tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46748717300268981322024-03-13T21:41:39.809-07:00The Author's FilesThe Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.comBlogger285125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-14524899753131949982021-05-09T11:33:00.000-07:002021-05-09T11:33:16.742-07:002018 Oscars in Review Part 1<p>Back in 2018, I undertook the ever more thankless task of seeing and reviewing every movie nominated for any Oscar, and I made it much closer to accomplishing that goal than I ever had before. Most of said awards contenders didn’t merit more than a Not Worth the Effort treatment, and in retrospect it seems foolish to have spared some of them even that much time. Regardless, the deed is done, and it would be a waste to let such writing be lost now. I hope the reflections captured in these reviews have retained their vitality for longer than the films that animated them.</p><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>... No, U</b></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--NTiwxK4lzo/YJgfHcQTVpI/AAAAAAAADqY/l3SJo33ZlQgas2v64JLWtuCfedB8Md_QQCNcBGAsYHQ/s536/Hate%2BU%2BGive.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="362" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--NTiwxK4lzo/YJgfHcQTVpI/AAAAAAAADqY/l3SJo33ZlQgas2v64JLWtuCfedB8Md_QQCNcBGAsYHQ/s16000/Hate%2BU%2BGive.jpg" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>I saw one critic for a major publication (I think <i>Vox</i>) extol <i>The Hate U Give</i> as “Oscar-worthy”. The fact that any adult who writes about film for income could reach such an assessment says less about the quality of the movie than it does about the diminished reputations of awards shows and the destitute state of mainstream cinema in 2018. <i>The Hate U Give</i> cynically meshes two of the worst film genres, viz. YA book adaptation and socially topical drama, to engineer a truly obnoxious cross-breed guaranteed to irk both adamant Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter proponents through its money-grubbing determination to reach as broad an audience as possible.<br /><br />Although the story is credited to a novel published in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting, the themes and general plot structure can’t escape the shadow of Spike Lee’s <i>Do The Right Thing</i>, which many would consider the quintessential American film about subsurface, post-Jim Crow racial tensions. Any conservatives who have voiced disapproval of that 1989 opus might look to <i>The Hate U Give</i> as a teachable moment, seeing as it dispenses much the same politics with markedly less subtlety, artistry, humor, and impact than the already transparent original.<br /><br />The political grandstanding and speechifying of <i>The Hate U Give</i> hinges on a policeman who pulls over the main character, Starr, and shoots her demonstrably irresponsible friend, who refuses to comply with simple orders and reaches into his car for a large black comb. Rather than shrouding this beat in ambiguity, director George Tillman Jr. clearly shows the officer firing out of ignorance and panic, mistaking the comb for a deadly weapon. So he renders the rest of his film aggravating to watch, since the audience possesses vindicating information not available to the emotionally compromised characters, whose irate demands for “justice” are framed as essentially noble despite being objectively wrong.<br /><br />The myopia and emotional core of the film’s argument mirrors the Left’s demonization of spectators who supported Justice Kavanaugh in the context of the plainly astroturfed smear campaign against him; even after the allegations against him crumbled, the #believewomen mob dug their holes even deeper, whining that Kavanaugh’s defenders, even if right, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#" target="_blank">“left no doubt what they think of women”</a>. On a more topical note, I once got into an argument about police brutality with a white college friend, who happened to be a more scrupulous consumer of hip-hop than anyone I’ve known. After I stated my case that forensic evidence didn’t incriminate the men who shot Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, said friend responded, “Yeaaaaa, but still, you have to admit there is a pattern.” <i>The Hate U Give</i> takes a similar stance in that it absolves a particular officer of murder but sides with his ignorant prosecutors anyway, merely because the tragedy falls into an immaterial “pattern of racism” not substantiated by DOJ statistics. The cop is banished from the screen, never allowed to speak for himself or interact with Starr after the death. Granted, his withdrawal does go against schmaltzy Hollywood tradition requiring reconciliation between victim and victimizer, but it also serves to deface and otherize him.<br /><br /><i>The Hate U Give</i> possesses a plot in the loosest sense: its protagonist begins in one state of mind and a series of events effects a change in her character through conflict. How these events causally link together and form a narrative takes a back seat to the naked outrage, spite, and grief that the actors blare each passing moment. The movie feels like a procession of disjointed scenes designed to admonish and instruct the viewer more than to advance the narrative.<br /><br />For example, Starr arrives at her private school sometime after the central shooting to discover that her peers are walking out of class in protest. Such a display doesn’t follow from their personalities, and one of the white girls says something like, “We can’t get in trouble if everyone skips class. Plus it’s for a great cause!” Starr seems justifiably wary of their motives, and the filmmakers deserve credit for questioning the purity of student protesters, who the media pathetically and irrationally lionize at every opportunity. Nonetheless, in an inexplicable breach of narrative integrity, the very next scene shows us an emboldened Starr, spurred after several days of moping to break her silence to the local news. A selfish mob’s unconvincing act of affectation finally compels our heroine to conquer her inhibitions and tell the truth, or so the editing implies.<br /><br />I took a lot of notes on this movie, being rather captivated by the brashness of its shortcomings, but translating them into a coherent essay wouldn’t be a prudent use of anybody’s time in Biden’s America. Despite their many similarities, <i>Hate</i>’s sins are of a different nature than <i>Do the Right Thing</i>’s, as the newer movie is aimed squarely at the type of unmarried white woman of childbearing age who plasters her Instagram stories with ugly, brightly colored infographics, urging her peers to “educate themselves”, call out their friends and family for their Racism, abolish their own whiteness, and immediately commit to a regimen of anti-white literature, Netflix content, and “resources”. Needless to say the average viewers of the movie wouldn’t know how to interpret <a href="https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf" target="_blank">Tables 14 and 15 of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ <i>Criminal Victimization</i> report of 2018</a> if a Buzzfeed quiz walked them through it.<br /><br />Basically, <i>Hate</i> is an unmistakably racial attack designed to confuse and make catatonic the demographic that is both essential to preserving European heritage and disturbingly suggestible to destroying it. Tillman masterfully reroutes young white women’s maternal instincts from traditional, natural, and healthy outlets to morally inverted political activism, making his work a particularly pungent strain of heinous. Spike Lee, on the other hand, is reputed to make movies for discerning adults and academics and is known for his <a href="https://archive.ph/lhuQi" target="_blank">cinephilia, surprisingly counting nothing less reactionary than Mel Gibson’s <i>Apocalypto</i> among his list of Essential Films</a>. Which craftsman is more to be abhorred—the competent handyman of the American Regime or the vengeful radical who should know better—is up to the individual to judge.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Borderline</b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IXZCTK02d1w/YJgfwKickjI/AAAAAAAADqg/Uo06nASS0CkgJQ1WCObyUhrOTy3jfJVLgCNcBGAsYHQ/s536/Border.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="349" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IXZCTK02d1w/YJgfwKickjI/AAAAAAAADqg/Uo06nASS0CkgJQ1WCObyUhrOTy3jfJVLgCNcBGAsYHQ/s16000/Border.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>On the basis of what I read before walking into <i>Border</i>, I expected to see an offbeat romantic “fairy tale” in discount Guillermo Del Toro mode, rounded out with a weird and shocking sex scene for the masses to giggle over on the ride home. I wish I could say that the movie subverted my expectations by providing something remotely watchable, maybe with a Timely and Relevant anti-Trump twist. I mean, why else would you name your movie <i>Border</i>? A title like that in today’s political climate is practically begging for a self-righteous volley against the unholy leviathan of ICE. To deliver anything less is, shall we say, borderline clickbait. After all, Anne Hathaway informs me that Herr Drumpf is “gassing children”. <br /><br />Unfortunately for this author’s bemusement, Ali Abbasi’s sophomore film is more <i>The Shape of Water</i> than <i>BlacKkKlansman</i>, and more boring than I could possibly have imagined. To describe the film as “fantasy” or “fairy tale” would cheapen both those genres, as nothing outside the bounds of science happens until an hour in, at which point complications accumulate at a ridiculous rate. Whereas the first half discreetly follows the footsteps of world arthouse cinema, the second half evokes a more convoluted, Hollywood style of wrapping a story up, imparting a king’s trove of questions without answers. Audiences can decide for themselves which half is worse. Ambiguity!<br /><br />So, my readers ask, what is this Swedish film about, and why was it conferred the lesser-known Un Certain Regard at Cannes? The movie centers on Tina, a baggage inspector whose genetic anomaly gives her the ability to detect contraband items by scent, including an SD card loaded with child porn toted by one unlucky chap. Technically, she explains to a skeptical officer, she smells emotions such as fear or guilt and “puts two and two together” to identify culprits. One day, Tina halts a traveler named Vore who has a facial deformity similar to her own, although the typically indie introversion of the protagonist masks her primary motive, whether that be distrust or infatuation. Over repeat encounters, the devilish stranger prods her to embrace her wild side, through everything from eating maggots to frolicking naked in the river. Soon he dispels one of her foundational insecurities—infertility—with an astonishing revelation: she was not meant to procreate with humans because she is a troll, designed by nature to copulate with other trolls, which of course she does.<br /><br />I cannot remember if the trailer for <i>Border</i> disclosed said twist, but given that it’s the premise of the movie, I don’t have any qualms about unveiling it. After the watercooler scene of intense lovemaking and personal discovery, the plot pivots away from unlikely romance to grotesque mystery. Remember the aforementioned phone filled with kiddie porn that seemed like a B-plot to showcase the protagonist’s profession and the ineffectual bureaucracy for which she works? It turns out that that’s the main conflict of the movie, and someone is more involved in it than our heroine suspects! We also learn of Vore’s vengeful scheme to wage a covert race war against humans, which forces the enlightened Tina to choose between a terrorist radical she fancies and a more dignified struggle for troll rights.<br /><br /><i>Border</i> has received attention mainly for coming from the writer of <i>Let the Right One In</i>, a coming-of-age horror flick that spawned a compulsory American remake. Whereas Tomas Alfedson’s vampire film abounds with memorable compositions and stark, wintry negative space, Ali Abassi shoots his troll-focused film like an interchangeable Sundance movie, full of tight close-ups and gloomy, hazy exteriors. If nothing else, this method grants the audience plenty of time to marvel at the impeccable monster makeup, which arguably deserved more attention than the prosthetics of Vice. <br /><br /> I don’t foresee this movie finding much of an audience outside of cinema-holics, but I’ll leave it to better-qualified gender studies majors at <i>Slate</i> and <i>The Atlantic</i> to expound on how the reversed genitalia of the trolls subvert and challenge binary, heteronormative concepts of gender that continually poison and have poisoned Western culture for thousands of years. As for general filmgoers, I can point to, if not recommend, another boyfriend-from-hell thriller entitled <i>Beast</i>, which came out of Ireland the same year and has been largely overlooked. Neither of these movies rewrites the wheel, but <i>Beast</i> does keep one guessing until its wonderfully jolting end, and more importantly, it clocks in three minutes shorter.The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-26603184291709619112021-02-03T19:10:00.005-08:002021-03-20T13:38:39.855-07:00Site Update and How to Support the Files<div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I may be dying but I’m still alive.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a name='more'></a></span></span></div><div><br /></div>Well, it’s been a while, patriots. A lot has transpired since the last time I chimed in on world events on this digital autonomous zone, including a Great Reset, the rapid, congressionally approved contraction of First Amendment liberties, and a (successful) coup attempt by domestic terrorists across the country, culminating in an enemy occupation of Washington, D.C. All of this has been very suspenseful and cinematic to say the least, enough to make even this film-loving author forget how much he misses his Regal Unlimited pass. Alas, as millions of psychologically brutalized peasants don the muzzle for perpetuity, the phantom ruling class of the <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2021/02/with-zero-moral-authority-left-the-globalist-american-empire-is-doomed-to-fail-at-home-and-abroad/" target="_blank">Globalist American Empire (GAE)</a> has ironically thrown off its mask once and for all, enacting a ruthless regime of Healing and Unity. “Once more the [globalists] will rule the galaxy. And … we shall have … peace.”<div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yr37CdomV_4/YBtP-0Q6rEI/AAAAAAAADoc/h14DVZUc5_ggcJpoRvDuWiGTYYh2xjheQCNcBGAsYHQ/s960/Refill%2Byour%2Bpopcorn.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="752" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yr37CdomV_4/YBtP-0Q6rEI/AAAAAAAADoc/h14DVZUc5_ggcJpoRvDuWiGTYYh2xjheQCNcBGAsYHQ/w313-h400/Refill%2Byour%2Bpopcorn.jpg" width="313" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/NickJFuentes/status/1349546665787711488" target="_blank">Take a second to apologize to George Lucas.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>Much has also shifted in my personal life, to the effect that I have simply not had the time to perform basic upkeep on this site that brings me no revenue. Vigilant readers may notice some not insignificant changes that have been implemented over the last year. For instance, this site used to be pitched as a place for expounding what “quasi-Randian, classically liberal, borderline libertarians” believe and why. After the events of 2020, I will never again describe myself as a libertarian or classical liberal, as both ideologies are degenerative, unstable, and impotent, serving mainly to glorify Satan and subject humanity to the cruel mastery of whatever group, through luck or nepotism, has already consolidated all institutional power into its own hands. <br /><br />On a lesser note, I’ve also been chipping away at the 100-something Movies list, as the West’s calamitous and effeminate COVID response and attendant shutdown of movie theaters have compelled me to wean myself off of weekly visits to the multiplex and explore more the history of cinema. This refocusing has broadened my perspective to the point that I now view my effusive praise of <i>Donnie Darko</i>, <i>The Social Network</i>, and other <a href="https://youtu.be/BPMfCJpfhdo">“postmillennial” films</a> with a bit of a grimace. The list as a whole now should be considered childlike and obsolete. Rebuilding it will take time, but it may make for a good book project. <br /><br />I would like to get back into the swing of writing for the <i>Files</i> regularly, but doing so would require some prodding. Consequently, I’ve opened an avenue for readers to help the website’s operations while helping themselves in a way they should have been doing already. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nMBk4wXg-uM/YBtVP4a3MTI/AAAAAAAADoo/GyuQGIA3gj4OLOQ5oWyo-NfNV2ywx5LdgCNcBGAsYHQ/s1352/BraveBat%25402x.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="1352" height="88" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nMBk4wXg-uM/YBtVP4a3MTI/AAAAAAAADoo/GyuQGIA3gj4OLOQ5oWyo-NfNV2ywx5LdgCNcBGAsYHQ/w400-h88/BraveBat%25402x.png" width="400" /></a></div><div><br />Brave is an Alt Tech browser created by Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Firefox. The browser is based on open-source Chromium code and thus looks similar to Chrome, but with the benefit of not giving any of its user’s data to Google. Brave is founded on principles of privacy and security and accordingly features a built-in blocker for ads and trackers. The upside of this shield is twofold: on an individual level, it makes the browsing experience much more enjoyable, fast, and efficient, removing clutter and distractions from websites and wait times for media on, say, YouTube or Spotify; on a macroeconomic level, it can hurt Silicon Valley corporations that hate the American people and subvert their self-government by stripping such companies of ad revenue and data profiles they pimp out to advertisers. Brave also has the capability to open a private window with TOR, which both hides one’s activity from one’s ISP and enables one to visit Dark Web sites that have been deplatformed by domain registrars, which is an increasingly likely scenario in monoparty America and with talks of a Patriot Act 2.0 focused on “domestic terrorism”. <br /><br />The second advantage of using the Brave browser is the ability to “tip” other Brave users who configure their personal website or social media pages to accept rewards. Although the browser by default blocks ads originally shown by websites, users can opt into seeing nonintrusive text ads that pop up either in bubbles in the lower right corner of the screen (on computers) or as notifications (on mobile devices). In exchange for viewing such sponsored ads, Brave by a profit-splitting arrangement dispenses “basic attention tokens” (BAT), which are deposited in one’s browser once a month and usually amount to about the equivalent of $5 between all my devices. Once users have BAT showing in their browser’s “wallet”, they can choose to donate their tokens to the owner of a particular site or YouTube/Twitter account by clicking the Rewards icon and then the tip button.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-63WeF13pgas/YBtZFH-c7PI/AAAAAAAADo0/tvova0flPWMmV11W0aH4riEJIthySYF0QCNcBGAsYHQ/s697/Brave%2Bad.PNG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="257" data-original-width="697" height="147" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-63WeF13pgas/YBtZFH-c7PI/AAAAAAAADo0/tvova0flPWMmV11W0aH4riEJIthySYF0QCNcBGAsYHQ/w400-h147/Brave%2Bad.PNG" width="400" /></a></div><br />For a walkthrough of how to do this, you can watch <a href="https://vimeo.com/332258054" target="_blank">this video</a>. The key trick is to change the settings to display five ads per hour, which increases one’s donation potential by the end of a given month.</div><div><br />If you aren’t feeling particularly generous, you can also save up BAT and either transfer them to your bank account as US dollars or exchange them for gift cards, but doing so is a pain in the neck and requires you to first save up 25 BAT, which takes about three months, so you might as well donate all your tokens to a good cause—me. In summary, by taking the very simple step of migrating to the Brave browser, you’d be a) punishing Big Tech for aiding and abetting a coup and disenfranchising the American people in their own homeland, b) improving your browsing experience by cutting loading times and blocking ads and malware, and c) supporting my work or others’ (e.g., <i>Infowars</i>, <i>The Gateway Pundit</i>) financially at no cost to yourself. <br /><br />In the time since 2019, the <i>Files</i>’ Letterboxd account has been banned for unspecified “infractions” of “hate speech”, thus flushing what might have been dozens of hours of labor’s worth of film-centered writing down the memory hole. I used to believe my capsule reviews on that frankly degenerate Kiwi platform wouldn’t be the best fit for this site, which is comprised more of long reads, but I have it on good authority that the criticism I posted there was meaningful to many pop culture dissidents, so I’ll probably republish some of my greatest hits over the coming months to give you all an excuse to come back and learn the Brave rewards function, which you should.</div>The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-57152533287750925832019-09-12T08:00:00.000-07:002020-04-15T18:30:45.162-07:005000 Beers On Elizabeth Warren After Tulsi Gabbard Debate Disqualification<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The new person to beat in the Democratic primary said “Mahalo” to her ohana shortly after hearing about whom she would and wouldn’t be facing on live TV.</span><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Article written by George Stefano Pallas.</span></b> Fauxcoholism, Steve Buscemi-ing, and Operation Chaos practiced by the author are his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i><br />
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Just days before the third 2020 Democratic
presidential debate, Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a rousing speech in the afternoon
happy hour to a crowd that needed no bribery, and yet they got some anyway. Warren’s
formidable campaign rallies, predicated on the all-American, blue-collar values
of taxing the 1% and defending workers’ rights to pay union dues, have blazed
up a testament to the power of grass roots organization, but her campaign team
encouraged attendees to get even more lit than the norm when they delivered
enough alcohol to feed 5000 Massachusetts supporters.</div>
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“As you know, a lot of good people dropped out of
the race before this third debate,” the leading candidate and multi-millionaire
addressed the crowd. “Some more people didn’t even make the cut for the stage. And
it’s for that reason I wanted to make a toast to all of you. Because this is
the most important election in American history, and you’ve believed in me despite
so many potential efforts to the contrary.”</div>
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Warren then raised a glass of Longboard Island Lager,
took a swig, and released a hearty, exotic whoop to thunderous applause. Adults
on the premises who looked old enough to drink were allowed and encouraged to pour
a biodegradable red cup from one of the 50 kegs Warren’s staff delivered to the
rally. Besides the Hawaii-brewed lager, the makeshift bar also offered
Big Wave Golden Ale, Hanalei IPA, Fire Rock Pale Ale, and Leinenkugel
Oktoberfest.</div>
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When asked why her event organizers made the beer free to
all without checking I.D., Warren responded by vowing that she would always
fight for Americans’ fundamental human rights. “Because sharing a beer with friends
and celebrating life shouldn’t be harder to do than buying an assault weapon
and ending it,” she said, according to what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Files </i>correspondent Albert Cahill could recall from his investigative research at the venue.</div>
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Awestruck fans on Twitter shared pictures showing
beer lines stretching outside the building, past the armed security, and onto
the sidewalk. Charles Olde, a senior strategic development associate at Westmont
Alliance for Solutions and Priorities, noted the high opportunity cost of waiting
in line and admitted he’s “more of an East Coast-style drinker.” Nonetheless,
he praised Warren’s generosity and sympathy to the working class’s needs.</div>
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“Hey, it’s free beer,” he shrugged, toting his own
Hydroflask that he brought to the occasion. “Could I walk across the street to
Buffalo, shell out $7 for a more hoppy pint, and have an extra hour to do something?
