Okja

Would disagree. I thought the "dual" villain was a perfect representation of the way corporations try their utmost to appear ethical, but will always remain fundamentally exploitative entities.
That is to say, that unlike most films, this one doesn't portray a "bad corporation" but rather exposes a "good corporation". In this age of bloodsuckers like Musk and Zuckerburg I think such a film is extremely valuable.

What is that thing? I want to fuck it.

it's just an asian girl

No you smug fuck, I meant the hippo-looking thing next to the """girl"""

watch that directors last movie Snowpiercer.

its a 10/10 movie about class struggle with marxist undertones, okja is fucking garbage.

the director is apparently a korean leftist

curious as to why you think so?

okja is for anarchists, snowpiercer is for marxists.

Even if this is the implication - that all corporations are exploitative - I still do not think that this is a critique of capitalism as such. For instance, someone might interpret it as anti-big business/multinationals and pro local/small business. We might see the actions in the film as naturally arising from the logic of capital accumulation, but the film was open-ended enough that someone might simply say that they were due to psychology (e.g., greed, psychopathy) or corruption. Again, we would consider these things in the context of capitalistic production, but the film did not frame it explicitly in that way.

well i think it sort of did in the climactic scene involving the villain where she explains her position that she owns property and works hard therefore is in the right.
this is the argument that basically every reactionary makes - and it is up to viewer to make mind up whether she is right or wrong.
clearly, having seen the destruction that this logic leads to, we are supposed to conclude that her stated position - which is effectively the foundation of capitalism - is wrong and immoral.

i was super hyped after seeing the trailer,
but ultimately it feels like its a parody of incompetency and stupidity of certain anarchists/animal organizations. it has some good anti-capitalist messages but it wasn't deep. it was shlock only a vegan who's never read a book in his life would think is cool.

Like i said watch his last movie snowpiercer (2013) if you want to see a much better movie

I think the scene at the end of the movie perfectly encapsulates how anti-capitalist it is.

At the end of the film, the pig that the little girl is trying to save throughout the entire film is about to be killed, and the CEO who's running the butcher operation isn't listening to this girl's pleas because "muh property". She only caves when the girl produces a golden pig given to her by her uncle earlier in the film". Even then, it's not a happy ending as they're walking away from this field of mutant pigs who are next in line to be butchered.

It also shows how especially modern companies try to spin their horrific acts into an eco-friendly, "indie" image and even when exposed for the horrific shit they do, in a capitalist society people will buy whatever's cheap and doesn't taste like assholes.

He totally is, and I like this film more than Snowpiercer (which is a film I really dig).

...

He still has nothing on the all time great, Nolan

Personally didn't see that as being a fundamental component of the film. Portrayal of the activists was largely positive - it takes the piss a bit, but they are still protagonists.
And as you can see from other posts, I feel the film contained a general anti-capitalist message, not just "meat's bad lmao" (which is of course what a lot of people read into the film)

why the fuck would you think okja is a better movie than snowpiercer? okja portrays animal organizations and anarchists as giant faggots. its literally a stereotype of how the right see them

feels like a love film for vegans who are too stupid to notice how they are being portrayed.

Nigga, please.

I see what you mean, but again - I see the film's fundamental message as being anti-capitalist - that is, it is a work interested in portraying the way capitalism ravages the environment and its inhabitants.
Though I would agree that there are a lot of dumb vegans who will love this film without noticing the jokes.

I just felt it was more consistent. I didn't like the ALF's "pacifist" bullshit in the film, but the villains were much better to me than in Snowpiercer, and unlike in paintrain, they're really not "defeated". It felt at times bleaker than the post-apocalyptic iceworld film.

not an argument

you are confusing the message of the bad guy, ie the bourgeoisie, with the underlying message of the movie. do you think the message in the lion king for example to kill your family members for power?

snowpiercer is about the proletariat rising up to seize the means of production and the bourgeoisie using the natural order message garbage on petit-bourgouise and reactionaries. the explosion at the end signifies that communism will only work when the entire system of exploitation/the means is destroyed so we can build a new one and actually branch out (the little kids walking off the train to build a new society)

unemployednegativity.com/2014/07/hijacking-train-revolution-and-its.html

(the director is in a south korean marxist btw)

