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The only reason it would be very uncommon would be if the magical authorities were very good at detecting it and either preventing it or punishing the people who did it.

They probably are very good at it. It helps that they have some interesting spells that might help with it, like Spoiler

Pulp Hero wrote:Sorry if this has been brought up (didn't read all 9 pages yet)

Law Abiding Citizen

So Gerard Butler's character is the villain and gets stopped at the end. But I still feel like the film was trying to get us to take his side throughout the beginning and middle. His character's stance is basically that the justice system is so screwed up and abused because cops "don't go far enough to take the law into their own hands" and criminals get all of those stupid protections to shield them from justice. (ie- the Constitution).

It's only reprehensible if all your personal values are taken from cinema. It's pretty clearly trying to fuck with you, showing him in a sympathetic light, and justifying every action he takes, until at the end you realize that, hey, wait a minute, he's fucking wrong! And then he dies.

They probably are very good at it. It helps that they have some interesting spells that might help with it, like

Yeah, but only if it was illegal. The fact they have the concept of "muggle hunting" doesn't exactly speak highly of their attempts to police such behavior.

Of course it still is useless for things like love potions. Or more innocuous things- they have a spell that makes the target happy. Use it to condition someone and you can get them to fall for you.

Really, it is a miracle the statute of secrecy survives in the series and you don't have rogue wizards. Never mind being a dark lord- just start your own cult.

Samuel wrote:

They probably are very good at it. It helps that they have some interesting spells that might help with it, like

Yeah, but only if it was illegal. The fact they have the concept of "muggle hunting" doesn't exactly speak highly of their attempts to police such behavior.

The only mention of "Muggle hunting" I am aware of was in the context of one of Sirius's relatives, who at an unknown point in the past tried, and presumably failed, to make it legal. Sure, people like Umbridge probably wouldn't give a shit about Muggle Rights, but due to the Statute of Secrecy if nothing else, I expect this sort of stuff would be illegal.

Of course it still is useless for things like love potions. Or more innocuous things- they have a spell that makes the target happy. Use it to condition someone and you can get them to fall for you.

Again, I don't doubt that, realistically, crap like this would happen sometimes. But I don't see any evidence that its as common as some here seem to think, and I certainly don't think it would be officially tolerated.

Really, it is a miracle the statute of secrecy survives in the series and you don't have rogue wizards. Never mind being a dark lord- just start your own cult.

Actually, there are some known incidents of SoS breaches that were not completely covered up. I'm pretty sure Rowling's companion book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them claims that the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti are cases of magical phenomena that are not well covered-up, and that the countries where these incidents occure have gotten in trouble with the rest of the magical world as a result. Unfortunately I don't have the book around right now, so I can't provide an exact quote.

But as for rogue wizards starting a cult, something that public would probably get noticed and said wizard would wake up in Azkaban one day.

Phantasee wrote:

Pulp Hero wrote:Sorry if this has been brought up (didn't read all 9 pages yet)

Law Abiding Citizen

So Gerard Butler's character is the villain and gets stopped at the end. But I still feel like the film was trying to get us to take his side throughout the beginning and middle. His character's stance is basically that the justice system is so screwed up and abused because cops "don't go far enough to take the law into their own hands" and criminals get all of those stupid protections to shield them from justice. (ie- the Constitution).

It's only reprehensible if all your personal values are taken from cinema. It's pretty clearly trying to fuck with you, showing him in a sympathetic light, and justifying every action he takes, until at the end you realize that, hey, wait a minute, he's fucking wrong! And then he dies.

A good villain is one who doesn't see himself as one.

(I haven't seen the film but I asked to be spoiled and a friend told me how Gerard Butler does it, and based on that alone I won't see this film because it's reprehensibly stupid)

Phantasee wrote:

Pulp Hero wrote:Sorry if this has been brought up (didn't read all 9 pages yet)

Law Abiding Citizen

So Gerard Butler's character is the villain and gets stopped at the end. But I still feel like the film was trying to get us to take his side throughout the beginning and middle. His character's stance is basically that the justice system is so screwed up and abused because cops "don't go far enough to take the law into their own hands" and criminals get all of those stupid protections to shield them from justice. (ie- the Constitution).