I don’t know. Not in this economy.” </div>
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The final slate of candidates to qualify for the
third 2020 Democratic presidential debate was confirmed a week ago by the Democratic National Committee. Notably
absent from the third debate is Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is
still campaigning regardless and who became the center of a conspiracy by alt-right,
incel, Russian 4chan trolls to skew various online polls in her favor.</div>
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Gabbard drew headlines following the second debate
on account of her mounting an unexpected blindside on the criminal justice
record of Kamala Harris, the California senator and former cop who decided to
run for president after two years of legislative service. Harris seemed
surprised to hear criticism coming from the mouth of a competitor for the same
position, and <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/1/kamala-harris-dismisses-tulsi-gabbard-low-polling-/" target="_blank">rebutted the attack on her the next day by saying</a>, “I’m obviously a top-tier
candidate, and so I did expect… hits tonight… especially when people are at 0
or 1% or whatever she might be at.”</div>
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Political commentators have taken the fact that
Gabbard didn’t even meet the DNC’s criteria for the third debate as conclusive
proof that her 60-second volley against Harris was a misfire. In the wake of
the second debate, <a href="https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3637" target="_blank">a poll of Democratic voters</a> showed that Harris still commanded an enviable 7% support
among all voters and 1% support among black voters, enough to put her in 4<sup>th</sup>
place of a crowded and incredibly competitive race.</div>
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On the evening of Warren’s beverage-supplemented
rally, Fox News host Tucker Carlson floated a theory that the specific variety
of beers on tap at the event sent a clear, subversive message. “I’m sure that
Warren picked Kona Brewing Company to sate the masses just because she prefers
the taste of Hawaiian craft beer, not to signal some victory to her coalition,”
he drawled. “About as sure as I am that Anheuser-Busch is going to be stumping for
Trump in 2020.” Far from an impartial journalist, Carlson has broken from Fox’s
past tradition by inviting a liberal, Gabbard, on his show and calling her someone
“the neocons hate more than anybody.”</div>
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Warren dismissed this “ludicrous” claim, claiming
that the brew was coincidental and entirely unrelated to the exclusion of
someone who might critique her policies. “These are Republican talking points,”
she explained on MSNBC’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Morning Joe</i>,
adding, “Which we’ve already heard far too much of at the last two debates
alone. It doesn’t surprise me that a guy who has a notoriously fragile
relationship with the truth would want to see even more GOP talking points at
future debates for the person who’s going to beat Donald Trump.”<sub><o:p></o:p></sub></div>
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The third debate sanctioned by the DNC will air at
8 PM ET Thursday on ABC and Univision. The political stars set to attend the
debate include several venerable members of the Democratic old guard, such as
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but in a race that could still be anyone’s game,
the Jim Crow-era Democratic leaders would be foolish to dismiss the other
attendees. Washington insiders in contact with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Files</i> are very concerned about Texas almost-Senator Beto O’Rourke, whose
propensity for saying, “F**k!” on the campaign trail has won him major support
from 4% of voters.</div>
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Fence sitters should also keep an eye on former Mayor Julian
Castro, who memorably set himself apart at the last two debates by calling for
increased abortion funding and rebuking Trump for putting immigrant children in
cages—two issues that other Democrats have critically ignored or shrugged off.
Andrew Yang, who has pitched himself as “the opposite of Donald Trump: an Asian
man who likes math,” could also sneak through the back door and surprise the competition
in a big way.</div>
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Right before Warren backed out of their brief
conversation, our correspondent believes that she clinked cups with him and said, “I’m
gonna get me… another round. Enjoy your beer.” Unfortunately, in a state of incapacitation,
the cameraman failed to record Cahill’s interaction, so we were unable to confirm the
veracity of Warren making such a comment.</div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-48773327382818989022019-08-06T22:18:00.002-07:002021-03-20T15:17:19.038-07:00It's Time for #Russiagate to End<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">Scientists say that Democrats have just 10 more months to talk about Russian collusion until they reach a tipping point where the damage becomes irreversible.</span><br />
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In a special televised event that felt longer than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 </i>and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> 2</i>,
special counsel Robert Mueller drove what should have been the last nail into
the coffin of the Democrat Party’s token conspiracy theory,
#Russiagate. Wearing an expression that many interpreted as bewilderment but
that could just as easily pass for boredom or impertinence, Mueller dodged
questions from the House and Senate Judiciary committee for close to five hours
on the findings of his novel-length report on <a href="https://youtu.be/lw2BVI9OhC4" target="_blank">“Trump, Russia, possible collusion”</a>. Like many a potboiler, the Mueller report gives a bad name to
airport reading, flying past by virtue of its titillating peeks behind the
Washingtonian curtain, but leaving no lasting impression on the reader or even
on the person who oversaw it.</div>
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It has been two years and eight months since the
Democrats legitimately forfeited the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.
Not only did they choose to run a campaign based primarily on guilt trips and
character assassination, but they also nominated the single least likeable,
relatable, and confidence-inspiring career politician in their roster to go
against a man who essentially signified a repudiation of “the swamp”. Instead
of facing this glaring tactical misstep head-on and working to ensure it never
happens again, Democrats thought leaders and talking heads have refused to accept
culpability for their failure and obstinately chalked the outcome up to foreign
actors, who they say leaked embarrassing e-mails, planted anti-Clinton <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190702044421/https:/www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russian-ads-facebook-targeting/" target="_blank">memes on Facebook</a>, and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170405044846/https:/www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522503844/how-russian-twitter-bots-pumped-out-fake-news-during-the-2016-election" target="_blank">proliferated “fake news”</a>, all somehow in concert with Donald Trump.</div>
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Disregarding that it’s not a crime to make, share,
or be influenced by memes or fakenews (unless one could credibly paint such
content as libel) and the odd incrimination of whistleblowers for damning
comments in e-mails written by Clinton associates, the Democrats’ case for
impeachment on collusion grounds has rested on the tenet that more voices, and
more information at voters’ disposal, somehow weakens “democracy”. It doesn’t
matter if disenfranchised Russian meme lords and click farms didn’t have a
measurable, testable impact on voting turnout. By the very act of exercising
their natural right to free speech and providing commentary on the U.S.
presidential race, these sinister foreigners could participate in the election
by proxy, hacking it by hacking into the very minds of citizens who did have a
vote.</div>
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Russiagate proves once again that the Democrat
Party is an oxymoron, privately holding more in common with the republican
Founding Fathers than it cares to admit. Their theory is manifestly
predicated on the vain belief that too much democracy can consume and defeat
itself. A well-maintained democracy, they aver, should have a central, authoritative
source of news/propaganda, skepticism of outsiders, and stringent regulation of
the ideas that the governed are allowed to bandy about. Sometimes ostracism is
necessary for the health of this democracy. If a certain group gets too loud
and gains too much influence over the democratic process, it becomes the duty
of a responsible, totally impartial department to step in and mediate how much
free speech said group has, in fairness to the other members of the “democracy”
whose ideas aren’t as persuasive.</div>
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With the Mueller subpoena, the Democrat Party’s
leadership has reached levels of intellectual slothfulness that shouldn’t be
possible. I had thought that they couldn’t get more lazy after their pathetic
response to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Russia
investigation. Rather than rebutting Barr’s interpretation of the document—that
it contained insufficient evidence for any further indictments of the Trump
campaign—with relevant excerpts and evidentiary proofs, the House Judiciary
Democrats <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/8/william-barr-held-contempt-house-judiciary-panel/" target="_blank">courageously voted to hold Barr in contempt</a>, pinning the onus on the attorney general,
who works for the president, to indict the president for the conspiracy that
they, via an opposition researcher for the Clinton campaign, made up. You see,
it’s really Donald Trump’s fault that the Democrat House majority lacks the information
and the temerity to impeach Donald Trump, let alone to come up with and present
to voters compelling proof of “collusion” (not a legally actionable offense) and
“obstruction”.</div>
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I’ve heard the argument from certain Republican
thinkers, e.g. David French, that Trump could and well deserves to be impeached
if he is found guilty of “process crime” by impeding the Mueller investigation.
I find myself much more aligned with Mark Steyn, who <a href="https://www.steynonline.com/9259/the-fanmaid-tale" target="_blank">writes</a>, “Philosophically
speaking, it is an interesting question whether one can obstruct justice in a
matter for which there is no underlying crime.” Even if one supposes that Trump
did drag his feet and propose sacking investigators during their laughably
protracted pursuit of “justice”, the investigation wasn’t principally about
obstruction but about whether a foreign government worked to “undermine our
democracy” … whatever that means.</div>
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On the issue of obstruction, Trump has taken fire
not for shielding a murderer or sexual abuser but for raining verbal scorn and talk
of pink slips on establishment elites, who were grossly overpaid by taxpayers
to pin the election not on Trump’s strategy but on Russian meme lords manipulating the idiocracy of America. He as may well be prosecuted
for obstructing hurricane prevention, obstructing anti-fascism, or obstructing
any other urban mythology. Democrats can talk about obstruction if they really
want to die on the hill of stuff that doesn’t matter, but anyone who cherishes
liberty should decry how casually impeachers shift the goalposts of their witch
hunts, from orchestrated treason to process crime, or from gang rape to “bad
temperament” and legal alcohol consumption.</div>
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Reluctant to articulate the obstruction argument
themselves and hazard their own credibility in the process, the Democrats
peevishly passed the Deep State baton of resistance from Barr to Mueller. Assuming
that the average American voter who works 40 hours a week would have no
interest in reading a bloated report on how Russia and Trump did not hack the
election, the Democrats schemed to adapt the report into a theatrical
production, built for digestible home entertainment. Mueller, much to the
chagrin of the party’s lackeys at CNN, showed little interest in playing along
with their affected hysteria, stumping most of his sycophantic questioners with
a thoroughly non-cinematic “Not my purview” or “I cannot speculate.”</div>
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Not even this setback, however, could banish the
shambling ghost of Russiagate. As recently as last week’s presidential
debates, the party was still evaluating whether slapping Trump with impeachment
would be preferable to defeating him at the ballot box. The central theme of the
CNN debates seemed to be that a right-wing media (meaning, yes, Don “White Men
Are The Biggest Terror Threat” Lemon) are sowing petty infighting between
Democrats when a foreign subversive or serial phobe-ist is occupying the White
House. Never mind that the candidates had shown up to a primary debate, the
very purpose of which is to magnify the annoyingly minute differences of
opinion between Democrat voters’ options.</div>
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In both debates so far and in statements outside,
the Democrats have mostly ignored the competition standing right beside them to
bask in Trump Derangement Syndrome, earnestly calling for impeachment on
collusion or obstruction grounds. The rigor with which Warren, O’Rourke, Buttigieg,
Harris, and Booker have clamored for the I-word is what makes the policy side
of the debates so unforgivably boring. We’re more than halfway through the year
before an election, and no layman who’s tuning into the debates can understand
what separates one candidate’s “free” health care plan from the rest, let alone
how the country can afford a college entitlement or how decriminalizing illegal
border crossings is supposed to work.</div>
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What would have happened if mainline Republicans had
continued to press Obama on his birth certificate instead of hammering him on
the numerous promises he and his party failed to deliver with two years of
absolute, unimpeded power? We may get a simulation of just such a strategy in
2020. It’s kind of miraculous that the Democrat Party of today has refrained so
long from making a move on Russian collusion. In 2010, hundreds of representatives
declined to read yet voted for 10,000 pages of regulations with systemic, life-altering ramifications
on all Americans. In 2019, senior Democrats are too politically petrified to
act on an 448-page smear document with ramifications on zero
Americans.</div>
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As Emerson says, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds. If Nancy Pelosi’s contingent of Dems have any waning common
sense whatsoever, they’ll realize along with her that it’s time to let Russiagate die. Kill it, if they have to.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-77914271709522072662019-07-22T10:58:00.000-07:002019-09-15T12:46:07.665-07:00Raging Homophobia in "Stuber" Exemplifies the Moral Hypocrisy of Hollywood<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">In a rare useful film, Nanjiani and Bautista accidentally expose Hollywood elitism: it’s OK for them as “allies” to mock protected groups, but anyone else caught doing so is a bigot.</span><br />
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I’ll cut to the chase. The new comedy <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> from the director of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Goon</i> is one of the most anti-gay—or
homophobic, in the ungainly parlance of my generation—movies I’ve seen come out of this
millennium, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even if it does scrape by
as a mostly serviceable and sterile buddy cop excursion, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> constitutes a bright and fascinating beacon of the
rhetorical hypocrisy endemic in Hollywood, who admonish Middle America for holding
retrograde or taboo values while fiddling with those same values in their
productions and laughing all the way to the bank.</div>
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When I excoriate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> as a vehicle of moral hypocrisy, I’m mostly referring to the
personality of star Kumail Nanjiani, whose predilection for using Twitter as a
soapbox inevitably creates a sizable gap between his public persona and his
career choices. The Pakistani-American comedian has long exploited
his limited capital from the best show on television (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Silicon Valley</i>) and his effective immunity as a member of the
establishment to take pot shots at conservatives online, railing against <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170910180936/https:/twitter.com/kumailn/status/892978702820102144" target="_blank">transgender jokes</a>, <a href="https://twitchy.com/sd-3133/2016/08/23/dont-laugh-actor-comedian-kumail-nanjianis-sick-of-your-racist-harambe-memes/" target="_blank">Harambe jokes</a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180402080556/https:/twitter.com/kumailn/status/979491377447829505" target="_blank">mockery of celebrities</a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180403071459/https:/twitter.com/kumailn/status/980618204304195584" target="_blank">police
shootings</a>, and <a href="https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2018/04/26/kumail-nanjianis-snit-fit-over-kanye-west-and-chance-the-rapper-is-straight-up-insulting/" target="_blank">fellow
liberals</a> who don’t cleave absolutely to the Democrat plantation.</div>
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As <a href="https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2018/05/13/actor-kumail-nanjianis-hot-take-on-john-mccain-proves-no-republican-will-ever-be-good-enough-for-libs/" target="_blank">venomous</a>
and <a href="https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2018/04/19/ahem-bethany-mandel-pokes-some-holes-in-kumail-nanjianis-case-against-ben-shapiro/" target="_blank">fraudulent</a>
and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170601154142/https:/twitter.com/kumailn/status/530771232371658753" target="_blank">brazenly
anti-semitic</a> as the actor’s greatest hits have sounded, Nanjiani also
possesses enough shrewdness as a comedian to realize when he should cut his
losses and cover up his less tenable comments, thus complicating the
preparation of this article. Even conservative entertainment sites have failed
to document the actor’s views on sexuality, preferring to amplify his <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2018/06/26/dear-judd-and-kumail-you-have-no-idea-what-a-nazi-really-was/" target="_blank">noticeable
suffering</a> from <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20171208052424/https:/twitter.com/kumailn/status/936315985577070592" target="_blank">Nazi
Derangement Syndrome</a>. Without detailing the unbroken timeline of every <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150227201834/https:/twitter.com/kumailn" target="_blank">patronizing
tweet</a> Nanjiani has penned or the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190716235732/https:/www.indiewire.com/2019/06/dave-bautista-homophobic-bishop-rhode-island-gay-pride-1202146806/" target="_blank">less
occasional</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190717001422/https:/twitter.com/DaveBautista/status/1033205492011749376" target="_blank">political
statements</a> of co-star Dave Bautista, suffice it to say that both outwardly
progressive and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170912002655/https:/twitter.com/kumailn/status/902654926291177476" target="_blank">pro-gay</a>
leading men have made themselves party to a comedy that has more laughs at
homosexual stereotypes than <a href="https://penthousemagazine.com/does-judd-apatow-deserve-to-be-cancelled/" target="_blank">a Judd Apatow joint</a>.</div>
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Nanjiani plays a sporting goods store worker who
moonlights as an Uber driver and exhibits all of the soy boy characteristics
that have pervaded the actor’s career since his 2013 stand-up special, “Beta
Male”. Unwillingly branded with the pet name Stu-ber, Stu has an iPod loaded
with “everything”, drives an all-electric vehicle, unironically uses words like
“problematic” and “queen”, squeals in excitement over the music of Sade, and
responds to harsh criticism with the firm riposte of, “You do your thing, I’ll
just go f*** myself.” On top of these traits, he also has a strong <a href="https://youtu.be/bIYfr_9Zpwk?t=10m43s" target="_blank">case of the notgays</a>, struggling to express his feelings to his long-time girl friend as she
appears to be getting involved with a black man—a subplot for which I shouldn’t have to spell out the unspoken racial baggage.</div>
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On the other side of the masculinity spectrum falls
the muscle-bound and spartan Bautista, whom I suspect general audiences will
only vaguely recognize as Drax from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guardians
of the Galaxy</i>. LAPD officer Vic Manning is the apotheosis of stone cold
beefcake (it’s even encoded in his name) yet is made dependent on Stu’s driving
after undergoing laser eye surgery renders him legally blind. The personality
clash between these two figures—a sniveling nu-male wiseass and an emotionally
pent-up tough guy—supplies most of the movie’s humor and heart. In fact, the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-stuber-dave-bautista-kumail-nanjiani-20190703-story.html" target="_blank">director</a>,
<a href="https://twitter.com/JohnFDaley/status/1137529063998873601" target="_blank">producers</a>,
and <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/kumail-nanjiani-dave-bautista-taking-toxic-masculinity-stuber-1223772" target="_blank">cast</a>
seem all too happy to entertain readings of the film as a treatise on toxic
masculinity, one in which the sensitive Stu teaches Vic to let go of his aggressive
impulses and spend more time with his daughter. To any member of the public
who’s seen the film, such headlines will look more like desperate deflections from
the traditional gender politics of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i>
than an accurate reflection of whatever’s on its mind.</div>
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The arguable centerpiece of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i>’s hilarity plays out in a gay strip club, where Vic is
promptly lavished with unrequited attention. As his passenger questions the
manager of the place, Stu gets into a conversation with one of the brawny
performers, who reveals a Hillary 2016 tattoo on his back. “She was up by 12
points in August,” he explains himself. It’s a mean, reactionary sight gag
playing upon the audience’s expectations and emasculating a character in one of
the more embarrassing ways imaginable. The ostensibly queer stripper tempts
derision in other ways besides his political self-erasure, mainly by his total
spinelessness around his female boss and the giddy, affected voice he slips
into when Stu scores a movie night with his crush. His lifestyle is simply
treated as a joke.</div>
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Far from getting less divisive as it builds towards
the protagonists reevaluating their life choices, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> steps on the throttle of its anti-gay energy. Having
arrested and sequestered a drug dealer, Vic tries to wring information out of
him by force, but his uncreative bad cop drill is no match for the advanced
interrogation techniques of Stu, who steals the bad guy’s phone and gets to
work on gaying up his Twitter. “I love Ryan Gosling movies,” he types out loud.
“He is hot-t-t-t-t-t.” The helpless captive howls in distress, and we’re meant
to howl along, at him and at Stu’s ingenuity in humiliation.</div>
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As all buddy movies with any cultural impact seem
to have, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> comes to a break-up
scene in the third act, wherein the two friends of less than a day verbalize all
their grievances with each other, have a fight in Stu’s closed store, and make
up. Director Michael Dowse accentuates the subliminal homoeroticism common in the
buddy genre by framing the exhausted actors lying parallel in an overhead shot.
