Peppermint is a heartwarming family movie

I don't go to see many movies, but "Peppermint" is definitely a kind I enjoy.  I would have appreciated a lot more backstory such as "Man on Fire" had.  Even the line from the trailer, which explains the film's title, is missing from the final cut.  I definitely see the limitations of this movie, but the reaction among the literati has been predictably misguided.  According to the New York Times review, "the film plays dangerously into violent Latino stereotypes. One blood bath takes place in a piñata warehouse, where Riley mows down Diego’s unsuspecting gang one by one...All of the dead appear to be Latinos (save for a couple of Korean mob allies), but she leaves the sole white guy working there alive in order to interrogate him."

(The following may contain spoilers.)  Let's start with the obvious problem:  all the dead are Latinos except the ones that aren't?  It wouldn't be credible to attack the idea of a Latino drug gang in Los Angeles, so the reviewer instead plays up the fact that the "dead people" resulting from an attack on the gang are Latino.  I'm curious how things could have turned out any differently.

I did not think that the person left alive was "white" (in the non-Latino sense) and I don't see any likely characters in the cast who could have been other than Latino, but let's grant her that point.  Maybe the filmmaker specifically chose to avoid killing a white person in this particular scene.  So, he's a hero?  No, he's a fink who gave away the gang's secrets and is unceremoniously dispatched in the very next scene.

That's at least one dead white person (if the reviewer is correct), but it's not the most significant by a longshot.  There is also the brutal killing of the white would-be robber of the gang, as well as the main character's family.  The reviewer seems not to have noticed that the single most screen time devoted to a killing is for the corrupt judge, a white man and thoroughly despicable person who gets his just deserts.   And speaking of despicable, probably the worst person in the movie is a corrupt white cop who also ends up being shot on screen.  Meanwhile, the heroic cop is Latino, and the hero twice puts herself in danger in the interest of protecting non-white girls.

The reviewer concludes, regarding the gang raid, "The moment says a lot about the way Hollywood continuously villainizes people of color and values certain lives over others."  It would be more true to say that her review says a lot about how some people are determined to find racism in everything, even when there is very little or no evidence for it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Science and Philosophy, Part I: Hume and Popper

I've been listening to a lecture series on philosophy recently, and, even though I haven't gotten past the Greeks yet, it has reminded me of a number of issues that trouble me about science. I want to take the opportunity to express my concerns here. Along the way, I will probably oversimplify philosophy a great deal -- not on purpose, but rather because I have only a simplistic understanding of it. I welcome responses to clear up my misconceptions. One of my issues with science is the famous idea of Karl Popper that it can never establish positive claims, only falsify wrong ones. The history of this goes back to David Hume, the 18th century Scottish sceptic. He shook up the philosophical world by claiming that science could never prove anything through induction -- that is, drawing conclusions about physical laws based on observations. The classic illustration is the sun's rising. Even though the sun has risen every day for our whole lives, and for countless human l...
Read more

Country Music

I noticed a long time ago that there isn't much difference between the sound of country music and rock music nowadays. If I'm surfing my radio and I come to a station playing jazz, classical, or rap, I recognize it right away; but if I come to a country or rock station, I often can't tell which it is until the song is half over. Country songs often have screaming guitars that would fit equally well in a hard rock song, and only a minority have a recognizably country instrument such as a fiddle or a banjo. All the same, no one could listen to a country music station for more than a few minutes without realizing that it is definitely not a rock station. What are the differences? There are some stylistic differences. Country songs are more likely to have a boogey beat or certain western-sounding bass lines. They also tend to be more formulaic: if you can't predict how a country song ends, you probably don't listen to much country music. But those things aren...
Read more

My privileged life

I have just read the article Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level , and the comments, and the follow-up and its comments.  The author claims that straight white males (SWM, for short) don't like being told they are "privileged," so he is going to try to explain their advantages in terms they understand.  He then very condescendingly compares their lives to playing a game on the easiest difficulty level, whereas people in other categories have it harder, and black lesbians are playing on the hardest level of all. I understand that this is a metaphor, or an analogy.  I understand that it is not supposed to be a perfect model of reality.  There are, however, several reasons why I think it is a very poor and misleading metaphor. First of all, using the gaming-difficulty metaphor implies that SWMs have an easy life.  No one plays at the easiest level unless he is a total noob, and only college students with lots of time on their hands play at the hard...
Read more