It's only reprehensible if all your personal values are taken from cinema. It's pretty clearly trying to fuck with you, showing him in a sympathetic light, and justifying every action he takes, until at the end you realize that, hey, wait a minute, he's fucking wrong! And then he dies.

Oh, I agree. For a moronic crazy ridiculous action movie, Law Abiding Citizen had quite a fucked up moral message/lesson. In a way, I like how it "subverted" (TROPES LOL) the whole ruthless Punisher-esque vigilante shtick and really made the supposedly noble or whatever justified vigilante "anti-hero" out into something no different from the Joker in The Dark Knight, or any other fucking terrifying terrorist of terror. It had ambiguity.

Stofsk wrote:A good villain is one who doesn't see himself as one.

(I haven't seen the film but I asked to be spoiled and a friend told me how Gerard Butler does it, and based on that alone I won't see this film because it's reprehensibly stupid)

The movie was kinda schizophrenic in that Butler and Foxx give very good performances, since they're damn awesome actors, but the whole story was frickin ridiculous.

I'm not sure law abiding citizen qualifies. The justice system really does have major flaws, and in there have been deals made like the one in the movie. It's what TVTropes would call Black and Grey Morality. They are the flawed system who let a complete monster off the hook, and he's the well intentioned extremist who's willing to kill. Like it or not, our system is flawed, and that is what they are saying. Also, making Clyde sympathetic sort of worked, since he's not a cackling snyvely whiplash villian. You can understand why he's doing it, but he's still a bad guy who has to be stopped. I personally stopped sympathizing when he murdered his cellmate purely to advance his plan.

I'm not going to get into the historical inaccuracies or anything since it's perfectly fine with me to be inaccurate if it makes the movie better, more compelling, and more cohesive(Troy, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, and myriads of other examples). What pissed me off about EatG is the fact that they weren't content to have it just be about the duel between 2 of the wars finest snipers. Instead they had to go that extra mile to make Ed Harris' Nazi character an EVIL MONSTER.

And shoehorn a Pearl Harbor-esque romance subplot too. What was the whole point of that? We could've had MORE WAR and LESS DRAMA, fer christ's sake.

beleive it or not the romance actually did happen. Also, from ed harris's point he couldn't have the kid give up his position now could he.

someone mentioned anastasia earlier. I liked the movie, and my sister did as well, but it still whitewashed the romanovs by downplaying their flaws. So yeah. it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Going back to the Op, I have what I consider to be a reprehensible film:

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I hated this film. It seemed designed solely to showcase brutal murder and a bizarre community that accepted it.

I know it is based on real events or whatnot, but still, I find it reprehensible. Gore, for the sake of gore

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Going back to the Op, I have what I consider to be a reprehensible film:

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I hated this film. It seemed designed solely to showcase brutal murder and a bizarre community that accepted it.

I know it is based on real events or whatnot, but still, I find it reprehensible. Gore, for the sake of gore

The remake or the original? Because the original had barely any blood in it at all.

I meant the remake, I think.

A mate of mine forced me to watc it a a party once. Not a pleasent experience and I normally have a high tolerance for blood and gore.

Then again, maybe i tolerate blood and gore when its in an appropriate context (a war for instance)

The Fast and the Furious and the pointless franchise it spawned can be seen as reprehensible, since the whole thing is geared around the blatant promotion and glamorization of street racing, with the crass, dangerous driving that it entails.

Big Orange wrote:The Fast and the Furious and the pointless franchise it spawned can be seen as reprehensible, since the whole thing is geared around the blatant promotion and glamorization of street racing, with the crass, dangerous driving that it entails.

I can second, third, and fourth this. When I did security in FL the site I was at had a movie theater down the street and on Saturday nights after these POS movies were released we would always see idiots who just got out of the movie racing at upwards of 90mph down the road, blowing through red lights and everything. We alerted the police and as I was driving home (On weekends I got off at 11:30pm) the 9pm showing must have just gotten out because there were literally lines of dumbass white kids with the "urban look" with $2000 rims on their fucking 90's Honda's pulled over a few hundred yards down from the theater waiting to get tickets written.