“I’m surprised we lasted that long,” one of them jokes. Their reconciliation is
rudely interrupted by the arrival of Stu’s boss, who instinctively mistakes their
posture for a consummation. Appalled by the sight<span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Cote" datetime="2019-07-20T03:28">,</ins></span> he doesn’t buy
the team’s insistence that they’re working an important case. “Case? Is that
what you call your butt?” he scoffs, reinforcing that it’s understandable to
laugh at the very idea of gay men having sex.</div>
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Nanjiani and the crew would probably justify this
scene as a subversion rather than an affirmation of homophobia. The store owner
is obviously compensating for crippling insecurity in his own masculinity by
diminishing that of his co-worker, defensively resorting to anti-gay signaling
as a reflex. He’s both mortified about his hair thinning and distraught at the
possibility of Stu, whom he secretly admires, quitting and leaving him to his
loneliness. Of all the male characters in the movie, the creators would say,
he’s one of the most sad and pitiable. Still, none of these character defects
change the reality that we are, in the moment, supposed to laugh compulsively with
the boss at the semblance of two men getting up from making love.</div>
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Lest I spoil all the best
jokes in the movie, I’ll skip over the myriad ways <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> makes light of police brutality, recklessness, or corruption
and reorient myself to its actual filmic merits. As the archetypal burly cop
and disconnected dad who must learn the importance of family, Bautista
continues to cement himself as one of the more affable screen actors working
today, like Dwayne Johnson if he wasn’t contractually obligated to play cool
and charismatic all the time (coincidentally, <a href="https://youtu.be/H0xZFfN8GcI" target="_blank">neither one knows how to pronounce
“cavalry”</a>). The stature-based stunt casting in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> feels more organic than, say, the pairing of Kevin Hart and The
Rock in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Central Intelligence</i>. Bautista
brings the perfect mix of incredulity and disappointment to Vic’s banter with
Stu, delightfully lampooning the latter’s media-warped perception of law
enforcement. “You think that when a gun is fired you can jump in front of
the bullet?” he says with a quizzical look shortly after they become
acquainted. Nanjiani is also in fine comedic form playing a character all too typical
for himself. At its best, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> serves
as a springboard for the comedian to deliver zingers like “Douche Lundgren” or
to revise a text message obsessively in the aims of maximizing his odds of
hooking up.</div>
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The most remarkable aspect
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> besides its overt hypocrisy
is its wastefulness, in music, direction, and especially casting. The eclectic soundtrack
includes The Avalanches, Arcade Fire, and The Hollies, but Dowse either cuts
the needle drops way too short or relegates them to the background, preventing
them from blessing the film with their full grandeur. He also sees fit to cast
nerd culture favorite Karen Gillan, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doctor
Who</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guardians of the Galaxy</i>,
yet unceremoniously dispatches her after six minutes of screen time. More
offensively, Dowse gives the main antagonist role to Indonesian martial artist
Iko Uwais—a move that should equate to catnip for action fans—yet chooses to
shoot all the action like a drunken sailor, with nondescript blocking and
egregious shaky cam that obscure the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raid</i>
actor’s athleticism. As an action-comedy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i>
bungles half of its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">raison d’être</i>, committing
to the most absurd concepts for mayhem one can find outside of a comic-book
movie. Around the middle of the film, Stu assists the unseeing Vic in a
shootout by lobbing fragile objects at their assailants, allowing him to line
up precise headshots by sound as if his unprotected ears wouldn’t be ringing. </div>
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For about its first 15
minutes, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i> threatens to be a
bowdlerized and thinly-veiled ad for Uber and other products, demonstrating the
mechanics of the service in far more detail than necessary. The two stars
should be commended for salvaging something intermittently funny and cathartic
from a premise so commercial and time-sensitive, essentially the R-rated
corollary of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ralph Breaks the Internet</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Emoji Movie</i>.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>No one, however, should be commended
for posturing as a secular crusader against police misconduct or
marginalization of homosexuals while participating in a film that finds humor in
both of those things.</div>
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There’s nothing inherently
wrong with storytellers drawing on social issues or societal aliments for
humor. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Smokey and the Bandit</i> has a
racist, womanizing sheriff as a major character, but Bufford T. Justice didn’t stop that classic from becoming one of the most successful and quintessentially American comedies
of all time. It’s unfortunate to see a generation of artists either so detached
from the final cause of comedy—to address real problems in a safe and unifying
medium—or so assured of their moral superiority that they don’t care about
philosophical consistency in their art, knowing their blue check mark will
exonerate them of any forbidden jokes.</div>
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In an ocean of uninspired,
bland franchise films that take no risks, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i>
stands as a rare and teachable monument to the arrogance and privilege of Hollywood elites; it’s
OK for them to laugh at protected groups of people or controversial topics because they
consider themselves “allies”, but anyone else who partakes in or contributes to
these comedic spaces is problematic, hateful, on the wrong side of history, etc.
It’s only fitting that the homophobic, backwards, toxically masculine masses of
the country should stay home and condemn <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stuber</i>
to implode as <a href="https://deadline.com/2019/07/spider-man-far-from-home-crawl-stuber-weekend-box-office-1202645451/" target="_blank">Disney-Fox’s second consecutive bomb after <i>Dark Phoenix</i></a>.</div>
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Have interconnected
franchise films driven the big-screen comedy into effective extinction, or have
Americans just grown tired of puritanical authoritarians masquerading as
comedians who blather on endlessly about “hate speech” and the various -isms and don’t even believe
in comedy? I think the rejection of <i>Stuber</i> suggests the latter.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XANKnCIHU_M/XTTbz9csnJI/AAAAAAAADjg/ne3HM_-MRpA_nsdsudCpSGoTUZjLr3nOACLcBGAs/s1600/Kumail%2BTweet%2BCollage%2B3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1020" data-original-width="1400" height="466" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XANKnCIHU_M/XTTbz9csnJI/AAAAAAAADjg/ne3HM_-MRpA_nsdsudCpSGoTUZjLr3nOACLcBGAs/s640/Kumail%2BTweet%2BCollage%2B3.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-52908663248120090632019-07-18T06:31:00.002-07:002023-06-17T14:53:11.992-07:00Criterion Collection #1000 Revealed: Inside the Most Complete MCU Box Set to Date<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">After days of nail-biting tension, Criterion fans can finally bury their fears and pre-order spine #1000.</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6IsWoUEs2x0/XTBootFSJFI/AAAAAAAADiU/Dh_KYs_rR6QfKqA7ofsTkI__iI_uwtp8wCLcBGAs/s1600/Criterion%2B1000.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="934" data-original-width="746" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6IsWoUEs2x0/XTBootFSJFI/AAAAAAAADiU/Dh_KYs_rR6QfKqA7ofsTkI__iI_uwtp8wCLcBGAs/s400/Criterion%2B1000.jpg" width="319" /></a></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Article written by George Stefano Pallas.</span></b> Cinephilia and unhealthy hoarding practiced by the author are his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i></div>
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<br />
On July 15, 2019, an insatiable panic descended on
the streets of Facebook, Film Twitter, Instagram, and the customer service
inbox of Criterion. For as long as time immemorial, it had been
tradition for the New York-based film restoration and home video company to unveil
a new line-up of forthcoming releases on the 15th day of the month,
usually no later than 4PM PT. This time, however, metropolitan white-collar workers
and arts students furiously pounding the refresh button at their desks were gathering that something had gone terribly wrong at Criterion HQ. All lines
of communication were down, and the evening passed with not so much as a mysterious tweet
from The Big C.</div>
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Criterion aficionados had begun to register unease
well before the day of the announcement because of the unique stakes at hand.
The last month’s update had concluded on Ernst Lubitsch’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cluny Brown</i> as the 997th spine number in the collection,
virtually ensuring a shockwave of anticipation for the next batch of titles.
What would receive the honor of sporting the 1000th spine in the
most esteemed, selective, and coveted American video catalogue, celebrated by
many as “film school in a box”?</div>
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A disturbance rippled throughout the cinephile community.
How could this edition possibly top such releases as the 39-film Ingmar Bergman
box set, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">100 Years of Olympic Films:
1912-2012</i>, or the iconic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Salò, or the
120 Days of Sodom</i>? Some proposed that a comprehensive Akira Kurosawa
collection would be the easiest path for Criterion to take. Others cynically hypothesized
that the company would release yet another version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Citizen Kane</i>, caving in to popular consensus.</div>
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After days of the most nail-biting tension observable
outside a De Palma film, Criterion fans can finally lay aside their baseless fears and pre-order spine #1000, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Early Marvel
Cinematic Universe: The Infinity Saga</i>. When asked by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Files</i> to explain what caused the delay,
CEO Jonathan B. Turell stated that Criterion places “immense value in
perfectionism” and “wanted to display a level of love and craftsmanship in the release’s presentation proportional to the films themselves.” They also had to decide upon a fair price point that wouldn’t be prohibitive to consumers while still
reflecting the high quality of the Criterion brand.</div>
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Given the company’s mission of “publishing
important classic and contemporary films from around the world,” the collected
first, second, and third phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) should appease
Criterion fans as the only logical contender for this incredible milestone. At
the time of writing, the MCU is by a wide margin the highest-grossing cinematic franchise
of all time, and within a week or two it will also include the highest-grossing
film of all time. Criterion is designating the first 22 films in the epic,
comic book-derived series as “early” Marvel in acknowledgment that the
franchise is still young, 11 years being a blip in the lifetime of a prolific
auteur. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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In addition to its obvious cultural and financial
impact, the MCU has broken new ground in the process of filmmaking itself, a
feat that’s reflected in the packaging. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Infinity Saga</i> box set substantially deviates from the vast majority of
numbered Criterion releases by not attributing the movies to a specific
director; for example, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ant-Man and the Wasp</i>
– a film by Peyton Reed” instead reads “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ant-Man
and the Wasp</i> – a film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.” Such a peculiar design
choice would seem to underscore the novel and experimental technique of making
all MCU movies look and feel mostly the same regardless of who’s directing
them, or it may allude to the fact that many MCU directors <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/lucrecia-martel-turned-down-black-212822205.html" target="_blank">don’t
actually direct their own action scenes</a>.</div>
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The MCU has garnered critical acclaim across the board
and numerous Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture. Although
entertaining enough to be mistaken for harmless “escapism,” the films invoke
the guise of fantasy to deliver subtle yet profound commentary on paganism, bureaucratic
overreach, democratic tampering, late capitalism, white nationalism, the military
industrial complex, 9/11 Truth, unilateralism, xenophobia, queer identity, and
intersectional feminism.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xhJfiQsdOjY/XTBvK5Ya-FI/AAAAAAAADio/fNeOqPocrxAE0Hv2RIeCsTcgn2Vs3u6bwCLcBGAs/s1600/Black%2BPanther%2BFYC.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="564" data-original-width="488" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xhJfiQsdOjY/XTBvK5Ya-FI/AAAAAAAADio/fNeOqPocrxAE0Hv2RIeCsTcgn2Vs3u6bwCLcBGAs/s1600/Black%2BPanther%2BFYC.jpg" /></a></div>
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One official Oscar campaign poster for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Panther</i> blends approximately 20 separate
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington Post</i> opinion articles on the
film to say, “As a celebration of Pan-Africanism and a critique of Africa’s
colonial history, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Panther</i> pays
homage to forebears as diverse as Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, and
W.E.B. Dubois drawing on elements from African history and tribal culture, as
well as contemporary and forward-looking flourishes, it is bracingly, joyfully
groundbreaking” [sic]. Hundreds if not thousands of other people who get paid
to write about movies unanimously lauded the MCU stand-out and forthcoming Criterion title as “revolutionary,”
“historical,” and “like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”</div>
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Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD collector’s edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Infinity Saga</i> boasts several brand-new
transfers from the original Arriraw codecs, guaranteeing that the movies will
look more slick and realistic than previous, bare-bones releases. Adding yet
more value to the package, a couple of the older films have never-before-seen alternate
cuts that make for radically different viewing experiences and help streamline
binge-watching. Our e-mail exchanges with a Criterion insider revealed that these
cuts will excise elements no longer cohesive to the MCU as a whole, for example
editing out the sex scene in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iron Man</i>,
the scantily clad women in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iron Man 2</i>,
and Tony Stark’s alcoholism in both. The cuts will also mitigate common, more
technical criticisms aimed at the MCU, such as the Dutch angles in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thor</i> and the number of Edward Norton
scenes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Incredible Hulk</i>. The
theatrical versions are included in keeping with Criterion’s record of
preserving all options, but the new versions pose a compelling reason for
cinephiles to revisit and reevaluate all the films they probably haven’t seen
since the theater.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Even the titles that don’t benefit from a
restoration or reinterpretation will come loaded with supplements, such as a
commentary track by producer Kevin Feige on every installment. The really
inquisitive film student will have a surplus of retrospective interviews and
documentaries to dig through that explicate the aesthetic, historical, and
political significance of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Infinity
Saga</i>. Due to the sheer volume of the product, Criterion will be announcing
more specifics on special features closer to the release date, but at the
moment their website promises a 30-minute video essay analyzing the troublingly
relevant geopolitics of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Captain America:
Civil War</i>. Also exclusive to the box set is a reflection from Olivia Wilde
on Captain Marvel’s importance to diversity and representation as the first female
main protagonist in an English-language action movie with a budget of more than
$150 million that was directed in part by a woman and distributed by Disney.</div>
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Turell claims that Criterion’s extended social
media silence allowed the company to negotiate the $1000 MSRP sought by Disney,
who are sharing the profits, down to a relatively affordable $600. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Early Marvel Cinematic Universe</i> box set
ships on October 29, just in time for Black Friday and Christmas.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
“We love you 1000,” the Criterion Twitter signed
off on Thursday.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-85527579233488368242019-07-10T20:39:00.003-07:002021-03-20T12:31:22.702-07:00The Most Important Moment of the Democratic Primary Debates<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">The Author breaks down the most essential sound bite of the first 2020 presidential debates and several runners-up. Spoiler: it’s not a good look.</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jrwQBSh6j-8/XSari3le47I/AAAAAAAADiI/vejFYhpQ6kA0_vZAP24WLyv4FQRVHgYggCLcBGAs/s1600/Kamala.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="341" data-original-width="607" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jrwQBSh6j-8/XSari3le47I/AAAAAAAADiI/vejFYhpQ6kA0_vZAP24WLyv4FQRVHgYggCLcBGAs/s1600/Kamala.png" /></a></div>
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At the second 2020 Democrat presidential debate televised on June 27, Americans were treated to a very revealing glimpse inside the
boundless ego of the party. This revelation didn’t come in the form of
non-politician Andrew Yang’s game-changing tie-less aesthetic, chucking
tradition to the wind and implicitly lampooning the pretense of looking
presentable in the wholly selfish pursuit of power—which any self-respecting
authoritarian will wield to silence or further marginalize one’s opponents.
Speaking of Yang, the moment didn’t even come in the curious decision of the Democratically aligned
NBC showrunners to <a href="file:///C:/Users/Cote/Documents/Blog/breitbart.com/politics/2019/06/28/andrew-yang-msnbc-cut-off-my-mic-during-debate-let-other-dems-interject/" target="_blank">mute
the microphone</a> of one of the three ethnically non-Caucascian candidates represented
between both nights, not even four years after it came to the public’s
attention that one of these debates was rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton.</div>
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As silly as it was, the candidates’ bid to appear
more ethnic than their competitors by speaking Spanish—in the case of Pete
Buttigieg—or by slipping into an exaggerated black or Latino voice—in the case
of half-Jamaican Kamala Harris—did not mark the highlight of the night’s
festivities. If the constituents of these elites weren’t so committed to <a href="https://youtu.be/XBtf0YeLoxY" target="_blank">defacing innocuous text-based posters</a>
as “hate speech”, maybe the Democrat candidates could loosen up a little, resting
assured that, contrary to rumor, it really is okay to be white.</div>
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The epiphany did not come in the form of
millennial Congressman Eric Swalwell’s humorously transparent ploy to turn “Pass the torch” into a meme, because Democrats apparently have a problem with
enabling politicians who’ve hardly or never worked in the private sector to
rule over them in perpetuity. Pass the popcorn, Eric. You have no place in this
race.</div>
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I speak not of the increasingly banal and <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/06/16/child-border-crossers-have-higher-standard-of-living-than-13m-impoverished-american-children/" target="_blank">unscientific</a>
Democrat cliché of “kids being put in cages” or “separated” from <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/unaccompanied-alien-children-and-family-units-are-flooding-border-because-catch-and" target="_blank">“their</a>
<a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/federal-judge-obama-administration-aids-and-abets-human-trafficking-hans-von-spakovsky/" target="_blank">parents”</a>,
neither charge of which packs much rhetorical punch considering the snakes’ <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/06/18/photos-obama-used-same-so-called-cages-to-detain-child-border-crossers/" target="_blank">deafening
silence on this reality during the Obama presidency</a>; on the extra-constitutional
court orders that have wrought such inefficacy in border enforcement; and on
the fact that the President, via executive order, has objectively done more to
rectify supposed separation than Congress. Never ones to pass up a tacky
talking point, the Democrats repeated these buzzwords often and without a hint
of irony.</div>
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I’m not even referring to the moment when all ten
candidates firmly raised their hands in favor of taxpayer funding for illegal
immigrants’ health insurance, thus signaling with startling clarity the abject
dearth of diversity in a party that pompously defines itself by that very
concept. The Republican primary debates were never this boring to watch; Mitt
Romney and Jeb Bush didn’t symbolize the same type of Republicanism as Rick
Santorum, who likewise didn’t have much in common with Rand Paul, who differs
in personality and priorities from fellow conservative Ted Cruz.</div>
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The show’s core takeaway didn’t even surface when
the eminently privileged Harris, who identifies as “black” yet <a href="https://www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/kamala-harris-jamaican-heritage/" target="_blank">has
slaveowner ancestry</a> and <a href="https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/06/she-lied-kamala-harris-says-she-was-in-second-integrated-class-in-berkeley-but-yearbok-pictures-prove-shes-lying/" target="_blank">lived
in Canada for the majority of her youth</a>, mounted a long-winded and
confusing indictment of Joe Biden as a Racist. Perplexingly, she argued this
case not because the VP <a href="https://youtu.be/fDNbC-MzzLw" target="_blank">once boasted</a>
that his running mate, being black, nonetheless practiced good hygiene, spoke
articulately, and wasn’t ugly, but because he once opposed the unpopular policy
of mandatory desegregation busing, to her irreparable detriment as a
kindergartner… or something. Coincidentally, Harris has <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/14/kamala-harris-wants-us-to-forget-that-her-truancy-law-put-parents-in-jail/" target="_blank">made
clear in the past</a> just how important she thinks going to public school is; in 2010, <a href="https://youtu.be/DhJwmIPRmYk" target="_blank">she amusingly spoke out in
favor</a> of a law to arrest parents of children who continually played hooky, giggling at
the concept. Also, she notes, Biden was friends with multiple segregationists, who happened to be Democrats. Oops.</div>
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No, the most crucial, exemplary, and damning line
of the whole debate went to Harris in a different scenario, one that many
commentators simply laughed away as some necessary levity in a night of heated
passions and poor choices, rhetorically speaking. After Bernie Sanders concluded
a yelling screed about some inequality of outcome or another, as he does,
Harris took a long time to speak up when called upon, allowing other Democrats
to try to interject. She then slapped her peers on the wrist in a ready-made
viral marketing clip, saying, “Hey guys, you know what, America does not want
to witness a food fight. They want to know how we’re going to put food on their
table.”</div>
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Harris’ retort raises eyebrows for a couple
reasons, neither of them being that it was particularly funny. For one, the canned
precision of the line suggests that she thought of it ahead of time, which
would disqualify it from being graciously considered a gaffe. Did she stutter?
In showing such foresight, Harris proved herself to be the campaigning inferior
of Biden, who spares as little thought to <a href="https://youtu.be/VusMmJkJU2s" target="_blank">his spontaneous humor</a> as he does to his
policy statements and thus earns the privilege of never being taken too
seriously. More damaging than the premeditation of Harris’s “joke” was the
blunt admission nestled therein of how the Democrat Party sees itself and the
government’s purpose.</div>
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In a bygone time, the progressive Left may have
prided (or whored, depending on political ambitions) themselves on their
eagerness to use other working people’s money to proffer assistance mainly to
those disadvantaged citizens who, for one reason or another, cannot obtain work
or cannot help themselves. “The first requisite of a good citizen in this
Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight,”
said the progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt. To rely on taxpayers extensively
for subsistence when one was perfectly capable of raising it oneself would have
been cause for shame and personal indignity.</div>
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Not 30 years ago, Democrats willing to haggle with
the opposing party would echo this basic sentiment: that government putting
food on the table should be a temporary evil, if a necessary one. In a news
conference on the welfare reform legislation he signed, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/01/us/text-of-president-clinton-s-announcement-on-welfare-legislation.html" target="_blank">Bill
Clinton</a> once said, “A long time ago I concluded that the current welfare
system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility and family, trapping
generation after generation in dependency and hurting the very people it was
designed to help. Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it
was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.” Even though Clinton
vetoed the bill twice and signed the final draft in spite of personal
objections, it’s hard to imagine any politically viable Democrat today
describing the welfare state in such terms as he did.</div>
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Harris’ line, coupled with the ecstatic applause
from the sycophantic media, reframes government as the rightful breadwinner of
every American household tuning into the debate. It is no longer the charge of
the state to provide for those who have no means of providing for themselves,
but to provide through theft and coercion a baseline standard of comfortable
living to all persons residing in the United States, citizen or alien,
able-bodied or handicapped. Gone is the Democrat Party that cloyingly advocated
for a “safety net” in case hard-working Americans fell upon hard times, for it
has been gutted and replaced by a “democratic socialist” purveyor of Medicare
for all, “free” college, artificially inflated wages, subsidized abortions for
female-to-male transgender individuals, and even unconditional universal basic
income. </div>
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Making this pandering all the more condescending,
some of the Democrat hopefuls have alluded to the defects of centralized government
food programs while pushing for them unapologetically. Bernie Sanders infamously
lauded food lines in socialist Nicaragua, downplaying the connection between
agricultural nationalization and food shortages by saying, “That’s a good
thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food; the rich get the food
and the poor starve to death.”</div>
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With such classist and <a href="https://reason.com/2019/07/09/kamala-harris-plan-to-end-the-racial-homeownership-gap-doubles-down-on-the-worst-aspects-of-u-s-housing-policy/" target="_blank">identitarian</a>
lenses setting the tone of the 2020 presidential race, it’s no wonder that the
current ringleaders of the Democrat Party feel that their social and intellectual
subordinates are unfit to attain the most basic form of self-reliance and must be
made dependent on involuntary benefactors to get their bread. If the trendy, <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ü</span>ber-socialist,
intersectional wing of the Democrat Party does manage to seize the reins away
from Uncle Joe, then voters will have a very easy decision to make in 2020: would
they rather keep the system that trusts them to put food on their own tables,
or trust the federal government to do the same? What could go wrong?</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-7100207983827589292019-06-22T15:57:00.002-07:002020-09-28T21:11:58.115-07:00Pixar Fans Are Relieved that "Toy Story 4" Isn't Rated R<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">For long, <i>Toy Story 4</i> battled rumors that it would be Pixar’s first film with a hard R rating. We broke the timeline down and explored whether it’s really a horror film.</span><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Article written by George Stefano Pallas.</span></b> Infantilization and bald-faced consumerism practiced by the author are his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i><br />
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Another <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy
Story</i> movie hits theaters this weekend, which means it’s once again time
for parents to replenish their tissue supply. Since the very first<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Toy Story</i> in 1995, Pixar have built a
reputation as the preeminent animation studio telling sophisticated, emotional,
grown-up stories that kids can also enjoy. It’s pretty much inarguable they
make movies better than anyone else in the whole world, notwithstanding less
ubiquitous competitors like Studio Ghibli, Studio Trigger, Studio Chizu, Kyoto
Animation, Science Saru, Madhouse, Gainax, Shaft, Inc., CoMix Wave Films, and American
Empirical Pictures.</div>
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Pixar’s thought-provoking, existentialist series
about talking toys being traumatically separated from the children who play
with them and finding their way back home over and over again has always held a
special appeal among adults, unsurprisingly so, <a href="http://web.archive.org/save/https:/www.thestatesman.com/features/pixar-doesnt-make-movies-kids-1502574279.html" target="_blank">according to <i>Toy Story 3</i> director Lee Unkrich</a>.
