Review – Flag Wars

I confess I was expecting this to be a bit less cut-and-dried than it turned out to be. Put the basic conflict here behind the “veil of ignorance,” and you get an economically-privileged class using its power to deprive poor, vulnerable people of their property. Lift the veil in this case and you find two historically-oppressed groups: homosexual men and black people. However, that doesn’t really seem to change the morality of the situation much. We get a scene or two of pseudo-Christian fanatics hurling insults during what looks like a gay pride march. While this is a good reminder that gay people suffer the effects of bigotry, it doesn’t lend a lot of justification to the gentrification of a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. The saddest part of the movie (aside from the death of one of the residents) is how the barrage of real estate agents and code enforcement harassment seems to be stirring up anti-gay prejudice where it didn’t exist (or at least existed in a less virulent form). Mildly amusing