his anus is going to get all squeamish about poop talk.
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