Yeah same, was hoping the post credit sequence would be them realising the futility of pacifism and pulling out guns ready to fuck up porky.

the bear in the distance wasn't supposed to be a bad sign. (dey gunna die)

I haven't seen Snowpiercer and even I can tell you missed the point extremely fucking hard

this is another reason why okja was fucking stupid

Maybe the director could have communicated that better by stopping the train (like they did in the comic), rather than crashing it and getting everybody else (i.e. the rest of the living human race) killed.

Perhaps I should re-watch that scene, but I do not remember it striking me as especially anti-capitalist. The idea of "owners become rich through their own hard work" is just one ideological justification/excuse for capitalist profits, hardly the foundation of capitalism. I mean, one could say the same thing about the anti-wall street films - that they show how the speculators didn't work for their money; they just manipulated stocks, mortgages, etc. At any rate, I don't think the villain was portrayed as anything more than simply a "I will make money by any means just because I can"-type. What was actually unique was, as you said, the two-faced character of the corporation. The fact that the external image was "organic/natural/non-GMO", whereas in the background it was brutal techniques to maximize production at all costs.
I think the film itself can be used as a part of an anti-capitalist argument, but by itself, any anti-capitalist messages the filmmaker may have intended were presented in indirect ways.

Well, in the comic, the conductor releases a virus that kills everyone else on board and he becomes the conductor instead of derailing the train. Honestly, I prefer the movie's ending.

And that change is kinda why I'm not totally dismissing the "anarchist" (if you can really call the Animal Liberation Front that) portrayal in the film. Nonviolent, small protests won't fundamentally change a system where capitalism has a death grip.

By he I mean the main protagonist. That was unclear, oops.

Property rights are the foundation of capitalism, and that was basically what she was saying: "my property, my rules".
IMO that scene was a challenge to those who believe that such a system leads to moral or just outcomes (ie. most viewers).
Taking the film as a whole, it is clear that the villain is acting well within the laws of capitalist society, but is totally morally bankrupt. Ergo, films conclusion is that system is at fault.
Compare to most films where the stereotypical evil businessman is acting outside of the law/against the knowledge of everyone else at the company, and gets their comeuppance in the end.

zengakuren are fucking cool

This is not true; for instance, there were certain property rights in slave and feudal societies too. Moreover, different capitalist societies have had different kinds of property rights. In general, you cannot say that certain legal constructs are the basis for capitalism. Rather, those laws develop as a response to capitalist production in order to strengthen it.

Ah, but these are not the laws of capitalist production, these are the laws of the state. So which system is "at fault", according to the film? The legal system? It is not clear that the film is critiquing precisely the capitalist system. It sort of dances around the capitalist issue, attacking some aspects of it, so that is why I wouldn't say it is an explicit critique of capitalism.

I agree that sounds even more retarded than snowpierecer's ending

Where can I watch it?

a fantastic communist movie. I've been a big fan of Bong for a long time, and I was aware he was left-wing, but this movie came out of the blue with just how blatantly communist it was. It felt like propaganda, but in a good way, like it was produced by state cinema or some radical leftcom party. I mean the actual fucking ALF is in this movie, anyone else would make a fictional animal rights organization, but this guy just pulls down the Wikipedia page for them on his ipad. It's a weird movie, probably a lot of people wont know how to handle it, but I liked it a lot.

netflix or torrent it.

Think you are being overly anal here. Property rights are the foundation of capitalism in the sense that it couldn't exist without them.
More importantly, the vast majority of people directly associate capitalism and prop. rights.
Whole point of that scene was to show immorality of such a system.
The system that puts the rights of property holders ahead of those of its inhabitants! ie. any capitalist system that exists.

This is kind of a bizarre line of reasoning. Capitalism couldn't exist without humans either, hence air or water, as far as we know. Are those the foundation of capitalism?