“At the end of the day, we don’t make movies for kids, we make them for everybody
—for adults and ourselves,” he said two years ago while promoting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coco</i>.</div>
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This disclosure, along with some other ambiguous
signs, had many Pixar fans concerned about the forthcoming <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story 4</i> and whether parents would be forced to find a
babysitter in order to go see it. Despite its G rating, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story 3</i> caused no small amount of debate in 2010 on the movie’s
suitability for young children. Cultural commentators noted that Unkrich <a href="https://web.archive.org/save/https:/www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/toy-story/264915/toy-story-3-and-its-horror-movie-undertones" target="_blank">wore his horror influences on the movie’s sleeves</a>, particularly in the intense
finale where the toys are dragged along a conveyor belt towards an open-mouthed incinerator.</div>
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“I honestly think I was more terrified than my 8-year-old
back then,” says San Francisco mom Denise Schaal. “One moment Buzz Lightyear is speaking
Spanish and Barbie’s doing Barbie things, the next our heroes are holding hands
in a circle, face to face with death. Was Pixar about to permanently kill these
characters I’d come to love and spent hundreds of dollars on between tickets, VCRs,
DVDs, merchandise, and Disneyland passes? It didn’t make any sense. All I could
do was cover my eyes.”</div>
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Schaal was far from the only adult to notice Pixar’s
sudden pivot into more extreme and stomach-churning subject matter. “In the
climax of the film, we see the toys embroiled in literal Hell,” observed Jordan
Peterson, controversial professor of psychology at the university of Toronto, in one of his YouTube videos. “They
flinch and recoil at the sight of this all-consuming evil and join hands in a
symbolic gesture of prayer. It’s only through their belief in a higher power
that a celestial claw descends from above to save them from the inferno, sealing
the redemption and resurrection themes of the whole saga that make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story</i> an indispensable piece of
American mythology.”</div>
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Other viewers brought different yet no less troubling
readings to the film, including <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190622215123/https:/nypost.com/2010/06/17/is-toy-story-3-a-holocaust-allegory/" target="_blank">the popular view</a> that the plight of the toys in the incinerator subtly evokes
the Holocaust. Unkrich has never addressed the fan theory that he intentionally
used visual parallels to real death camps responsible for millions of tragedies
in order to imbue <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story 3</i> with
more dramatic heft. Still, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story </i>fans
wondered obsessively if Pixar had outgrown their original audience. Tellingly, <a href="https://web.archive.org/save/https:/www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/toy-story/264915/toy-story-3-and-its-horror-movie-undertones" target="_blank">the chair of the MPAA later admitted</a> that the ratings board had made a mistake
by not restricting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story 3</i>
enough. “It should have been PG-13 at the very least,” she said. “Based on that
70-second scene where nobody gets hurt alone.”</div>
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When Pixar continued their dark streak with the
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20190622222603/http://www.today.com/id/43543750/ns/today-today_entertainment/t/cars-too-violent-kids-some-readers-say-yes/" target="_blank">violent</a> spy movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cars 2</i>, the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20190622222907/https://movieweb.com/pixar-inside-out-movie-review/" target="_blank">depressing</a> psychological drama <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inside Out</i>, the
macabre <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coco</i>, and the white-knuckle,
gritty <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Incredibles 2</i>, the pattern did
little to allay fans’ worst fears that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy
Story </i>would finally receive an R rating.</div>
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“I don’t have a problem in principle with creators
changing over time and trying out new styles,” says Chapman University sophomore
Aishna Feyer. “But when you make the choice to exclude like an entire group from
seeing your vision, I don’t see how anybody benefits from that. Pixar are the
ones who inspired me to become a filmmaker, like they’re the reason I’m here
getting a film degree. Imagine if millions of little girls didn’t have that
source of inspiration to go to college for an arts degree.”</div>
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Pixar’s silence on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story 4</i> in the months leading up to it amplified uncertainty
about both the genre and the rating of the movie. The revelation that Jordan
Peele, director of <a href="https://www.cotekeller.com/2019/04/us-shazam-review.html" target="_blank">the terrifying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Us</i></a>,
had joined the cast seemed to affirm that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy
Story</i> was sticking to the horror route established in the last film. The
use of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in the first trailer also raised
eyebrows: would the new film depict Woody’s slide into marijuana and LSD
addiction? Or would the studio shaped by John Lasseter leverage the return of
Bo Peep to comment on #MeToo and unwanted touching in the workplace? Some journalists
at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slate</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Verge</i> welcomed the possibility, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story</i> purists weren’t sold.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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On Monday, though, families exhaled a collective
sigh of relief when the MPAA dealt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy
Story 4</i> a strong G rating, the same as more than half of Pixar’s films
aimed at adults. For the near future at least, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story</i> is safe for the whole family, with a few caveats.</div>
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“I’m scared to go back,” Schaal says about the new
movie. “My baby is about to graduate high school now; he watches really horrifying
stuff like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Logan</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.cotekeller.com/2016/05/deadpool-wasnt-that-offensive-and-were-foolish-for-thinking-it-was.html" target="_blank">Deadpool</a></i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.cotekeller.com/2017/05/alien-covenant-a-litany-of-reasons-why-it-is-just-the-worst.html" target="_blank">Alien:Covenant</a></i>. I just don’t know if I can make it through another two hours
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story</i> in one piece.” She adds with a laugh, “Maybe I’ll
have him preview it for me.”</div>
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Parental
doubts aside, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story 4</i> is expected
easily to sweep the box office this weekend over <i>The </i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Secret Life of Pets 2</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Men In
Black 4</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">John Wick 3</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Child’s Play</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">(2019)</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aladdin (2019)</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shaft (2019)</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dark Phoenix</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Godzilla: King
of the Monsters</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avengers</i>: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Endgame</i>.</div>
</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-86471090432152155312019-06-19T16:14:00.000-07:002019-09-15T12:52:01.213-07:00Roman Polanski Shares Harrowing Rape Story In Brave Speech<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">After he opened up on the horrific experience, some are calling the director’s choice more relevant now than ever.</span><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Article written by George Stefano Pallas.</span></b> Victim blaming, moral relativism, and degradation of western civilization practiced by the author are his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i><br />
<br />
Roman Polanski doesn’t often speak out on politics, but when he does, the world knows to stop and pay attention. The famed Polish
director and Holocaust survivor made just such an occasion at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival before a secret screening of his new film, <i>An Officer and a Spy</i>, where a discreet cell phone video captured
his impassioned rhetoric.<br />
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The video surfaced Monday afternoon on
the conspiracy theory-laced website <i>Wikileaks</i>. In it, an international audience of hushed and rapt buyers listened to Polanski as he
introduced his feature with a deeply personal preamble, describing in new
detail the nonconsensual sexual procedure he underwent 40 years ago.<br />
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“I had sex with a girl when she was very young,
and it was the best decision that she never made,” Polanski said with a grave
expression. “It worked out for the better, both of me and of the supportive,
reciprocal relationship neither of us were ready for, emotionally,
psychologically, and financially.”</div>
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The director, most well-known for the involuntary
impregnation horror classic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rosemary’s
Baby</i> was referring to the well-publicized scandal in 1977 when he performed
multiple kinds of sexual intercourse on Samantha Geimer, then 13 years old,
allegedly after giving her a sedative and several glasses of champagne. The case
remains steeped in controversy because Polanski, who pled guilty to the lesser
charge of unlawful sex with a minor, left the United States before his
sentencing hearing and has never returned.</div>
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“So many teenage girls end up being betrayed by
boyfriends they wrongly believed they could trust,” Polanski continued. “These
children can feel like their lives are ruined, like the world doesn’t want
them. They can end up spending their 20s living at home, terrified to open
themselves up to another partner. I can think of nothing more cruel than
entering an unsustainable committed relationship with an underage woman that
one wants to make love to. Consider all the heartbreak that would be avoided if
politicians just respected our right to safe, accessible sex.”</div>
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Polanski ultimately related his lingering
frustration from the Geimer affair to the #MeToo movement, and with it the “cancel
culture” that has disgraced several alleged undertakers of nonconsensual sexual
procedures. At this point in the video he appears to go off a script and speak in a more raw, emotional tone.</div>
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“It’s easy,” he said, “To sit in the comfort of
your parents’ home and say, ‘Oh, Kevin Spacey shouldn’t be soliciting young
boys for sex.’ Or ‘Bill Cosby really shouldn’t have drugged and violated those
women.’ Until you’ve been in that situation, though, you have no idea what a
nightmare it is. And who decides if you can go to prison for 100 years for having
a rape or an assault? People who’ve never had to make that impossible choice.”</div>
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“I never wanted to speak about my experience
again,” Polanski concluded. “But when I think about the fact that men might
have to procure nonconsensual intercourse in worse conditions than I did, my
stomach turns. I couldn’t remain silent when so much is at stake.” The video cuts
off shortly afterwards.</div>
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Uncorroborated sources at the screening reported
seeing several people walk out during Polanski’s introduction, but the majority
who remained greeted it with a 10-minute standing ovation. <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/16/cnns_chris_cuomo_remember_it_is_illegal_to_download_wikileaks_emails.html" target="_blank">While
it is illegal</a> to look at the leak in question, concerned citizens should
seek out more information from the media, who are working to uncover the United
States’ possible involvement in hacking the video.</div>
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If, as an inside source suggests, the White House did
participate in the leak, then the move appears to have backfired. Since the emergence
of the video, #JusticeForPolanski and #DoLikeTheRoman have started trending on
Twitter, fueled by an outpouring of support for the director. Fans of Roman Polanski have long decried what
they see as the puritanical, outdated mores of the United States on teenage
sex. Because Geimer has subsequently forgiven Polanski, some argue that
the discrimination against the director infringes not only his right to govern his
own body but also the separation of church and state. </div>
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“This is just another case of organized religion
sticking its hands into the pants of a successful man whose lifestyle they don’t
agree with,” reacted Brie Papologos on an MSNBC discussion of the Cannes footage. “Polanski
is an extremely affectionate, extremely flirtatious guy, not a predator. When ‘the
victim’ herself is telling you that he’s a good man, then you know you’re
crossing into that constitutional gray area where you’re legislating morality.”</div>
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The age of Geimer at the time of the procedure has turned into a critical point for reproductive rights
activists. According to their argument, because the girl was not old enough by law
to unambiguously consent to intercourse, Polanski cannot reasonably be charged
with having nonconsensual sex with her, having had no scientific way of knowing
the acceptability of his actions.</div>
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Nikolai Vladimrov, a professor of psychology at
Yale and expert on sexual development, comments, “Polanski’s case is a perfect
prism through which to analyze our sexist legal system. The erotic relationship
entered into between them was premature and nonviable, ready to be terminated
at any time. The child was not developed enough, mentally or as a moral being,
to have a say either way in her bonding with Polanski. Who receives the
punishment for this inconvenient state? The adult man who was freely giving of his own body and enabling a less independent person to benefit from him, of
course.”</div>
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Polanski’s vulnerable speech had such wide-reaching
ripple effects that even politicians weighed in on whether he should be
pardoned. Newly-elect U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced
his statewide ban on her Twitter account, which she runs independently without
any ghostwriters. Ocasio-Cortez argued sharply that opposition to free college tuition
and other policies speaks to a deep hypocrisy within Polanski’s detractors.</div>
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“Anti-rapers don’t care about rape - especially
statutory ones,” she wrote in the last of a several tweet-long thread. “If they
did, they’d: cosponsor sexual assault groups or at LEAST have a real assault
plan; guarantee reproductive access so NO men have to seek nonconsensual care; resist
systemic rape of our prison industrial complex.”</div>
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Numerous celebrities have spoken out in defense of
Polanski since the video went viral, including <a href="https://youtu.be/nZskUvAGyjQ" target="_blank">Whoopi Goldberg</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/fhVPwen3pk0" target="_blank">Quentin Tarantino</a>, and <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-356343/Mia-Farrow-gives-evidence-Polanski-case.html" target="_blank">Mia
Farrow</a>, who played the involuntarily impregnated mother in <i>Rosemary’s Baby</i> and used to be the partner of Woody Allen. More than 50 actors and directors have also signed a
petition to reinstate Polanski’s membership with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts
and Sciences.</div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-91671496450535551812019-05-23T23:02:00.000-07:002019-09-15T12:24:53.274-07:00"Booksmart" Crams Problematic Predecessors for the P.C. Midterm, Forgets about Comedy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Olivia Wilde's faux-indie, go-for-woke directorial debut epitomizes the meekness of artists in the shadow of our cancel culture. It's <i>Superbad</i> without balls.</span></div>
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Whatever people choose to think of Roger Ebert’s liberal
(and also liberal) use of his 4 star rating, the critic <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-best-of-youth-2005" target="_blank">once astutely wrote</a>
that, “No good movie is too long, just as no bad movie is short enough.” Olivia
Wilde’s directorial debut <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i>
doesn’t run for longer than 105 minutes, but I can’t imagine a version of the
movie that wouldn’t be fundamentally broken. Vaunted in advertising and
pseudo-advertising (i.e. reviews right out of SXSW) as “female <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i>” for the Zoomer generation—a
compliment suggesting a viewer who has exceedingly fond memories tied to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i>—, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> trades in a generic high-school comedy plot about
partying hard and getting laid that would be wholly unremarkable and fly under
the radar of any discriminating person if not for its cunning, politically
correct casting choices.<br />
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The movie is set in some kind of small prep school
where all the rising graduates with names are going to an Ivy League college or
heading straight into the workforce… at Google. “Don’t judge me, but… Harvard,”
says one of the teens to the competitive Jewish girl Molly, the more outgoing
half of the straight-As duo who decide to live it up the night before they get
their diplomas. Har har moments like these underscore the film’s slavish endorsement
of the money-fleecing scams that are for-profit, intellectually specious institutions
like Yale and Harvard, the latter of which is recognized for <a href="https://twitter.com/CollegeFix/status/1076492719781040128?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1076492719781040128&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fbrettt-3136%2F2018%2F12%2F22%2Fparkland-survivor-david-hoggs-acceptance-to-harvard-makes-the-news-at-tmz-so-congratulations%2F" target="_blank">accepting celebrities with subpar testing scores</a> so long as they promote the fad political
cause of the month.</div>
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Confronted by the sudden epiphany that having good
academics and good fun aren’t mutually exclusive goals in high-school, Molly
berates her virginal gay best friend Amy into infiltrating the cool kids’
party, where both hope to make up for the missed opportunities and see some
physical action. Making the Michael Cera character a lesbian is the film’s most
inspired deviation from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i>,
since Amy’s defective gaydar compounds her lack of social confidence and
belonging. However, her gayness has the downside of unveiling the writers’ similar
lack of fortitude as they lightly skip around the eggshells of issues that
could rile their young audience up into a cannibalistic Twitter mob. Teen
comedies frequently come up in “Could it be made today?” discussions because
they reflect the ever-shifting Overton windows of their respective youths. In
the same way that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i> repudiated
the glamorized sexuality or supposed “creepiness” of John Hughes’s hits, e.g. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sixteen Candles</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> suggests that young Millennials and Zoomer Tumblrites can
no longer tolerate some of the edgier, more truthful sides of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i>.</div>
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As any devout LGBT supporter would feel pressured
to do, Wilde gives life to an idealized neoliberal universe where seemingly
every character, no matter how mean or vindictive, presumes homosexuality is
normal and beyond the boundaries of reproach. It’s hard to judge what convenience
beggars belief more: that Amy’s parents, over a celebratory dinner they’ve
prepared, casually give their daughter their assent to go have sex with
Molly at her house (the most plausible alibi these #smartwomen could brainstorm
for slipping off to the party), or that none of the bullies seize upon her sexual
preference as an object for ridicule.</div>
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Does <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i>
feel more toothless than its forerunners because its subjects don’t flaunt
their cruelty as much and the movie is merely portraying their deference to
political-correctness accurately, or is the film itself a product of inhibitions
and social conformity? I haven’t set foot in a high-school since my SAT, but I
did go to a university that felt like high-school, and rewatching <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i> just confirmed my notion that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> buckles under the timorous
impulses of its writers. In the 2007 film written by and loosely based on Seth
Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the young cast members casually denote effeminate or atypical
behavior as “gay”, which was true to my college experience, as I’m sure it
remains true to current high-schoolers’. Making matters more problematic and
funny, Jonah Hill addresses Christopher Mintz-Plasse as “Fagell” throughout the
film, a decision that Rogen <a href="https://variety.com/2016/film/news/seth-rogen-superbad-homophobic-jokes-1201766398/#!" target="_blank">now claims to regret</a>. The 2019 film features no
such displays of antagonism because it’s terrified of people who can’t
distinguish a writer’s words from the words of a character.</div>
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I anticipate a defense that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> is less abrasive and mean-spirited than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i> merely by token of its focus on
women, who don’t find as much camaraderie as men in skewering each other’s sexual
prowess and proclivities. On the other hand, the writers seem largely disinterested
in the myriad ways that women can demean and torment each other, or in the friction
that could develop between adamantly leftist #Resisters and their peers.
