So, because I wanted to hear people discuss
The Wings of Honneamise I decided to listen to the latest ANNCast available
here.
As an added bonus I got to hear Carl Horn give his thoughts on
The Wind Rises. On the downside I had to hear Zach, who hasn't even seen the movie yet, give his views on the very concept of the film.
Now, I know that there has been some discourse about the topic of the movie and I understand some Yanks might not like that you'd even make a movie about this topic but, frankly, I don't entirely understand what the fuss is about. Zach seems to object to the concept of the movie because it's a movie with a fetishistic love of engineering about a guy who designed a plane "expressly to kill Americans" (not true, as pointed out by Carl Horn).
The (implicit?) argument he seems to be making about why that would be a problem is that there was something wrong, morally, with making a weapon of war and that you really shouldn't make a movie celebrating the life of the weapons designer especially one whose creation lead to the death of Americans. I just fail to see how this really that big of a deal considering that it's not like the designer was some kind of 'evil figure' or bad guy who did anything outside the bounds of acceptability for the time. It's not like he even designed an indiscriminate weapon for butchering civilians such as a fire bomb or a nuclear weapon. He designed a plane that would be used by military personnel against other military personnel.
Moreover, such a line of thinking seems rather rich coming from an American whose culture features a number of films which feature 'war machine porn'.