Capitalism is associated with all sorts of things - that's because it has many features: markets, private property, wage-labor, finance, etc. However, the main focus of the film was that one company, and hence the explicit target of the film is corporations like that, not the whole of the capitalist system.

But this is your interpretation, not something explicitly stated by the film. Overall, the film does not really have a clear systematic outlook - i.e., it does not explore the problems of an entire system. The only partially systematic feature of the film was the connection between the police and the corporation, but again, this could be seen as simply "rich people have a lot of power", which is hardly surprising to anyone.

How did you miss the point that bad? I think you are taking the movie or the ending to be specific too literally. The whole message of the ending is that the whole system (the train) is the enemy and must be destroyed to build a better world. If the system is not destroyed you just get another tyrant.

THIS is a bizarre line of reasoning. Is human society capable of ridding itself of people, air or water? Is it capable of ridding itself of property rights?

It's a two hour film on netflix, don't see how it could possibly do so. And it DOES explore problems of entire system unlike most films because problems are clearly shown to be systemic.

To demonstrate, here's the template for your standard "evil corporation" film, of which there are many.
This is the template you see in, say Jurassic Park, or any of the innumerable superhero films where a rich industrialist is the villain.
Contrast with Okja, where the villain is not "defeated" at the end because they have the law on their side.

So now you are saying that property rights are the "foundations" of capitalism because:
1. it cannot exist without them
2. societies can get rid of them
Basically, what it seems you're trying to argue is that anything that necessarily follows from capitalism is its "foundation". However, this is faulty logic, as my example was trying to point out. It is capitalism which causes certain property rights to come about, not the other way around.

It did not seem to me that the film "clearly" showed that these were systematic problems.
This whole discussion reminds me of a joke/story about a mathematician who spends 20 minutes of a lecture explaining to someone in the audience why a certain step in the proof was "trivial". If it were so trivial, it wouldn't take 20 minutes to explain! Similarly, if Okja were so clearly anti-capitalist, it would be clear to everyone. For those who are educated in anti-capitalism, it is easy to make the connections. However, to someone else, it would perhaps make them think more about certain problems in society and question how/why they arise, but it does not state outright "capitalism is the source of theses problems". Perhaps that makes it more effective at reaching a larger audience, who might otherwise write it off as a "communist film".

Obviously, one would not compare Okja to those films. I was thinking more along the lines of, say, The Big Short, which was a critique of the financial speculation that led to the crash of 2007. However, one would not call that film explicitly anti-capitalist. Both that film and Okja are already different from the "generic" films, insofar as both are highly critical of economic aspects of present society. I will say that it is easy to use Okja to make an anti-capitalist argument, but the film itself does not fully go there.

Why the arguments over semantics? Do property rights stem from economic relations of capitalism? Yes. Could capitalism as we know it exist without them? No. Every mode of production constructs its own foundations so to speak.
I think though, that it should be compared to them. The target market is pretty similar, Okja presents itself as an action film about the relationship between a girl and a larger than life creature. The Big Short is basically sold as a critical film about finance etc. Thus Okja has great possibility to communicate messages to people who weren't expecting it.
A great many reviews from people who are far from great political minds have described it as such, and besides the description of the film as such conditions people to respond to it in a different way.

The problem is you are using the same argument, which is not valid. Capitalism re-creates the conditions for its own continued existence, but it also creates other things, which are not "foundational", such as property rights.
On that note, finance is also an indispensable part of capitalism. So would you then say that The Big Short was explicitly anti-capitalist?

Ultimately, which films one compares Okja to does not affect whether it is explicitly anti-capitalist itself.

That film is shitty vegan horse manure. I'd say it's even reactionary (the message of don't change your old truddushunul perfect idealized vegan paradise way of life, also "orcs vs humans")

God you guys gave awful taste in film

It's actually you who missed the point. It means exactly what it is seem. The kids won't be able to build shit and the bear represents the continuation of the natural order only this time it isn't the humans on the top of things.
The movie was written exactly to confuse people into believing what you do while subliminally pushing the opposite message. I wasn't affected because I'm pretty good at caching subliminal stuff and seeing right through bullshit.