Putting aside the utter detachment that would be necessary to put an “Elizabeth
Warren 2020” sticker on a car belonging to an 18-year-old, Molly and Amy don’t
come up against any intellectual adversaries because the script has situated them
in an idealized neoliberal bubble. Even Jason Sudeikis’ jaded principal gets caught
with his metaphorical pants down listening to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lean In</i> audiobook in his Uber car, because nothing apparently is
funnier than the thought of a white male hating himself enough to read Sheryl
Sandberg. An hour into the film, I could have gone for one of Adam McKay’s and
Will Ferrell’s stick-figure conservatives, just so the main characters wouldn’t
have to exist in a vacuum, unopposed by anyone and everyone. Some
paid critics’ blurbs on Rotten Tomatoes (a utility that gets more broken and
oxymoronic by the month) extol the lack of “meanness” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i>. To each their own, but if I
wanted to watch a story without adversity or the more unattractive sides of
humanity, I could always take a nap on my couch in front of HGTV or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chopped</i>.</div>
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For a project bent on breaking down stereotypes
and giving dimension to “less visible” groups, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart </i>has an odd habit of validating its audience’s
preconceived assumptions about masculinity and femininity. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lean In</i> scene begs a chuckle because of
the principal’s embarrassment, having been exposed as liking something that he,
a heterosexual man, should not like. A second-act twist, admittedly well staged
in an underwater pool shot, reveals that the frizzy-haired skater girl whom Amy
formerly fancied a lesbian swims the other way, subverting both her and our
expectations. In order for this scene to work as a surprise at all, one has to
assume that some girls, either by the way they present themselves or by their
facial features, fit a lesbian profile more than others, a postulate that sets
the gay community back more than any <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bohemian
Rhapsody</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blue is the Warmest Color</i>.</div>
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With a whole lot of smaller reviews on my
back burner, I could have tried to mash <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i>
into another indie movie round-up, but that would make less sense than
wrangling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">John Wick</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">3 </i>into an arthouse round-up. The film
owes its existence to the generous pockets or astounding vanity of Megan
Ellison, the daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison who has made a name for her
Annapurna Pictures by <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/vice-movie-review-dick-cheney-spastic-mess/" target="_blank">throwing exorbitant resources at financially insolvent, “important”, Oscar baitprojects, often of a leftist bent</a>, that unlike most films don’t need to
turn a profit. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i>, Ellison’s
unlimited money appears to have been funneled straight into the soundtrack,
which features such heavyweights as LCD Soundsystem, DJ Shadow, and Death
Grips, although Wilde disrespectfully abuses the last group’s “I’ve Seen
Footage” for a loud instrumental transition gag, anonymizing them. </div>
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The movie will surely be lauded for casting
relatively unknown or even <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9856595/?ref_=tt_cl_t7" target="_blank">non-professional actors</a>, but that praise also belies the insular, elitist nature of the
casting; more than just a lazy ripoff of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad</i>
without any balls, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> is an avante-garde,
metatextual art film enlisting the real-life younger sister of Jonah Hill to
play roughly the same character that he did 12 years ago. Clicking through the cast list on
IMDb reveals additional noteworthy, if not surprising, connections: Mason
Gooding, son of Cuba Gooding, Jr., Molly Gordon, daughter of a
screenwriter-producer and a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Curb Your
Enthusiasm </i>director, and Billie Lourd, daughter of Carrie Fisher, who was of
course the daughter of Debbie Reynolds. Being a laissez-faire capitalist, I
point these details out not to discredit the casting choices so much as to
assert that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> is about as “indie”
as Bernie Sanders.</div>
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The camerawork, production design, and other
elements are serviceable, though not enough to compensate for the blandness of Wilde’s
direction. In a moment that’s pretty indicative of the film’s artistic sensibilities,
Amy and Molly get into an argument at the party that Wilde captures in one long
take, woozily bobbing back and forth between the two girls as their tempers fly
out of hand—so impressive, at least until the ambient soundtrack gradually swallows
the audio of their quarrel, as if to tell anyone who didn’t get it or wasn’t
paying attention that this is a very low point indeed. What’s the purpose of
writing, shooting, and performing a friendship fallout scene if you’re going to
make half of the scene illegible in post-production? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> has precious few spaces where music isn’t overtly lending
the mood of a scene, which may appeal to its target psychographic of young
adults prone to saying, “I love music. I listen to a little bit of everything
except country.” It also features a stop-motion drug trip in case the rest of the
movie didn’t already scream, “Quirky directorial debut.”</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i>
is hard to hold in contempt for very long if only because it feels emblematic of Hollywood’s new
puritanical norm in the Trump era, which in 2018 saw one
of the most banal and artistically bankrupt years in film history. Annapurna are pushing the film as a cutting-edge romp, full of risqué humor and political zealotry,
but the final product can’t even find amusement in a high-school student
seducing and having sex with his teacher in a fictional scenario. “You’re 20,
right?” Jessica Williams asks pointedly, half to the student and half to the
bloggers or SJWs carefully scrutinizing the movie for clickbait. Wilde forgets the principle <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superbad </i>knew so well, that there’s much
hilarity to be mined from people taking drastic measures to misbehave. If it’s
neither illegal nor, according to the liberal metric of consent, immoral for
the student to bed his teacher, then why does <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Booksmart</i> expect me to cackle at them doing it?<br />
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<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">AUTHOR’S CORRECTION/ADDENDUM: The Sandberg audiobook scene takes place not in the car of the principal, who does awkwardly try to strike up a conversation with Amy about feminist music, but in the vehicle of another white male character. I originally conflated the two car ride scenes through an error of memory.</span></div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-50819897374053529992019-04-30T21:07:00.000-07:002019-09-15T12:54:00.545-07:00"GAME OF THRONES" SCANDAL: Inside the Shocking Fall of the Nation's Top Recap Writer<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">After the Battle of Winterfell, <i>USA Today</i> fired their most trusted expert on <i>Game of Thrones</i>. What got us here, and what does it mean for the future of journalism?</span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LyzUJnKe34U/XMkJOD6_YGI/AAAAAAAADgA/2u33bDKYKpwzRHTU2_9IqWrkpp_8uyXRwCLcBGAs/s1600/GOT%2BHeader.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="626" data-original-width="1050" height="381" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LyzUJnKe34U/XMkJOD6_YGI/AAAAAAAADgA/2u33bDKYKpwzRHTU2_9IqWrkpp_8uyXRwCLcBGAs/s640/GOT%2BHeader.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Left: Arya Stark fights the Army of the Dead at Winterfell; Right: Wes O'Fink. © Home Box Office / Wes O'Fink</span><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Article written by George Stefano Pallas.</span></b> Search engine optimization and softcore pornography practiced by the author are his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i><br />
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People flipping through the Life section
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i> on Monday were confronted by a rather glaring omission: for the first time in nearly six years, the
company did not run a recap article for the previous night’s episode of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Game of Thrones</i>, not even in the
Opinion, Money, or News section. That’s because, as of Sunday night, TV critic and
Senior Analyst of Westeros Affairs Wes O’Fink no longer works for the famed nonpartisan newspaper, which he nurtured into a go-to source for reporting on the power struggles and
scandals pandemic to the war-torn continent.</div>
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It took <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA
Today</i>’s board of directors no more than 36 hours to respond to an internet
furor sparked by incendiary tweets that O’Fink posted before he worked for them. Sometime around Saturday morning, users on the
social network unearthed misogynistic comments that the analyst seemed to have
made off the cuff in reaction to earlier seasons of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Game of Thrones</i>. The earliest of the tweets, which O’Fink has since
deleted, focused on a particularly rough and memorable encounter between
Daenerys Targyrean and Khal Drogo from Season One.</div>
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“Drogo did nothing wrong,
also Jason Momoa can GET IT,” he wrote after the premiere of the second
episode. Many <i>Game of Thrones</i> fans,
however, choose to see the scene as more distressing than erotic, and tweeted
at the analyst in droves to say that his rhetoric normalizes rape culture.</div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JFDO01S6xC4/XMkNqHec52I/AAAAAAAADgM/wC56ZtP1QlUJZCAdt1S1sSnTDUsHzC15gCLcBGAs/s1600/GOT%2BTweet%2B1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="304" data-original-width="934" height="208" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JFDO01S6xC4/XMkNqHec52I/AAAAAAAADgM/wC56ZtP1QlUJZCAdt1S1sSnTDUsHzC15gCLcBGAs/s640/GOT%2BTweet%2B1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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O’Fink didn’t stop at this admittedly ambiguous moment,
though. In 2014, he weighed in on the controversial relationship between the
incestuous Lannister twins, specifically the infamous scene where Jaime forces
himself on a reluctant Cersei right next to Joffrey’s dead body. His take reads:
“Jaime be like, ‘Your mouth is saying one thing, but your body’s saying
something else.’ #GOT #BetterThanBrazzers.” <i>Game of Thrones</i> analysts and professors at USC
universally agree with the episode’s director that Jaime’s actions constituted
rape, and academics have identified denial of this fact as an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ipso facto</i> symptom of rape culture.</div>
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During the last season before he joined <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i> as a journalist, O’Fink dabbled
in victim blaming yet again, sharing an offensive meme based on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dark Knight</i>. In the meme, Heath
Ledger’s Joker character reflects, “Massacre countless people including a
pregnant queen at a wedding, nobody panics; have Sansa Stark get raped off-screen,
well then everyone loses their minds!” O’Fink was presumably referencing the episode
“Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” which <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3088849/Democratic-senator-says-s-quitting-Game-Thrones-gratuitous-rape-scene-actress-defends-controversial-episode.html" target="_blank">critics
and politicians</a> regarded as a low point for the series. The tweet is made
still more disturbing by the <a href="https://kiwifarms.net/threads/white-nationalists-adopt-clowns-as-their-next-racist-symbol-yes-seriously.55088/" target="_blank">known
connections between clown symbols and white supremacist groups online</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bGCdn5sRWIk/XMkOB8UCiGI/AAAAAAAADgU/zJtUQH4RiVsqGaxtBce-z-xcwHtMrTRAwCLcBGAs/s1600/GOT%2BTweet%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="867" height="329" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bGCdn5sRWIk/XMkOB8UCiGI/AAAAAAAADgU/zJtUQH4RiVsqGaxtBce-z-xcwHtMrTRAwCLcBGAs/s640/GOT%2BTweet%2B2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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O’Fink waited until Sunday morning to address the
public backlash against the things he’d written. Instead of apologizing for
belittling the pain of the characters, though, he doubled down on those and
other statements.</div>
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“To anyone who went creeping through my profile looking for
some old jokes to twist against me for a keyboard warrior medal or dopamine rush, I hope you get impaled
by the Night King and exposed as the zombies that you are,” he wrote in a series of enraged tweets. “I will
enjoy finishing up one of three articles I’ve already started for #BattleOfWinterfell and invite all the haters to suck on it.”</div>
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None of those pieces have materialized, however, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i> told the analyst that very
evening that he was fired effective immediately. In a public statement first
shared by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deadline</i>, the paper explained,
“In the #MeToo era of heightened sensitivity to the experiences of women
including Cersei Lannister, Sansa Stark, and Danyreas Targyrean, we apologize
to all our readers for the repellent statements made by one of our former staffers. Rape is never a laughing matter, and we hold our recap analysts to a
higher standard of professional conduct than that displayed by Wes O’Fink.”</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i>
also disclosed that they had contacted the FBI to investigate whether their writer had committed any crimes by explicitly wishing for his detractors to be
killed by the Night King. “Not every threat of violence is genuine,” the paper
read, “But when someone sends a threat with that degree of specificity, the
only responsible option is to take it seriously.”</div>
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The reaction on social media to O’Fink’s dismissal
was largely positive. One user named Fiona Marrow said, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i> took less than two days to adopt a common-sense 21<sup>st</sup>-century
solution to an abuser. America, are you listening?” Others noted that O’Fink
will be entering a tough job market for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Game
of Thrones </i>recappers and reporters in general, considering <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-buzzfeed-huffpost-layoffs-20190123-story.htmlhttps:/www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-buzzfeed-huffpost-layoffs-20190123-story.html" target="_blank">the
wave of journalist layoffs</a> at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">BuzzFeed
News</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Huffington Post</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vox</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vice</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Refinery29</i>, and other respected online
publications. “Better get used to Kraft and ramen, @BestWes,” scoffed Bob Breichner,
an actor-turned-activist who has a blue check mark.</div>
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For many, however, the termination of O’Fink
couldn’t come at a more inconvenient time, as the third episode of the eighth season threw viewers
headlong into the epic Battle of Winterfell, one of the most deadly mass
killings in a nation long burdened by sword violence. The absence of a designated expert covering the bloodshed in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Game of
Thrones</i> feels especially poignant in the era of fake news and concerted
efforts to suppress the freedom of the press.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i>
has assigned TV critic Patricia Crummer to cover O’Fink’s responsibilities
until they hire a permanent replacement, but some find even that measure inadequate,
given the magnitude of the events in Sunday’s episode. “It’s like we’ve become <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Idiocracy</i>,” said YouTube commentator Cenk Uygur with a heavy sigh on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Young Turks</i>’ weekly review special. “This is history in the making, and you’re going to fuss over a couple
bad words said years ago by a journalist, one of the people we need most right
now? Are you for f***ing real?”</div>
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Indeed, O’Fink is not without vocal defenders. Several
cast members of the show wrote an open letter to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i> on Monday pleading for his reinstatement. According to
the signees, including Emilia Clarke, Kit Harrington, Sophie Turner, and Maisie
Williams, O’Fink was a “victim of internet trolls and character assassination.” The letter went on, “We believe his cancellation does a disservice to our show, which has always
forced the topic of rape in a mature and penetrating manner.” Commenters on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">USA Today</i> Facebook
page also questioned if terminating O’Fink is consistent with the paper’s centrist,
independent political stance, which makes it a printed competitor to NPR and
CNN.</div>
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Whatever the future holds for Wes O’Fink, the outcry
over his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Game of Thrones</i> criticism has
renewed conversation about the necessity of unregulated administrative regulation
of social networks. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has attracted criticism for lax enforcement
of the website’s hate speech guidelines, making it a favored platform for conspiracy
theorists and noted alt-right figures like <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-leslie-jones-twitter-ban-2016-7" target="_blank">Milo
Yiannopoulos</a>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/06/twitter-permanently-blacklists-alex-jones-infowars/" target="_blank">Alex
Jones</a>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/10/twitter-bans-conservative-commentator-gavin-mcinnes/" target="_blank">Gavin
McInnes</a>, <a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspended-twitter-over-satirical-meme-could-impact-election" target="_blank">James
Woods</a>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/11/22/laura-loomer-banned-from-twitter-after-criticizing-ilhan-omar/" target="_blank">Laura
Loomer</a>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2018/03/28/tommy-robinson-suspended-from-twitter-days-after-hyde-park-freedom-of-speech-event/" target="_blank">Tommy
Robinson</a>, and Carl Benjamin, a.k.a. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBt0YNbrXWQ" target="_blank">Sargon of Akkad</a>.</div>
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The Gannet Co. is currently accepting applications
for a new critic to write about the developments both in Westeros and
Westworld. Among the requirements listed are a Bachelor’s degree in History,
Political Science, Journalism, or International Studies and at least three years of experience analyzing
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Game of Thrones </i>for an established
podcast, newspaper, journal, or think tank.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-62124037641279423002019-04-22T00:00:00.003-07:002022-10-23T17:48:03.753-07:00Belated Thoughts on "Us", "Shazam", and the State of Art Criticism<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">Two of the most successful flicks of the year, and one of the most popular. Is either a masterpiece? Should white liberal critics even try to review films by minorities?</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Jordan Peele and the Soft Bigotry of Lowered Expectations</span></b><br />
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<b><u>The following contains brief spoilers for <i>Us</i>, mostly in the third and fourth paragraph, so if for some reason you’e yet to see it and are waiting on the home release, you may want to bookmark this page and come back later.</u></b></span><br />
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As more and more curious people come out of the woodwork to understand the swollen hype around <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Us</i>,
which shockingly grabbed the best opening weekend gross for an original, non-animated
film since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avatar</i>, Jordan Peele’s sophomore film will probably gain a reputation as a cinematic personality test, splitting
viewers into more creative/liberal thinkers and logical/conservative ones. For
the latter party, the mental exertion of dwelling on the premise for more than
30 seconds will both hurt their brains and dilute whatever emotional response
the movie momentarily wrung from them. “Why did the doppelgangers wait until
the present day to attack their surface-world counterparts?” these critics will
ask. “Why did the rules that restrained them for so long arbitrarily cease to
function, and why is the central family able to exploit those rules for
survival anyway? Nothing that happens has a logical reason for happening in the
time or manner it does, and only happens so that there can be a movie.”</div>
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The liberal party of thought, in contrast, will undoubtedly
chastise the “nitpickers” for fixating on plot holes to an unfair extent,
missing the dense forest of political themes and symbols for the trees of how
it all works. “It’s all a metaphor, and should be treated as such,” they will
argue. “Focusing on the mechanics of how the doppelgangers move or reproduce or survive ignores the deeper, more
crucial subtext of the movie, which is about disenfranchised or forgotten
people living in the shadows. Also, Jordan Peele is producing the reboot of <i>The Twilight Zone</i>, and since nobody raises
the feasibility of a gremlin terrorizing William Shatner on the wing of a
plane, <i>Us </i>deserves the same
suspension of disbelief. Also, you raved about Darren Aronofsky’s <i>mother!</i>, Mr. Author, and that movie literally makes no sense, so you’re a hypocrite.”</div>
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Nothing would bring me more pleasure than to take <i>Us</i> as an extended <i>Twilight Zone</i> episode and grapple with its ideas separate from the
linear home invasion plot. At times the movie seems to court an allegorical
reading, as in the mind-bogglingly hokey declaration by Lupita Nyongo’s double:
“We’re Americans.” Get it? Because <i>Us</i>
= <i>U.S.</i> I’m certain almost nobody else
noticed this connection. As fleeting broadcasts and exposition dumps peel back
the curtain on a heavily coordinated, nationwide clone uprising, <i>Us</i> half-heartedly masquerades as a class
warfare fable, designed more to jog the moral noggin than to move logically
from point A to point B.</div>
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Nonetheless,<i>
Us </i>differs significantly in practice from <i>mother!</i>, one of my favorite films. Whereas the latter worked as a Kierkegaardian
satire staged in a malleable, figurative environment, with some Lynch and Polanski elements
thrown in to distort reality even further, <i>Us</i>
is definitively not an allegory, and so it has the added burden of maintaining
some internal consistency. Most of <i>Us</i>’
narrative shortcomings could be alleviated by merely leaving the doppelgangers’
origins open to interpretation. There’s nothing wrong with choosing Pure Evil
or Magic as the threat to be overcome; whatever deviation from our material world
is necessary, audiences will generally allow it if the storyteller announces it
up front. Peele sets up his grand reveal in a multitude of places: text drawing
attention to a network of underground tunnels, seemingly throwaway dialogue
about government mind control, a creepy zoom shot of caged rabbits all along a
wall. When he does at last unveil the truth, though, I couldn’t help but wish he
hadn’t. I didn’t need a real-world, rational explanation for the origins of the
tethered, but since the author saw fit to provide one, such is the lens by
which many will reasonably judge, and thereby reject, his text.</div>
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With the exception of its opening flashback to a
stormy night in Santa Cruz, freed of any overbearing music or editing tricks, <i>Us</i> never particularly inspires fear, nor
does it earn its comedic beats as well as <i>Get
Out</i>, which kept the horror and the humorous knuckling of liberals mostly
separate yet equal, so to speak. Left with a defective story occasionally elevated by
inspired string sections, some cool shots, and a decent dual performance by
Lupita N’yongo, the average horror fan will disassociate from the plot holes of
<i>Us</i> by playing spot-the-film-reference
(There’s <i>Funny Games</i>! And there’s the
’78 <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i>!)
and later gawk at the onslaught of utterly shameless rave reviews penned by
professional journalists.</div>
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Has another movie’s point more expertly eluded its
target audience than that of <i>Get Out</i>?
