I'm sorry for misunderstanding your point about the Profanation of the Host. I wasn't familiar.

A valence issue is one in which both sides agree, but they disagree on how to go about it. There are surprisingly few (the economy is one — few people actively want a worse economy). If you think women's rights, traditional gender roles (which is mostly at stake in the clip here), and even rape are bipartisan or…

A. Your comparison doesn't hold. The Fifth Element et al at their anti-feminist worst aren't analogous to the Holocaust. They're analogous to mild anti-Semitism.

Thanks for actually engaging, albeit in the form of a muppet.

I get that we can't completely divorce politics from art, but as a Jewish person, you learn quickly that if you rule out all art that has anti-Semitic undertones, you really limit yourself. Whether I like it or not, it wasn't considered wrong or even unfashionable to be anti-Semitic until the 20th century. And…

Does your definition of artistic greatness include "Shares my political views?"

Agreed. I think it's also worth mentioning that Bruce Willis' character comes off as pretty unsophisticated himself

I don't think it's arbitrary. I think you can go into an art museum and say something is a great painting, and it's still a great painting even if you worry that the artist objectified his female model

I think that's a fair criticism of Passengers, because you've connected the "political" criticism to its ability to succeed as a movie. However, I think that The Fifth Element uses Leeloo's naivety well as a film, and thus isn't worth criticizing just because it bothers us from a feminist standpoint

It's not completely unrelated, sure. But why was Passengers a bad movie because it didn't share my viewpoints on relationships? Why was Zero Dark Thirty a worse piece of art if it didn't condemn torture, something I abhor? Why is Thank You For Smoking a worse movie for supporting a venal lobbyist?

You know it's a lot easier (and *so* AV Club) to mock instead of actually engaging with someone. I'm what used to pass for a moderate liberal, for what it's worth, but I feel that movies are judged too much for their politics and not enough on the basis of their actual strengths and weaknesses as a movie. I think…

I'm not going to argue with a person who claims to care about "basic human decency" and then calls strangers on the internet "fuckface" for having a different opinion from him

How characters are portrayed in art and fiction has nothing to do with "human decency", but absolutely is political

Ahhhhhhh how typical. A person who disagrees with any aspect of the lefts agenda must be a radical Breitbart neo-conservative! I can't just me a moderate liberal who feels movies should be judged as movies rather than as political statements, of course not.

Yes. A movie's job is not to agree with your politics. A movie's job is to be a good movie. Do you go through art museums getting angry at all the objectified female models?

Actually, no you didn't. It's only very recently that we decided that a movie portraying women in a way that isn't 100% au courant is literally an affront to "basic human decency"

Nicely said.

Are you kidding?

I don't think you should ignore politics. But I don't think you should judge a movie based on, again, whether it upholds the standards of the day's liberalism. Such criticism is becoming far more important than the qualities of the film, and that's not right. *A movie's job is not to agree with your politics*

Does the AV Club ever get tired of finding new ways to criticize movies for not sharing the left's politics du jour?