Lol the police manage to do something effective quickly. Pity they cant be like that in good old England. I agree wth The Fast and the Furious though. Struck me as a film for small boys who wank over fast cars

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Lol the police manage to do something effective quickly. Pity they cant be like that in good old England. I agree wth The Fast and the Furious though. Struck me as a film for small boys who wank over fast cars

Of course they did! You know how much a speeding/racing ticket will cost you?

Another movie I'd like to nominate as reprehensible is Norbit. Not only was it unfunny, but I've never liked the "fat sassy black woman" stereotype it promotes. I was also bothered by Norbit's "good" love interest being biracial in appearance, because I am really fucking sick of every "black" female love interest in the movies being light-skinned.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Lol the police manage to do something effective quickly. Pity they cant be like that in good old England. I agree wth The Fast and the Furious though. Struck me as a film for small boys who wank over fast cars

A film for small boys who wank over fast cars isn't a reprehensible film. This thread is turning into another "I don't like this movie because of X" list of complaints. Seriously, how many movies can there really be that are truly reprehensible? Do we need to repost the definition of reprehensible on every new page?

Torture porn like Saw, shit like Atonement, that's pretty much it.

Phantasee wrote:

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Lol the police manage to do something effective quickly. Pity they cant be like that in good old England. I agree wth The Fast and the Furious though. Struck me as a film for small boys who wank over fast cars

A film for small boys who wank over fast cars isn't a reprehensible film. This thread is turning into another "I don't like this movie because of X" list of complaints. Seriously, how many movies can there really be that are truly reprehensible? Do we need to repost the definition of reprehensible on every new page?

Yeah, except for the fact that the film didn't just show illegal street racing as a dangerous thing you shouldn't do, it marketed itself as an adrenaline rush and basically encouraged it.

Vastatosaurus Rex wrote:Another movie I'd like to nominate as reprehensible is Norbit. Not only was it unfunny, but I've never liked the "fat sassy black woman" stereotype it promotes. I was also bothered by Norbit's "good" love interest being biracial in appearance, because I am really fucking sick of every "black" female love interest in the movies being light-skinned.

This may possibly be because light skinned black girls are fairly common and you'll be hard pressed to find black girls in America that don't have some degree of mixed race in them.

General Zod wrote:

Vastatosaurus Rex wrote:Another movie I'd like to nominate as reprehensible is Norbit. Not only was it unfunny, but I've never liked the "fat sassy black woman" stereotype it promotes. I was also bothered by Norbit's "good" love interest being biracial in appearance, because I am really fucking sick of every "black" female love interest in the movies being light-skinned.

This may possibly be because light skinned black girls are fairly common and you'll be hard pressed to find black girls in America that don't have some degree of mixed race in them.

I suspect that is horseshit; even in my limited exposure I've seen women whose skin colour runs from pitch dark to almost tan. Without any real evidence to go on, I'm more inclined to believe that it is simply easier to market black women as attractive to both black and white audiences if they have features which appeal to both.

I'd like to add in the kids movie "Ice Age" as having a small morally questionable plot issue. The saber-toothed cat spends the whole movie trying to get a baby murdered, but at the end of the movie he pulls a Darth Vader and helps the good guys, which makes him an adorable hero. At the end of it all, I was wondering why we were supposed to be happy about the survival of the guy who was almost entirely responsible for the death of the baby's mother at the start of the film. If you murdered someone, then spent the entire story planning to murder the victim's baby, you would not be instantly redeemed merely by changing your mind about the second murder. You're still a murderer.

Frankly, the issue of "intelligent predator thrown in with a pack of intelligent herbivores" was done better in Madagascar, where the revelation to Alex that he was a predator and carnivore caused him to go mad and suffer a crisis of his conscience versus his apparently overwhelming instinct. Of course, that movie shows that in an animal context even the spiders are intelligent, so it's probably best we didn't hear the opinions of the fish at the end or the cows at the beginning about Alex's decision to turn from killing one 'intelligent' species to another.