A rare film from mainline Hollywood to reach across the partisan divide,
Peele’s directorial debut <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/05/01/get-out-review/" target="_blank">spoke to certain</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2017/02/22/liberalism-gets-a-gleeful-slashing-in-get-out/" target="_blank">pockets</a> <a href="https://freebeacon.com/blog/get-out-2017s-most-surprising-defense-of-racial-profiling/" target="_blank">of conservatism</a> by
relentlessly taking the piss out of guilt-ridden white liberals. An Obama-era
update of <i>Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner</i>,
<i>Get Out</i> supplants the disapproving
and prejudiced family of the Sydney Poitiet original with a no less bigoted
progressive cabal, who aggressively ingratiate themselves to the protagonist and
flaunt their racial wokeness. “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I
could,” Mr. Armitage confides to his daughter’s black boyfriend, Chris, with no
pretext whatsoever. “Best president in my lifetime, hands down.” Later in the
film, the visiting friends of the Armitages vocally appraise the interracial
couple and make such cringeworthy, overcompensating remarks as, “Black is in
fashion.” Spoiler alert for anyone who turns a blind eye to the Democrat
Party’s actual perception of black Americans: all this patronizing special
treatment belies a misconceived ploy to lower Chris’ guard, lulling him into a
false sense of value and belonging before his liberal benefactors surgically
hijack his superior black body for their own gain. <i>Get Out</i>, whether by accident or by design, was the ultimate rebuke
to our mainstream media’s insidious language of white-knighting and two-faced racial
paternalism.</div>
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I don’t mean to say that leftists can’t enjoy or
write highly of Jordan Peele’s films, but I do wish that they’d attempt so with
some modicum of self-awareness. Notice Richard Brody’s <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20190324060601/https:/www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/review-jordan-peeles-us-is-a-colossal-cinematic-achievement" target="_blank">review featured in The New Yorker</a>,
extolling the film as a “colossal cinematic achievement” and “work of
directorial virtuosity” because, among other things, “Peele employs
point-of-view shots to put audience members in the position of the characters,
to conjure subjective and fragmentary experience that reverberates with the
metaphysical eeriness of their suddenly doubled world.” In other words,
sometimes (hardly enough to note) the director positions the camera to put
viewers in the shoes of the hunter, for reasons of tension. Such technique is
old hat for horror aficionados. Brody goes on to argue, “This world-building
has a stark thematic simplicity that both belies and inspires immense
complexity,” but even he has trouble abiding by his own moratorium on
applying “jigsaw-fit, quasi-academic interpretation” to <i>Us</i>. “The results [of receiving Peele’s inner world],” he concludes,
“Are intrinsically political, even revolutionary.”</div>
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The hyperbole continues with the beltway’s haste to
coronate Peele <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/us-2019" target="_blank">a perfectionist alike to Kubrick</a> or <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20190420052534/https:/www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2019/03/18/review-jordan-peele-us-delivers-freaky-follow-up-get-out/3193397002/" target="_blank">“this generation’s Hitchcock”</a>, two films into a career that, if he were closely
following Hitchcock’s output, would have 50 more movies to assert his mettle. Peele
has more in common with a mischievous satirist and remixer like Wes Craven than
with the master of suspense, and I’m not even that partial to Hitch after chowing
down half his filmography. Is it responsible or just to hold Peele to a lower standard as a
genre director, merely as reparations for decades of horror treating people of
his pigmentation as expendable? Was Obama the best president of my lifetime,
hands down?</div>
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If you take a film or gender class at university now, you may hear that Alfred Hitchcock was a Bad Person because he allegedly harassed Tippi Hedren, because he liked to cast actresses he found sexually attractive, or because <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20190420063500/https:/www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/21/alfred-hitchcock-women-psycho-the-birds-bidisha" target="_blank"><i>Marnie</i> is super Problematic</a>. All that may or may not be the case, but at least Hitchcock never shoehorned ominous-sounding, yet largely tangential Bible quotes into his lowbrow shock films—full of murder, obsession, and men on the run—in order to goad gullible or self-effacing people into thinking they’re enjoying something deep and smart.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>This Is Not a CW Original Show</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EJpyg5VLMmg/XL1ag7B4dBI/AAAAAAAADf0/W9gyrdqAhvo-oo-UwmYgYvhwMRCryEa4QCLcBGAs/s1600/Shazam.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="566" data-original-width="340" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EJpyg5VLMmg/XL1ag7B4dBI/AAAAAAAADf0/W9gyrdqAhvo-oo-UwmYgYvhwMRCryEa4QCLcBGAs/s1600/Shazam.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shazam! </i>left
such a feeble impression on my memory that I can’t guarantee the accuracy of any detail
recounted here, but I’m tempted to say that it features the first on-screen
depiction of a completely secular prayer. The patriarch of the central foster
home reaches his palm face-down across the dinner table and instructs the
others to follow suit. Everybody at the table stacks hands with the father, as
if in a team huddle, and he proceeds to lead them in this act of “prayer”. “Thank
you for this food, thank you for this house, thank you for this family,” he
says to nobody in particular. Then they split hands and eat, the recipient of
their thanks never addressed by name or consolidated with so much as an “Amen.”</div>
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Having been raised in a religious household that
occasionally observed traditional Christian prayer at the dinner table, I
couldn’t understand this ritual, and the strangeness of it continues to bother me while writing this. If anybody who worked on the set of the movie,
or anyone who identifies as a member of the “Spiritual” religion, can tell me
what the heck was happening in these scenes, I will append the explanation to
this review for the benefit of paying filmgoers likewise nagged by the question.</div>
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Why focus so much on an aspect that will fly
right over most superhero fans’ heads? For me at least, the noncommittal
football prayer sequences and confusion they entailed were the most fascinating
takeaway from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shazam!</i>, which is
perhaps the closest that DC has gotten to making a Marvel Cinematic Universe
product: visually flat, predictable, and challenged for good humor. The major comp
for entertainment writers will be Penny Marshall’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big</i>, which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shazam!</i>
briefly and lazily references, but the new film reminds us yet again that the
1980s were a much brasher and more offensive—ergo, more interesting—time for
comedy than the hamstrung, overly sensitive 21<sup>st</sup> century. Who could
forget the scene in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big</i> where the
naïve boy trapped in Tom Hanks’ body ushers a woman into his apartment for “a
sleepover”, on one condition: “I get to be on top!” One of the funnier scenes
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shazam!</i> follows the main foster kids’ endeavor
to grab beer from a gas station, taking advantage of hero Billy Batson’s newfound
height and manly man looks. When the boys crack open a cold one outside, we get
to laugh at their subverted expectations.</div>
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On the whole, though, the movie steers clear of
the humorous travails of an inexperienced kid having to grapple with the
responsibilities of adulthood. Billy is a superhero.
Punching the bad guy harder than the bad guy punches him is about as adult as
he can get. For most of its runtime, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shazam!</i>
is weightless entertainment wherein nobody with a name gets physically or
emotionally hurt, and when they do, we only know because they talk about the
incident afterwards. Several YouTube-based critics I watch have admonished
parents over the “intensity” of scenes involving the interchangeable, bland CG
ogres who are supposed to represent the seven deadly sins. Their concern rubs
me as ironic, since director David F. Sandberg, a man with a background in
horror, has shepherded the least horror-inflected movie in the DC canon.</div>
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Between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shazam!</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Justice League</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aquaman</i> (which I nonetheless loved as
unadulterated IMAX spectacle), Warner Bros. has neutered a franchise that used to
offer an <a href="https://deadline.com/2016/05/dc-films-batman-v-superman-geoff-johns-jon-berg-1201758630/" target="_blank">eclectic, director-sculpted alternative</a> to Disney-Marvel, clumsily
broaching real-world topics like immigration, <a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2013/06/man-of-steal.html" target="_blank">eugenics, or the Gospel</a>. Even the
foster household angle in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shazam!</i>
feels like second pickings after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Instant
Family</i>, a much funnier, edgier, more holistic, and more heartfelt precis of the system that too few people saw.</div>
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I have more issues with the
movie, but most of them were <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/shazam-superhero-movie-power-failure/" target="_blank">already covered by Kyle Smith</a> at <i>National Review</i>, so I won’t waste
anybody’s time repackaging them.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Author’s note: The <i>Shazam!</i> copy originally included the language “traditional Judeo-Christian prayer at the dinner table”, which is not at all something I would write today. As in many protestant American families, my childhood was molded by some Judeo-Christian beliefs, but the Judeo-Christianity never manifested in prayer, and it pains me to have flippantly asserted it did.</div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-19836262767560088222019-03-22T14:35:00.000-07:002019-09-15T12:56:09.641-07:00"How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" of Good Animated Sequels<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">After years of anticipation and speculation, The Author finally finishes the epic trilogy... of his <i>How to Train Your Dragon</i> reviews.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">©
Dreamworks</span><br />
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I wasn’t originally planning to write about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World</i>,
the obligatory third part to the crown jewel and prime money-maker of
DreamWorks Animation. Then I remembered that this series has been
butting its head into the <i>Files</i> <a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2010/04/2-film-reviews.html" target="_blank">since the beginnings of both</a>, and so the
completionist in me feels obligated to assess the final one, not only for the
benefit of DreamWorks, who have 90% of critics telling them they can do no
wrong, but also for my own as a maturing writer and critic.</div>
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As with many threequels that are too eager to
placate fans with inflated expectations,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Dragon
3</i> talks about twice as often as the original and communicates nary half as
much. More than just a disappointing cash grab, it stands as a microcosmic case
study of all the forces that have been degrading Hollywood entertainment over
the last decade, one that retroactively augmented my esteem for the flawed
second film.</div>
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The plot of the film resembles a shambling re-animation
of two long-deceased kiddie movie frameworks, viz. the forced migration from a
no longer habitable home (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dinosaur</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Land Before Time</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ice Age 2</i>, et al.) and the conniving dog
napper, here re-purposed into a comically gaunt and Nordic hunter whose raison
’d’être is to exterminate all of dragonkind. When Hiccup rightly impugns his bad guy principles by pointing out that Nosferatu himself commands an army of
“Deathgripper” dragons—the better to chase our heroes and create spectacle, my
dear—the villain laughs the accusation off, asserting that those aren’t “real
dragons” because he drugs them into obedience with their own venom. Checkmate,
YouTube critics. No inconsistencies or plot holes to see here. This still
doesn’t make Max Von Pseudow an interesting or empathetic figure, certainly not
with an affected Transylvanian voice supplied by F. Murray Abraham, the
Oscar-winning Salieri of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Amadeus</i>.</div>
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As I recall <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How
to Train Your Dragon 2</i>, the overarching writing credo of that film was to
take the message and characters of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon</i>
and flip them inside out. Whereas the first movie reveres Hiccup for defying
the will of Chief Stoick and acting brashly in defense of what he believes to be right,
the second movie reprimands him for his filial impiety and air-headed
millennial hubris. <a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2014/07/how-to-train-your-dragon-2-imagine-itself.html" target="_blank">In 2014</a>, I didn’t take fondly to this twist because it
seemed to come at the contrived expense of Hiccup, a young man who’d
demonstrated a certain composure and critical outlook. Having now seen the full
trajectory of the series, I can commend the second installment for having the
gumption to do anything with the main character—integrity be damned.</div>
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Hiccup’s principal motive in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon</i> was to effect peace between the Vikings and the dragons,
while in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon 2</i> it was to avert an
imminent war between Berk and a barbaric chieftain, whom he mistakenly believes
will be privy to negotiation. Both of these drives speak to a deeper value in
his character and are ripe for both personal and political exploration. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon 3</i>, Hiccup is moved to find a new
home for the dragons because Berk has simply gotten too crowded. Along this
journey, he tries to set Toothless up with a female night fury by pure
coincidence and at no discernible cost to himself, while other thankless
characters like his mother urge him to join the unconditionally supportive
Astrid in marriage, a union he doesn’t protest at any point. These threads make
for a stunningly inert narrative wherein neither Hiccup, nor his mannequin of a
girlfriend, nor the unrelatable paleface antagonist undergo any development or
have to make hard decisions.</div>
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Remember how Disney shills <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2010/06/23/we-love-pixar-the-pixar-rules/" target="_blank">insecure
in their admiration of a children’s movie</a> played up the angle that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story 3</i> was intended more for adults
than the kiddos: that Pixar was <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20190322192010/https:/www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-jun-24-la-et-word-20100624-story.html" target="_blank">deliberately
catering to college students</a> who grew up with the VHS tapes or <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190322191450/https:/www.bbc.com/news/magazine-10636511" target="_blank">Gen
X dads</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20190322194232/https:/www.vulture.com/2010/06/just_how_much_will_toy_story_3.html" target="_blank">moved
to tears</a> by dredged-up childhood memories? DreamWorks landed themselves in a
similarly opportune moment with this franchise, which has charted such familiar
domains of adolescent development as first crushes, death in the family, and
assuming responsibility for people besides oneself. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hidden World</i> should have been the chapter where Hiccup and
Astrid, if not consummate their love on a fur pelt in a vivid anime
interpolation, at least have a stern, mature conversation about his roommate
Toothless and whether it’s time for the best friends to separate and start
their own families. Instead of advancing the nuanced human relationships that arguably
pushed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon</i> to the top of the
DreamWorks pyramid, writer-director Dean DeBlois took the easy route and
focused on a nonverbal mating game between two adorable, wide-eyed fairy tale
creatures. It appears the easy route might have reaped the greatest spoils, as trailers emphasizing the meet-cute of Toothless and the girl dragon helped <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon 3</i> capture <a href="https://deadline.com/2019/02/weekend-box-office-how-to-train-your-dragon-dwayne-johnson-fighting-with-my-family-1202562635/" target="_blank">the
best opening weekend of the trilogy.</a></div>
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Granting this is a trivial cartoon made for
children with no insight to proffer on the human condition, can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hidden World</i> get any credit for the
dragons? The first movie achieved a fine balance of making the Vikings’ nemeses
colorful and loveable but also nonhuman and dangerous. One could understand why
the warriors dreaded the beasts even while rooting for Hiccup to show them the
error of their ways. By the time we get to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon
3</i>, commercial interests have swallowed any mythical grandeur, physicality,
or distinctive traits left to the dragons, reducing them to a throng of
loveable doglike pets ready to be peddled as plush toys and action figures.
Toothless gets to keep some smidgeon of personality, but he himself suffers an
anthropomorphic makeover, no longer believable as a legendary king among
monsters.</div>
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A lot of people have lauded the animation work in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon 3</i>, the lowest-budgeted entry, as
the best in the series, in large part because Toothless draws a picture in a
sand bank that looks exactly like real sand. If higher polygon counts or more
realistic hair and grass are someone’s main metric of good animation, then I
wouldn’t know how to convince such a person that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon</i>’s animation has visibly soured over the years. When <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Incredibles 2</i> came out, some critics
seized the occasion to note <a href="https://youtu.be/WzNIyoMmjQ4" target="_blank">how far CGI has advanced</a> since the comparatively
rudimentary<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Incredibles</i>; how long
will it take popular consensus to grow disenchanted with the computer graphics
in DreamWorks’ grand finale? Preoccupation with 3D animation “detail” or
“realism” seems a uniquely American foible. Films like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Akira</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghost in the Shell</i>,
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Princess Mononoke</i> look just as
impressive today as they did in the ’90s, having put most of their chips in
technology that isn’t aging rapidly. Even the first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon</i> can lord its darker, more intricate lighting and shadows
over <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hidden World</i>, which
continues to repaint the world with a sunny, candy-colored palette more
reflective of competing cartoons.</div>
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Cuteness trumps narrative functionality or theme,
and scenes that are primarily dramatic feel like a welcome reprieve from the
“comic relief”. I said that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon 3</i>
talks a lot more than the original, which has many scenes of intentionally
sparse or absent dialogue where Hiccup gradually earns the trust of Toothless.
Somewhere along the marketing research treadmill, DreamWorks or DeBlois got the
message that audiences liked the hilarious interactions between Snotlout,
Fishlegs, Ruffnut, and Tuffnut, who barely figured into the first film but I
imagine have a sizeable role in the Netflix series. I would venture that these
characters have twice as many lines collectively as they had in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2</i>, not one of them being funny or
instrumental to the film. In a rather characteristic scene, Tuffnut advises the
peg-legged Hiccup to “lose the limp” because “no one’s going to marry that”.
When Hiccup informs him that his gait stems from a physical disability, Tuffnut
says something witty like, “And I’ve got a parasitic twin, but you don’t see me
limping around about it!”</div>
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So goes the humor in the third part of a
critically-acclaimed animated franchise. AFOD’s (adult fans of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon</i>) used to be able to tune out these
minor characters, as their idiocy was incidental to the plot. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hidden World</i>, their mishaps—a brother
abandoning his sister in battle because they hate each other; said sister
assuming the bad guy let her go with no intention of secretly following her—are
actually integral to it.</div>
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Somewhere over the course of watching the movie
and mentally drifting off from boredom, it occurred to me that there has never
been a truly good animated sequel in the West, and DreamWorks’ series makes it
blaringly apparent why. As a new IP that early adopters had no guarantee would
satisfy them, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How to Train Your Dragon </i>had
the luxury of being able to make risky choices concerning its characters,
choices that endowed their actions with moral significance. In the DVD
commentary track, the creators talk about the positive reaction at test screenings
to Hiccup’s amputation at the end; one child appreciated that the protagonist
“lost something, but he gained so much more”. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hidden World</i> doesn’t have the same benefit because the
filmmakers have to skirt around inflicting terror upon children, who are
conditioned by witless media outlets and a consumerist culture to “identify”
with or “look up to” unattainable fantasy characters. How can a director like
Deblois sleep knowing that he may have corrupted, maimed, or misrepresented a
figure who brings joy to millions of people? It’s easier just to do nothing
with him.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How to
Train Your Dragon</i>, Hiccup’s courage and commitment to Berk cost him a limb.
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon 2</i>, his arrogance cost him
his father, even if Stoick’s death didn’t loom over the film to a great extent.
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dragon 3</i>, Hiccup tries to
sacrifice his own life to save Toothless, but ten seconds later the movie saves
them both miraculously anyway, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Last Jedi</i>-style.
