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The Stairs after John and Cassian fell down three flights:

Consider this a professional courtesy.

Watching John Wick Take on 30 People at Once Be Like

Are Russians Always The Bad Guys?

This is the big constipated guy from ^8ecdfc

Depicting the Russians as villains has a long history. “Even before the Cold War, Russia was represented often as a geopolitical threat to the West,” says James Chapman, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. “But [that stereotyping] takes on a particular ideological inflection during the Cold War when you get the association [with] not just Russia but also Soviet communism.” (View Highlight)

Scholars see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tough stance as the reason for the increased presence of Russian villains now. “I think particularly since the reemergence of Putin and a much more hardline regime, [especially] with the problems now in the Ukraine, there’s been this sense that Russia remains a geopolitical threat and a hostile power – even if it’s post-communist – and I think that’s really the reason you see this type of villainy,” says Chapman. (View Highlight)

Given that Russia represents the seventh biggest movie market in the world why would the studios risk antagonising one of its more significant customers? One possibility is that Russia’s complaints over Hollywood movies may have a public relations impact that plays positively in the studios’ favour. “They’ll be glad for the interest and the attention,” says James Chapman. Also, Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, says, “I think Hollywood is far more concerned about the Chinese market.” Indeed there’s almost an obsession over China in Hollywood – but now that Russian displeasure could depress box office revenues there may be some reassessment. (View Highlight)

What A Shared External Enemy Does To a Country

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but in order to make sense of America’s current predicament, you have to start by recognizing that the mid-twentieth century was a historical anomaly—a period of unusually low political polarization and cross-party animosity combined with generally high levels of social trust and trust in government. From the 1940s to around 1980, American politics was about as centrist and bipartisan as it has ever been. One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faced a series of common challenges and enemies, including the Great Depression, the Axis Powers during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War. Given the psychology of tribalism that we described in chapter 3, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict. A second major reason is that, since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities, as Bill Bishop showed in his influential 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Subsequent research has shown that we live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block. (Location 2336)

War also makes people far more interested in one another. The United States had never been more closely in touch with Russia than during the Cold War, when every cough in a Moscow corridor sent people scrambling up and down Washington staircases. People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam. (Location 1632)

Other Nationalities

The Russians might be the villain of choice right now but over the decades many different races and nationalities have had their moment in the evildoer spotlight. Around the time of World War II, for obvious reasons, Germans appeared as villains in US films – as did the Japanese. (View Highlight)

One group that’s been demonised for decades with varying degrees of intensity is Arabs – and Muslims. Even before the days of Rudolph Valentino’s roles in silent films like The Sheik in 1921 the cast was set for depicting Arabs as questionable characters who stole and murdered. In the Arab-American community Hollywood’s depictions over the decades have been seen as suffering from the ‘3B Syndrome’, in which Arabs were shown to be either belly dancers, billionaires or bombers. (View Highlight)

China has contributed its share of movie villains going back to the time when Fu Manchu appeared as a distrustful Chinese character in the early days of talking cinema. When MGM released The Mask of Fu Manchu 1932 the Chinese embassy in the US delivered a formal complaint because the title character was depicted with such hostility. But nowadays there’s hardly a trace of a Chinese character with evil intent in any Hollywood film because China has become a vitally important market for the studios. (View Highlight)

This became clear with the remake of the 2012 US war film Red Dawn. It was filmed with Chinese villains, but because of concerns that might jeopardise its entry to the Chinese movie market the villains were transformed into North Koreans in post-production – at considerable expense. Given that there’s no distribution of Hollywood movies in North Korea the producers knew there could be no loss of box office revenue by alienating that country. (View Highlight)

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As with every legally summoned Assassin per the original, uncorrupted rules of Fuyuki's Grail War, his identity is that of the legendary Persian "Old Man of the Mountain," Hassan-i-Sabah, the leader of al-Assasīn. Despite his possession of female personalities, Hassan's original existence is actually referred to with a masculine pronoun in quotation marks, which has been interpreted to suggest that he may have been physically male, at one point. His wish to the Holy Grail was, in fact, to ultimately "be reconstituted as a complete personality." (View Highlight)

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