Some days later, Hiccup marries Astrid and says a final goodbye to Toothless,
himself involved in a serious relationship with the girl dragon. Here the movie
could have ended on a beautiful callback to the first film’s training scene, signifying
that our friendships irrevocably change and bless us even when our friends must
journey elsewhere, never to see us again.</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hidden
World</i>, however, is too coy to end on such a poetic note, or to suggest that
the hero’s best friend could actually be his wife. Instead we get a
manipulative, happy-go-lucky epilogue in which a bearded Hiccup and his
offspring reunite with Toothless and his offspring and they all go flying
together above the clouds while John Powell’s theme music swells. Nothing
ventured, nothing, for me at least, gained.</div>
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The CGI was good, though, so I’ll give it an A-,
slightly below what I gave <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Captain Marvel</i>,
which is also decent and entertaining despite its slight deficiencies in
comedy, drama, romance, action, suspense, acting, writing, editing,
cinematography, makeup, and shot composition. Please support these films.</div>
</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-89880699450056026662018-10-05T14:46:00.000-07:002019-09-15T12:57:12.905-07:00"A Private War" Review – Indie Movie Round-up #2<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">A Private War dispenses the most punishing kind of Oscar bait with on-the-nose politics and excessive reverence for its subject Marie Colvin. Also reviewed: Mandy and The Sisters Brothers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>War as Chore</b></span><br />
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<i>A Private War</i> is the kind of sadistic movie to spoil its ending within the very first shot and continue spoiling it doggedly only to stretch out its climax forever when it finally gets to that point. The camera glides up and away from a debilitated courtyard to reveal a Syrian city blanketed in a haze of dust, as Rosamund Pike speaks some voiceover that may or may not prove important later on. The rest of the movie hopscotches from one Middle-eastern conflict to another, each location change accompanied by a title card that suspiciously notes how many years remain until Homs, Syria. This basic editing syntax enables even those unfamiliar with the real journalist Marie Colvin to deduce that she will absolutely die in Syria, which wouldn’t be such a problem if the movie didn’t take nearly two excruciating hours to get there.<br />
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Anyone who had qualms with the pacing of <i>Adrift</i>, <i>The Impossible</i>, or <i>Lone Survivor</i> is bound to suffer at <i>A Private War</i>, to an even more grueling degree; whereas those true stories carried the implicit guarantee of survival and triumph by the fact that someone lived to write about them, this one relentlessly portends death and failure. It exemplifies a prestige picture cousin to lowbrow slasher films, except there is no final girl, and the sweet release of violent closure only comes with the requisite face reveals before the credits. In the final act, Colvin bunkers down in a chiseled, hardly intact building along with other news reporters and Syrian rebels. After she broadcasts footage of a dying child to Anderson Cooper in impeccable movie fashion (the roof above her threatens to collapse), her cameraman moves to evacuate, considering their mission accomplished, but Colvin wants to stay and “help” by taking more pictures of corpses and shrapnel victims. This difference of priorities induces a drawn-out sequence of running back and forth in a missile rainstorm, culminating in the effective suicide of a protagonist whose agenda and plan of action we cannot begin to comprehend.<br />
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<i>A Private War</i> holds such contempt for the time and intelligence of its audience that it basically demands outside homework to answer what its heroine hoped to achieve. Normally one of these biopics ravenous for awards would include a scene concisely establishing what compels the main character. <i><a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2015/05/best-movies-of-the-year-part-2.html" target="_blank">American Sniper</a></i>, <i>Hacksaw Ridge</i>, <i>The Social Network</i>, and even <i>Spotlight</i> all leap to mind as true-story films that summarily supply a motive for their subjects. Screenwriter Arash Amel, on the other hand, makes the avant-garde decision to start his script <i>in media res</i> and never work his way back to the chronological beginning. How does Colvin define the terms of her own success, and why does she choose to put her life on the line for the negligible gains of <a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2014/02/squeamish-girl-nation_17.html" target="_blank">“gruesome photos”</a> that sissified networks won’t air anyway? “I see it so you don’t have to,” she barks, in a pretty damning comment on mass media in 2018, when merely looking for a concrete chain of events in Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, etc. is sufficient grounds to label someone a purveyor of Hate Speech.<br />
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Again, what is the narrative question at play in <i>A Private War</i>, and what are the stakes? Colvin has no personal connections, unlike in those aforementioned pictures, nor does director Matthew Heineman show any tangible policy impact of her work. Instead he makes sure we notice in virtually every scene that she’s a smoker and an alcoholic, and lest we fail to connect the dots ourselves, he even politely spells out the subtext of sorts. Towards the middle of the film, Pike prattles something like, “I am repelled by war zones, yet feel compelled to be there,” which causes her astute cameraman to share an epiphany: “It’s because you’re addicted to it!” I noted on my screener form that this dialogue, if anything, should have been stricken from the movie. Little did I know that Aviron Pictures had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTf0Lc5YAcc" target="_blank">already cut together a trailer</a> with the very same Eureka moment as its centerpiece. Why hold a test screening for marketing research if you’ve already committed to an ad campaign and set it in motion?<br />
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Taken as a cautionary tale about addiction, the worst possible outcome of this drama is that Colvin goes through metaphorical withdrawal from lack of death and suffering, while the best is that her story outrages some pundits on an irrelevant entertainment channel. Sensing that the movie could use a more viable emotional core beyond its <i>Giver</i>-esque delusions of grandeur—sparing peasants the pain of having to witness the troubles of the world—, Amel decided to insert a romantic partner in the form of Stanley Tucci. <i>A Private War </i>attempts to wring some personal loss out of this relationship, which would ring more truly if Colvin didn’t exhibit a progressive and morally apathetic posture towards sex, having intercourse with so many interchangeable men that she seems to attach little significance to the act. Tucci’s character is cinematic turkey stuffing, contributing nothing to the literal, internal, or workplace conflict of the film. It surprised me to see he made the final cut, especially in an era when female-led pictures, e.g. <i>Frozen</i> and Disney’s Star Wars, conspicuously avoid shoehorning in a male paramour for fear of being called misogynist.<br />
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Heineman stages action elegantly with gusto and grit, so it’s a shame there isn’t more of it. One particular shot tracking the actors from behind appears reminiscent of <i>Full Metal Jacket</i>, although it’s lopped off in the strangest of places, declining to show how the intrepid journalists escaped from a line of gunfire. Pretty much all the warfare scenes end prematurely, as the script would rather wallow in Colvin’s psychological ailments, injecting contrived scenarios in which characters discuss PTSD in the most Oscar-courting manner. Notwithstanding the child bleeding out in Homs and some other brief episodes, the film largely averts its eyes from the human toll of warfare, and by extension from whatever gave the protagonist a sense of purpose.<br />
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When it isn’t laboring overtime to show that smoking and drinking are bad for you, <i>A Private War</i> eventually collapses into self-important propaganda, painting a portrait of the Syrian civil war so monochromatic and simplistic that even interventionist Obama supporters may be tempted to roll their eyes at it. I would say it irked me by turning into a CNN ad at the end, but the feature had already squandered my goodwill by that point. Yes, the politics of Heineman’s film seem frozen in the 2012 presidential debates, but the bigger takeaway from it is that personal problems supersede political ones. I suppose that’s how they came up with the title.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Not-P.T. Anderson Brothers</span></b><br />
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“It’s the journey, not the destination.” Such is the credo of Jacques Audiard’s new western <i>The Sisters Brothers</i>, which seems to posit that all you need for an interesting movie is several revered actors to trash-talk each other while camping in the great outdoors. Story is of secondary importance, as are witty dialogue and multi-dimensional characters, at least to a discriminating Toronto or Venice audience.<br />
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Look no further for a prime example of the whole amounting to less than the sum of its parts. <i>The Sisters Brothers</i> competently herds together all the expected ingredients of its post-<i>Unforgiven</i> genre, from grisly shoot-outs in untouched vales and plains to hardened, morally crooked heroes, and while that mix may sate the appetite of certain critics, I was let down by the scarcity of risks taken in its script. The story is split unevenly between two duos, one being the eponymous brothers involved in the hitman profession, the other being a Transcendentalist commie prospector and whoever Jake Gyllenhaal was supposed to be. John C. Reilly plays the older Eli Sisters, a kind and gentle man, at least as hired killers go anyway. Throughout the movie he bears the burden of compensating for the outbursts of Charlie Sisters, a temperamental and violent drunkard. I guess you could say he’s forced to be his Sisters brother’s keeper. From this premise and execution, one redeems another long-suffering, fraternal camaraderie story, written in the mode of <i>Mean Streets</i>, <i>What’s Eating Gilbert Grape</i>, or <i><a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2017/08/overlooked-asian-cinema-devdas-metropolis-as-tears-go-by.html" target="_blank">As Tears Go By</a></i> but nixing the romantic subplot and most of the melancholy comedy or craft.<br />
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The performances are all fine and good, though it’s hard to err with the trifecta of Joaquin Phoenix, Reilly, and Gyllenhaal. Out of these three, the usually comedic actor gives the most natural and compelling performance precisely because he’s trying the least for an Oscar, whereas Phoenix’s volatile drunk routine seemed more credible in <i>Walk the Line</i> and Gyllenhaal’s accent screams awards season fakery, albeit dedicated fakery. Going back to <i>Magnolia</i>, Reilly has always been a mite underrated in an industry that prizes the big and bold and transformative, the Streeps and the Depps and the Dicaprios. He provides the emotional center of this largely hallow adventure, briefly selling us on the tragic background of the Sisters family in one illuminating scene that falls too close to the end. <br />
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The ever dependable Alexandre Desplat composes another decent score, though deferring from any instantly memorable theme such as he made in <i>Isle of Dogs</i> or <i>Shape of Water</i>. The meticulous sound mixing does the utmost to immerse viewers in the wilderness, though not enough to make up for the shallow and intimate cinematography. Leave it to a Frenchman to conceive and direct a western visualized for the most part in handheld close-ups. The credits list the acclaimed Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne as producers, and if not for the English dialogue, period setting, and general uncouthness of the characters, one could be forgiven for mistaking it as one of their films. There’s hardly an interesting shot in the whole movie, though I can at least compliment the depiction of the gunfights, which are messy, disorienting, and often over quickly. <br />
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Audiard gracious avoids committing many of his peers’ more pervasive artistic sins, to an extent that I want to like <i>The Sisters Brothers</i> more than I actually do. In an era of filmmaking weaponized against the Trump regime and consequently against itself, when <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2018/06/21/jurassic-world-and-the-decline-of-the-quip/?utm_term=.b61f01524790" target="_blank">even the Jurassic Park franchise birthed by Michael Crichton has sold out for cheap political points</a>, it was refreshing to see an indie film with no such pretensions. As I said, Riz Ahmed basically plays himself as the idealistic roamer who wants to start a Brook Farm-styled village in Dallas, a place where he hopes to eradicate violence along with the profit motive. The movie makes no statements on the feasibility of his dream, nor does this strand go anywhere in the grand scheme of things. <br />
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By all accounts except for its anachronistic modern vernacular, <i>The Sisters Brothers</i> feels like an old-fashioned, slow-paced western, and yet it doesn’t reach half of its full potential. Many such films juxtapose male and female characters placed in turmoil to get at the root of what distinguishes each sex—what makes a man a man and vice-versa. So ingrained is the topic of masculinity in the genre that indies dubbed “revisionist westerns” (usually by academics who also love to spam the “anti-war” label) have deliberately “subverted” the gender politics permeating older westerns. For a movie focusing exclusively on four male actors with distinct public personas, <i>Sisters Brothers</i> curiously contributes almost nothing to the ongoing definition of masculinity in entertainment. Reilly and <i>Fargo</i>’s Allison Tolman share one scene in a brothel, which shows him to be a woman-respecter and then waves the great, up-and-coming actress away as abruptly as she appeared. <br />
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Despite the paltry virtues of Audiard’s performers, <i>The Sisters Brothers</i> almost made me yearn to be watching a John Ford & Wayne collaboration instead, and that is really saying something.</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Mandy</i> Serves up Anti-Reagan Revenge Fantasies, Instagram-style</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">© Mandy Films, LTD.</span></div>
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<i>Note: If you would rather listen to a review that covers most of the points below, my friend and I recorded <a href="https://youtu.be/LnhJiRKm1NQ" target="_blank">a related podcast under the moniker of Two Monkeys</a>. We generally differed on the merits of the film, so the podcast makes a good companion piece to my written thoughts.</i><br />
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In the time since I watched <i>Mandy</i> about three weeks ago, the metal-inspired revenge film starring Nicolas Cage has garnered high praise from Kyle Smith, Sonny Bunch, and the folks at Red Letter Media. This puts me at odds with roughly half of the professional critics whose insight I value, along with the hundreds whose opinions I don’t. Director Panos Cosmatos had formerly directed the small cult film <i>Beyond the Black Rainbow</i>, which I described as <a href="https://letterboxd.com/gspallas/film/beyond-the-black-rainbow/" target="_blank">“an extremely soothing, soporific product, bound to crush even the most rigid insomnia”</a>. Despite a trailer that portended a more eventful and plot-driven trip, <i>Mandy</i> unfortunately offers more of the director’s plodding shtick, that is until it tilts over into a no-holds-barred, glorified revenge fantasy against (I think) demonic Christian cultists. I would be offended by the blasphemous connotations of its imagery and literally monstrous characterization of religious people if Cosmatos didn’t try so hard to bore me ahead of the slaughter. <br />
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The movie opens with a long overheard shot of the woods set to Starless by King Crimson before cutting to a car radio playing Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech, which the driver irritably shuts off right as the president is condemning pornography and abortion. Cosmatos doesn’t earn either of these references, but the Reagan sound bite effectively announces his intentions: those of delicate constitutions and/or strong moral persuasions should run to guest services for their refund. The inciting incident doesn’t occur until about half an hour into the film, and once it does, we receive basically no explanation for who the villains are or what motivates them to murder the protagonist’s wife. In any case, the second half of <i>Mandy</i> shrugs off its über-artsy robes and morphs into a traditional slasher revenge flick—one that just happens to benefit from the presence of a typecast, unhinged, and debatably good Nic Cage.<br />
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Almost every aspect of <i>Mandy</i> can be regarded as a failure. The frames are doused in vivid strokes of pink and red that call to mind a J.M.W. Turner painting; while the art style occasions some scattered pretty images, it makes for an eyesore when applied to a two-hour film, over which the wary viewer will think less about the story than about the process of applying 50 different filters in editing to achieve a hallucinogenic look. The script was seemingly assembled from a smorgasbord of cryptic movie trailer lines, and the violence itself suffers from incoherent editing.<br />
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Going by U.S. release date, <i>Mandy</i> signifies the last cinematic contribution by the recently-deceased composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The wistful, bass-heavy score doesn’t sound like anything he’d written before, and while it isn’t destined to replace <i>Arrival</i> or <i>Sicario</i> as my default night drive soundtrack, it does stand as a testament to the artist’s versatility. I only wish it came packaged with a better film.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-27335276679038704872018-09-26T17:31:00.000-07:002020-06-24T19:32:16.637-07:00"Fahrenheit 11/9" – A Conservative Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Michael Moore serves up one of the year’s most entertaining movies (except when it’s dull), drawing a line between Trump and Hitler while simultaneously arguing for gun control.</span><br />
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Michael Moore’s latest documentary is more funny and engaging than half the movies I’ve seen all year, a rip-roaring typhoon of disruptive montages and risible proclamations. Barring some extended deviations from the red-capped elephant in the room, I was grinning and laughing constantly in the theater, but in a demure and tepid way befitting my station as the lone, out-of-place conservative in a very vocal audience of leftists.<br />
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Allow me to draw the scene. It was primetime on a Friday evening, and roughly 15% of the seats were taken, which sounds terrible in writing, but it’s rather standard performance for documentaries. This movie isn’t doing Dinesh D’Souza or <i>Won’t You Be My Neighbor</i> business, but we’re talking about an Orange County cineplex frequented mostly by Boomers, Hispanic families, and church groups going to the latest Pureflick, so I’ll cut it some slack. Anyway, I walked into the theater about 30 minutes late (I caught the first section earlier) and took a seat on the aisle, figuring I wouldn’t cause a disturbance to the two empty rows above me. The auditorium looked like one of those “packed” Hillary rallies you’d see in a news story, <a href="https://imgur.com/a/f6erl" target="_blank">the type to be presented in obviously cropped photos</a>. At this point in the film, Moore was reviving a sore loser’s respite that I thought was buried long ago, viz. that the electoral college is an outdated, unfair relic needing to be replaced. “You can’t call it a democracy if the person who gets the most votes doesn’t win,” he stated indignantly, which struck a chord with at least three people behind me, stirring a round of “Amen!” for gutting one of our oldest checks on mob rule. Nor was that the end of participation from the audience, who would guffaw and groan and “mmmm hmmm, that’s right!” wherever appropriate.<br />
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If not for my decision to leave the safe space of my home and assimilate with that pumped-up crowd, I doubt I would have reached this revelation: that Michael Moore is a kind of rock star to the left, for reasons not too difficult to grasp. This overweight, unkempt, unruly, and perpetually grimacing man knows how to string together a bunch of original and archived media to hold somebody’s attention for close to two hours, which is all that some critics need to dub somebody a great director. That he loudly and consistently espouses anti-capitalist ideals is just the icing on the cake. Even his ideological rivals can respect the momentum and smooth-talking fervor of his works; Moore bitterly, and perhaps a tad conceitedly, includes a reel of Jared Kushner, fellow filmmaker Steve Bannon, and even Donald Trump praising his cinematic sensibility. “I hope he never does one on me,” jokes the current president in a <i>Roseanne Show</i> flashback that’s almost too good to be true. The provocateur’s response is jaded and laughably somber: “It seems I’ve gotten too close to the enemy.”<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
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</span>On the subject of things too good to be true, Briarcliff Entertainment has sold Moore’s latest picture under egregiously misleading advertising. Billed as a spiritual sequel to <i>Fahrenheit 9/11</i>, which I’ve heard described as a focused invective of George Bush and the War on Terror, <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> would seem to promise a similar takedown of the Trump administration. “How the f___ did we get here, and how the f___ do we get out?” reads the synopsis. For about the first 30 minutes, the film delivers on this agenda, kinetically slashing and rehashing clips that audiences will probably remember from the mainstream media cycle.<br />
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Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> is how resilient and unshaken Trump emerges from a movie designed primarily to impugn his character. He appears good-humored, authoritative, and more relatable than all the career politicians running against him, despite Moore desperately hurling almost every anti-Trump overture at the wall. Once he exhausts all the more rote objections to his presidency—the presence of racist individuals at certain rallies, Russian intervention, Trump’s act of “committing treason in front of the world” (ostensibly, by shaking hands with Vladimir Putin), his whole campaign being an ego trip, the “They’re rapists” meme, and various other charges—Moore reaches to the bottom of the barrel and pulls out the really amusing tidbits, most insipid among them <a href="https://youtu.be/TFxP6-cjxRI" target="_blank">the theory that Trump had sex with his daughter</a> and knowingly supported a governor whom he accuses of “slow-motion ethnic cleansing”.<br />
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It’s not surprising that the Tweeter-in-chief has resisted the urge so long to denounce the movie officially. One gets the impression while watching <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> that its creator doesn’t put much stock in half of the assertions he makes, and that lack of candor combined with his overly cinematic style makes it a struggle to conjure genuine outrage at any message he spins. Moore’s parlor tricks run the gamut of leftist manipulation, but mainly entail lies of omission, guilt by association, ambiguous definition of terms, and negligence to conducting proper research.<br />
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<li>After pointedly (and admirably) demonstrating how
voters felt a disconnect from the Democrat candidate, and how Trump “took one
position after another to the left of Hillary”, Moore tries to discredit the
president’s victory as an electoral college fluke, pointing to the results of 7
elections since 1988 wherein Democrats beat Republicans in the popular vote. Conveniently
scrubbed from this chart is the fact that 3 of those “wins” were plurality
victories, i.e. ones where the majority of voters rejected the Democrat
politician.</li>
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<li>Moore laments these electoral outcomes and Trump in general, arguing throughout the picture that they exemplify a perversion of “democracy”. Unless he’s just profoundly uneducated about American history, which is altogether possible, I’m inclined to call this willful dishonesty, maliciously fine-tuned for ignoramuses who will chirrup, “Amen!” to his every word. Surely Moore knows that American’s Founding Fathers <a href="https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10" target="_blank">sought to constrain the baser impulses of pure democracy</a> and generally avoided the term in anything but a cautious tone? Then again, he does close the movie by admitting his revolutionary intent: “I want to save the America that we’ve never had.”</li>
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<li>An aforementioned montage gawks at Donald’s affectionate body posture and statements regarding Ivanka Trump, yet turns a blind eye to more abundant and inappropriate behavior by VP Joe Biden, who habitually <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/11/16/adventures-creepy-joe-biden-serial-young-girl-toucher/" target="_blank">stroked, kissed, and fondled</a> women and <a href="https://youtu.be/KQ-YjGmpO4Q" target="_blank">prepubescent girls</a> unrelated to him and was recorded saying, among other things, “Do you wanna know how horny I am to have a 13-year-old girl standing right next to me?” But this is supposed to be a movie about Trump, so I’ll excuse Moore for overlooking the more extensive and repulsive affronts of his own people.</li>
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<li>In a sequence compiling Trump’s “admitted racism”, Moore refers to comments the president made in 1989 calling for the execution of “five innocent black teenagers”. The film darts through this point too quickly for the audience to get its bearings, but the teenagers in question turn out to be the Central Park Five, who confessed to and were convicted of raping and assaulting a female jogger. The five youths were never acquitted or exonerated, i.e. declared “not guilty”, nor was <a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2018/07/25/central-park-rapists-trump-was-right-n2503894" target="_blank">any of the physical evidence invalidated that the jury used to reach their verdict</a>. Moore doesn’t bother to acknowledge the complicated nature of the case; he’s got 25 scenes to shoot before the night is through, and rightly assumes his viewers won’t look past the “Trump is racist” explanation.</li>
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<li>Segueing from his distaste for the electoral college, Moore loudly declares, “America is a leftist country,” lighting the key word up in all caps. As evidence for this claim, he cites such illuminating survey results as, “75% of Americans <u>think immigration is a good thing</u>,” “82% <u>support equal pay for women</u>,” and, “70% <u>want a reduction in the military’s budget</u>.” This line of reasoning is like the leftist equivalent of saying America is a “Christian nation” because the majority of poll respondents oppose legalizing abortion past the first trimester, because most people support allowing prayer in school, or because the Declaration of Independence acknowledges a deity four times.</li>
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I would be lying, though, if I suggested that all
this Trump lampoonery isn’t somewhat invigorating. Since directing <i>Roger & Me</i>, Michael Moore has been
surpassed by many internet-based creatives, e.g. Crowbcat, Red
Letter Media, and EmpLemon, but he still deserves credit for popularizing this
style of “edutainment” filmmaking. When the film stays on the topic established
in the prologue, <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> is a
rollicking good time. Unfortunately, Moore runs out of dirt on Trump rather fast, and
so he has to devise other, significantly less intriguing ways to fill up screen
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The first of these digressions comes in the form
of the Flint, Michigan water “crisis”, which Moore wants viewers to perceive as
a criminal, racially-motivated capitalist conspiracy. In contrast to the more
observational Trump scenes, this section of the film contains all of the
hunched-over walking and confrontational antics that the director has made his
signature, from trying to perform a citizen’s arrest on Governor Rick Snyder to
pushing a cup of drinking water in a state worker’s face and daring him to taste
it. If those pranks weren’t sufficient to turn viewers off, Moore inadvertently
numbs anyone to the situation in Flint by his phony and contrived storytelling,
indulging in numerous leering, exploitative shots of black children whom he insists could be retarded due to lead poisoning. It doesn’t take more than five
minutes of reading to debunk most of the claims in a Michael Moore film, but
his sensationalist rhetoric and white savior posturing defeat their own ends here,
probably desensitizing even devout leftists to <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/25/flints-water-crisis-is-a-democrat-disaster-long-in-the-making/" target="_blank">a public health risk that their own party engineered</a>.</div>
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The third act of the film takes an even harder
left turn, so to speak, effectively plummeting into an ad for Socialist-identifying Democrats and school shooting activists. The swooning optimism of this chapter
yields some occasional cringe humor, but it’s mostly boring and unsatisfying for people who aren’t, like, totally enamored of, like, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and the celebrity son of an FBI agent. In mid-March, Moore rolls back the
curtain on Parkland student David Hogg’s brain lab, which looks like a thrifty war room
in an underground bunker. He and his comrades animatedly celebrate a Republican
dropping out of a senate race, right before Hogg admits that he and Emma Gonzales failed two Psych tests to work on their protesting, which almost
reveals as much about the figureheads as any banned YouTube video. For the sake
of this site’s continued existence, I won’t share my personal opinions about the
Parkland shooting, although I did find something disconcerting and awry about
Moore’s decision to pair anti-gun marches and speeches with upbeat alt rock music. These sequences feel like the product of a reptilian humanoid, who, having no comprehension of English, interpreted raw footage of such demonstrations
as a positive display of communion and hope instead of a livid outcry responding to the cold-blooded murder of teenagers.</div>
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After a punishingly long detour that has nothing
to do with his thesis, Moore gets back on track with the Trump bashing and interviews
a handful of Experts, who compare the president’s populist ascension to Hitler’s. <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> is the kind of left-wing
movie to restlessly raise alarm bells against an imminent neo-Nazi takeover, then
end with an earnest plea to strip citizens of firearms because an 18-year-old girl said we should. In
short, it perfectly captures the cognitive dissonance of neo-liberals, sealing
the author’s way of thinking in visual form for generations to come, which is
really the point of most good documentaries. It also entertained me more than
any film since the end of May, except for those stretches when it didn’t.</div>
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At one point in the movie, Moore joyously reprises
the failed campaign of Jed Bush, ending with the punch line of, <a href="https://youtu.be/DdCYMvaUcrA" target="_blank">“Please clap.”</a> I did not clap for <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i>, but I would encourage
fellow conservatives to check it out from Redbox or, better yet, the library,
because why should truth be sold for profit? I’m sure Michael would agree that $10 rentals have no place in a democracy.</div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-50034824751934406772018-09-08T18:29:00.000-07:002019-08-06T17:18:40.898-07:00The Top 10 Best and Worst Trailers of 2017-2018<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">You'll never guess where Toy Story 4 lands.</span><br />
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Dearest readers, I come bearing tidings that will
prove debilitating, if not to many others, then certainly to me. One of the
most cherished traditions at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Files</i>
has been our semi-annual trailer update, in which I render pithy takes and
take-downs on all the film previews I was subjected to in my excursions to the
cinema. Unfortunately, because of either a Word malfunction or my own
negligence, I have lost the document containing all of the trailers I logged between summer 2017 and summer 2018, a list I could
try to reconstruct from memory at the unavoidable expense of omitting those
movies I’ve entirely forgotten.</div>
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While I was looking forward to revisiting a hundred-odd advertisements and writing blurbs for every one, no matter how punishing to myself, I do perceive one upside to this travesty, that being I have an excuse to revamp the trailer update into a more clickbaity, digestible listicle format. Downsizing is en vogue right now; just ask the Academy, amusingly convinced that their plummeting ratings are due mainly to a 3-hour runtime.<br />
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I have accordingly condensed our own ceremony down to 15 trailers, the ten best and five worst I saw between June 2017 and 2018, because as sweet as revenge is, we want to keep a more positive vibe on this corner of the web.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">WORST 5.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Annihilation</i></span></div>
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It’s only a matter of time before Paramount goes belly-up and Disney controls half of the film industry. The only reliable IP they can turn a profit on is the Mission Impossible franchise, and even those are laden with expensive location shooting and low merchandising value. The Transformers flicks are keeling over in America, and I give Viacom five years until they sell their dud machine to Disney.</div>
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Let’s talk about this trailer. I don’t have so little faith in American consumers as to think them fundamentally averse to a movie like <i>Annihilation</i>. Granted, as movie tickets rise in price, we are living in an increasingly event-based, disparate market, with the <a href="https://deadline.com/2018/07/box-office-future-top-ten-films-2018-black-panther-star-wars-market-share-1202426684/">ten highest-grossing movies devouring more than 30% of market share</a>, but I have to believe that demand persists for artistic and thought-provoking sci-fi. Alex Garland’s <i>Ex Machina</i> made more than $25 million in theaters, and his sophomore feature isn’t that slow or challenging by comparison. <i>Annihilation</i> packs one of the most entrancing and theatrical finales since <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>, so why couldn’t Paramount just advertise it as the cerebral and psychedelic horror that it is? Instead they tried to seduce viewers with a shoot-em-up romp through monster-infested swampland, when guns and monsters constitute about four minutes of the film.</div>
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It goes without saying that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2018/02/26/annihilations-grim-box-office-fate-was-an-inevitable-tragedy/#6a0790674ed9" target="_blank">viewers didn’t take kindly to the lies</a>.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 10.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Downsizing</i></span><br />
<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/41juXbAJ7JI?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><br />
I can’t for the life of me comprehend how this movie was misinterpreted so vastly by so many people. Popular consensus latched onto what the movie seems on its face to concern, i.e. the existential perils of global warming and overpopulation, and willfully ignored all the nuances in its weighty and speculative script, which satirizes Generation X’s egoism and elitism better than the Oscar-winning <i>Get Out</i>. Even the casting of outspoken environmentalist Matt Damon seems purposeful in a meta, facetious way. The film isn’t great by any means, but it is in dire need of re-evaluation.<br />
<br />
Anyway, Damon was on a roll with the trailers for last year. Half of my love for this particular one owes to the fantastic and relevant invocation of Talking Heads, while the other half owes to the great special effects and production design on display. I also have to thank the editor for not disclosing the entire plot, which ironically led to a chorus of angry YouTube comments shouting the trailer down as “false advertising” for the “worst movie ever”, when another edit would trigger just as many complaints of, “I feel like I just saw the whole movie, lol, saves me from buying a ticket.”<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 9.</span> <i><span style="font-size: large;">The House That Jack
Built</span></i></div>
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/c6DuLPGZIoQ?rel=0" width="560"></iframe></div>
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I will admit my partiality towards this preview. Ask me what film I’m
looking forward to the most that I’ll probably have to drive 50 miles to see,
and the answer is <i>The House That Jack
Built</i>. Yes, Lars Von Trier has been on a losing streak, bottoming
out with the risible <i>Nymphomaniac</i>, but
my inability to predict his next move keeps his artistry exciting. Judging by
this trailer, which would doubtless make David Bowie proud, I expect his first film in five years<i> </i>to proffer more
pessimistic ruminations on man’s depravity and the problem of pain, although Von Trier’s religious views are splattered so across the map that I could
be completely off base—I did write a long paper on that subject, which may or
may not resurface at some point. Regardless, it is fitting that the trailer for
<i>Jack</i> should break the typical rules
of composition, considering that its filmmaker has constantly strived to do the
same with his craft, for better and for worse.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">WORST 4.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>The Shape of Water</i></span></div>
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While we haven’t strayed too far from the topic of showing too much in advertising, this trailer spoils basically everything short of the last three minutes of its associated movie. <i>The Shape of Water</i> isn’t exactly intricate or daring in its narrative, but flashing this spot in front of unsuspecting audiences waiting for their movie to start borders on criminal harassment. I can say that because we live in a Relativist society where “harassment” means anything I want it to mean.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 8.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Suburbicon</i></span><br />
<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QBB-buUOsmQ?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><br />
I can already assure you I’m in the minority for heralding this trailer, as <i>Suburbicon</i> charitably vied to give a more embarrassing theatrical performance than Luc Besson’s galactic bomb <i>Valerian</i>. Not even leftist critics condoned George Clooney’s outdated, anti-racist “satire”, slapping it with an impressively awful 29% approval rating. Apparently making fun of white suburban communities can only get so much comic mileage in 2017, when we’ve already seen countless, oh-so-funny Subversions of the pristine nuclear family Mythology.<br />
<br />
I deliberately avoided supporting <i>Suburbicon</i> in theaters, which wasn’t a hard endeavor for the short two weeks it played, but I do find it admirable how the trailer editor managed to rein in and obscure the more untenable or patronizing dimensions of the plot. There’s almost no way to glean from the advertising that the movie’s actually about racism, and I’d wager that some naïve seniors wandered in expecting a morbid Coen-esque comedy along the lines of <i>Burn After Reading</i>. The trailer is funny and propulsive thanks to the track by Run the Jewels, who are fast usurping Kanye’s throne as the most valuable names in movie trailer scoring. For the span of what felt like an entire summer, I somehow encountered this preview before every remotely adult-oriented movie, and yet I never grew tired of reciting it from memory.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 7.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>First Reformed</i></span></div>
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<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/hCF5Y8dQpR4?rel=0" width="560"></iframe></div>
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I have
mixed feelings on the marketing endeavors of A24. On one hand, they have
mastered the discipline of compressing their movies down into singular,
two-minute short films, each conveying the theme or mood peculiar to the whole.
Even when their trailers turn out to be flagrantly misleading, as in the
notorious misfire <i>It Comes At Night</i>, A24
tend to give a sharp and accurate taste of the kool aid that they’re selling. I
have already praised some editors herein for their dastardly Achievement in Tricking
People, but I can also appreciate the clarity and honesty with which this
left-wing indie distributor presents most of its productions.</div>
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Nowhere are these
principles more evident than in the trailer for <i>First Reformed</i>, which filled me with awe every time I had the
luxury of taking my seat in time. Many of the more striking shots are taken out
of context, suggesting a more fantastical plot than in the actual movie, but
the melancholy and apocalyptic tone of the trailer ultimately stays true to
Ethan Hawke’s despondent priest. One consistent strength of A24’s trailers is
sourcing their music straight from the film, and the choral backing here is
especially haunting. <a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2015/07/horror-movie-roundup-it-follows.html" target="_blank">I liked those Suicide Squad trailers</a> as much as the next DC fanboy, but those didn’t count for
much when the songs were cut out of the movie.</div>
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So what are my
grievances with this marketing style? Frankly, I’d be a lot more inclined to
A24 if they weren’t so damned inclined to methods that can only be described as
cheating. Almost every one of their trailers plucks a handful of quotes from
toxic or useless tech blog critics who echo the Tomatometer 90% of the time and vainly
correlate their ideology with art. If I wanted to read an adulatory review from
a bastion of cuckoldry like <i>The AV Club</i>,
<i>The New Yorker</i>, <i>The L.A. Times</i>, or <i>Indiewire</i>,
I would do a search for those, not seek out a trailer. More often than not,
leaning on such journalists’ talking points has exacerbated backlash against
A24’s product; would general audiences have hated <i>Hereditary</i> so much if the trailer hadn’t boldly sold it as “this
generation’s <i>The Exorcist</i>”? Likewise,
how does reducing <i>First Reformed</i> to
an “update of <i>Taxi Driver</i>” do it any
favors when the two films have almost nothing in common, style- or
narrative-wise?</div>
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I adore the last 40 seconds of this trailer, a purely visual glimpse into my favorite film of the year, but citations in marketing are a fallback for the lazy or logically impaired. A24’s snobbish culling of the critical intelligentsia is the film industry equivalent of celebrity endorsements for deodorant, cars, <a href="https://youtu.be/dA5Yq1DLSmQ">soft drinks</a>, or <a href="https://youtu.be/pEoZbXB78NI">Xbox’s</a>, and should be treated with the same scorn we levy at all those other offenses.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">WORST 3. </span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Venom</i></span></div>
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Several months back, a Pepperdine friend acted appalled when I admitted that I hadn’t yet seen the trailer for Sony’s Venom stand-alone movie. “It looks so good,” he exclaimed. “You’ve got to look it up right now.” Now believe it or not, I had initially planned on waiting to catch the <i>Venom</i> trailer on the big-screen, where I could experience the anti-hero’s origin in all its glory (again). Based on this recommendation, though, I made sure to watch the trailer at work that very night, and I dare say none of it was lost on my 20-inch monitor. Imagine how crushed I was to see that Sony’s CG quality control has actually declined since 2007, or that Tom Hardy had agreed to besmirch his nearly speckless resume with such an odorous pile of black goo.</div>
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Hope for the superhero genre is a mistake.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 6.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Mission Impossible: Fallout</i></span></div>
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Imagine Dragons have
to be my least favorite band of all time, so I’m really saying something when I
call this virtuosic preview one of the year’s most best. The remix of “Friction” with the
Mission Impossible theme is perfectly aligned with every punch and collision
for maximum impact. The trailer shows off just enough of the action to pique
one’s interest without spoiling everything (unlike those <i>Dark Knight</i> trailers
that just couldn’t resist the flipping truck), and Henry Cavill’s reloading
shotgun arms will be enshrined in the annals of action movie history.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 5.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Under the Silver Lake</i></span></div>
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Violent Femmes deserve to be used in more movie trailers. I have but the foggiest notion what this movie is about, but it sure looks vibrant, sexy, and off-kilter, and in today’s climate of slapdash, mundane franchise fare, that’s enough for me. It’s a shame A24 elected to shelve it for six months after a handful of bad reviews from the notoriously thin-skinned attendees of Cannes. If that move was a matter of maximizing returns by skirting around summer blockbusters, then I can see their rationale, but if it’s a matter of re-cutting for a better reaction, then the decision reeks of a company betraying its mission statement.</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2015/07/horror-movie-roundup-it-follows.html" target="_blank">It Follows</a></i> definitely sits atop the mound of <a href="https://boxd.it/1OSTa" target="_blank">throwback horror movies overhyped by insecure horror and arthouse fans</a>, so I have faith that director David Robert Mitchell and Andrew Garfield can deliver another hit.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">WORST 2.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Peppermint</i></span></div>
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“Social media has lit up with support for her.”</div>
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Female-centric action movies need to be retired in America. Name a less intimidating vigilante or revenge movie hero than Jennifer Garner. I’ll wait.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 4.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>BlacKkKlansman</i></span></div>
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Whatever team concocted this trailer deserves an Oscar, because they clearly understood better than Spike Lee how to tell such a compellingly odd story. The trailer takes lines of dialogue that aren’t funny in the film and injects them with hilarity through the power of editing, while also omitting (most of) the nauseating anti-Trump posturing so as not to alienate a third of the film’s potential audience. It nobly recasts a tonally-confused and morose diatribe as an undiluted farce, which is what the movie should have been along, considering that nothing of consequence happened in the real Ron Stallworth’s investigation.</div>
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It takes restraint and a modicum of discretion to edit a trailer as enticing or deceiving as this, both attributes in which Lee is sorely lacking. The title cards themselves are a riot, promising, “DIS JOINT IS BASED UPON SOME FO’ REAL, FO’ REAL SH*T.” Incredible.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 3.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Isle of Dogs</i></span></div>
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One of the few reprieves for a long
time that made waiting for family movies a bearable exercise, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Isle of Dogs</i> trailer impeccably balances
the whimsy, adventure, and overflowing love for Japanese aesthetics that would
come to distinguish one of Wes Anderson’s most divisive pictures. In long-form
trailer fashion, the three-song structure imitates the rising action of an
actual film, and a cascade of timpani drums at the end ensures that viewers
will be crushing their armrests in anticipation. Yes, the unveiling of the cast
has an aura of snootiness to it (“Check out all the famous actors I
sweet-talked into voicing my movie! I’m a celebrated American auteur and can
cast whomever I want!”), but cinephiles like me are honestly fickle in such
matters, and Wes Anderson has earned the right to brag.</div>
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Get ready to jump.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">WORST 1. </span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Darkest Minds</i></span></div>
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I’ll give this trailer some comedy points for laying bare the blasé detachment of some Hollywood executives in their 40s or 50s trying in vain to relate to teenagers. It’s an irritatingly embarrassing showcase of a cynical, money-grubbing product that’s arriving at least three years too late. Lionsgate can’t even afford to finish its Divergent series because people are so burnt out on YA twaddle, yet Fox has the arrogance to think it can turn a profit on a flagrant X-men rip-off, colored with some one-dimensional personality types and violent, youth-led resistance against the big bad government. Hell, they even cast an actress from <i>The Hunger Games</i> as the lead, because why would you take a chance on someone new when you can simply take the road more traveled?</div>
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Didn’t someone give Fox the memo that Gen Z is the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2017/08/11/why-democrats-should-be-losing-sleep-over-generation-z/#606346a7878c">most conservative audience since the Silent Generation</a>? This uninspired garbage would barely break even in 2014, so their insistence on releasing it theatrically in 2018 confounds me. If anybody in the United States was really hankering for another of these properties, they’d be more compelled to seek it out on Hulu, next to media darlings like <i>The Handmaid’s Tale</i>. The convenient advantage of streaming services is that users will gobble up sub-par entertainment because those publishers operate on a sunk cost subscription model; people don’t feel as cheated if they watch a trashy movie or TV show because they’ve already paid their $10 for the month. Then again, there’s a reason why more people pirate <i>Game of Thrones</i> than pay for it, and there’s a reason why Fox is being absorbed by Disney, which remains better at responding to market cues despite the company’s antipathy to art.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 2.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Bad Times at the El
Royale</i></span></div>
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For my money, one of the best genre trailers since <i>Prometheus</i>. It isn’t bound to spawn a
lot of copycats, but that’s mostly because the format is built so firmly on the
actual content of the film. Whoever edited this clearly studied up on trailer
crutches—taglines or critic quotations that describe the subject matter,
actors’ names popping on screen after their close-ups, trendy or ubiquitous pop
songs that aren’t in the movie, jump scares, etc.—and made a concerted effort
to walk without them. The song that carries it appears to originate from the
film itself, characters get surprising and memorable introductions, and the
mid-trailer tonal shift highlights the dark comedy that director Drew Goddard
(of <i>Cabin In the Woods</i>) will probably
bring to the table. I especially like the quickening of the cuts right before
smashing into a wide tracking shot of a woman fleeing the hotel, as the vocal soundtrack
gives way to frantic drums. That’s how you send chills up the spine and feet
running to the multiplex.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BEST 1.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>mother!</i></span></div>
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The version of
the teaser I’m reviewing sadly appears lost forever, although the official trailer
is a fair substitute. If you had the fortune of seeing <i>Dunkirk</i> in its first week or so, then you may have gotten an early
look at <i>mother!</i>, or listen, more
precisely. The teaser itself consisted of nothing more than a black screen, harried
dialogue, alien, indescribable sound effects, a momentary close-up on Jennifer
Lawrence’s eyes, and the revelation that a new Darren Aronofsky film was coming
out in less than two months’ time. It was the most disarming example of
minimalist, guerilla film marketing I’d ever seen, and it’s nowhere to be found
online.</div>
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Bravo, Paramount.
Katniss Everdeen fans may not have bought into your elusive, go-for-broke ad
campaign, but I sure did. Even your poster designs showed real audacity, for what
other company would <a href="http://www.impawards.com/2017/posters/mother_ver7.jpg">proudly flaunt and
own their negative reviews?</a></div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-40779819142382804592018-08-13T23:03:00.001-07:002021-05-09T11:01:54.814-07:00Indie Movie Round-up #1 – Sorry To Bother You, Eighth Grade<span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">Discouraged by an endless wave of sequels, the Author seeks refuge in the Sundance Sacred Cow Class of 2018, and explains why they are actually not so good.</span><br />
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Kids are out of school, it’s too hot to go outside, and Hollywood still can’t find new ways to drive people to the AC-pumping multiplex. The well of original ideas is running increasingly dry in Western studio film production, as evidenced by a seemingly unprecedented deluge of summer sequels: <i>Deadpool 2</i>, <i>Incredibles 2</i>, <i>Ant-Man 2</i>, <i>Avengers 3</i>, <i>Jurassic World 2</i>, <i>Mamma Mia 2</i>, <i>Equalizer 2</i>, <i>Unfriended 2</i>, <i>Ocean’s Eleven 4</i>, <i>The Purge 4</i>, <i>Hotel Transylvania 3</i>, and more. As a critic, I have begrudgingly kept up with many of these, though most of them save for <i>Jurassic World</i> weren’t worth thinking, talking, or writing about after I’d vacated the parking lot. <br />
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Keeping this stagnancy in mind, which will only fester now that Disney-Fox is <a href="https://screenrant.com/disney-fox-box-office-control-percentage/">projected to control 40% of all ticket sales</a>, I’m looking to the festival circuit for more stimulating entertainment. Some of the movies featured in this series will be good, and others very not-good, but I hope that even the not-good ones will provide ample fodder for discussion.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">... Apology not accepted.</span></b></div>
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In the weeks leading up to it, <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> was being pegged as this year’s successor to <i>Get Out</i>. If, by those comparisons, critics meant to call it out as an overrated, trendy genre film by a first-time director who isn’t as smart as he thinks, then they may have pinned the tail on the ass, so to speak. Whereas <i>Get Out </i>was functional as a horror thriller, though, <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> is only a nuisance, completely inept at conveying its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/magazine/how-boots-riley-infiltrated-hollywood.html">communist</a> message in a manner persuasive to blue-collar Trump supporters. <br />
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Cassius Green is an unemployed guy squatting in his uncle’s garage and perpetually deferring his rent. I refer to Cassius so vaguely because he doesn’t have much of a background or character, which is a pretty impressive feat for a nearly two-hour film crammed with archetypes. Before we even get a firm sense of his status quo—usually the first step in a story diagram—Cassius lands a sales job at a telemarketing firm called Regalview, where a profane and world-wise Danny Glover counsels him to use his “white voice” for better results. <br />
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The premise that speaking in a certain dialect and tenor (dubbed here by useful white leftists David Cross and Patton Oswalt) can make consumers more amenable to unsolicited marketing is ridiculous on its face, but the satirical dressings of the film can theoretically excuse its cartoonish racial depictions. Less excusable is the lack of any unifying focus in the script. Despite having <i>Get Out</i>’s Jordan Peele in the producer’s chair, <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> is not fundamentally about racial inequity, and the white voice gag seems designed as both red herring and time-filler. <br />
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Director Boots Riley, of the hip-hop trio The Coup, has his sights set firmly on capitalism, and in this jab at criticism we see the full extent of his ideological stupor. After exercising his “white voice”, Cassius gets promoted to the position of power caller, thereby alienating the malcontented workers at Regalview who have been conspiring to unionize for higher pay. The film’s dramatic arc is based on the premise that Cassius is betraying his roots and proverbially selling his soul in the act of pursuing a more profitable career. His friends and colleagues affectionately call him “Cash” for short, lest the downward spiral of “Cashius Green” be lost on us. This premise rings false for the simple reason that Cassius has no discernible roots, nor any reason to flagellate himself out of fealty to those who have no motivation to move up the corporate ladder. The script essentially stoops to chastising its protagonist for attempting to better his lot responsibly, to pay his rent through means both legal and ethical. Social justice trumps self-advancement, and lobbying for an inflated minimum wage is nobler than seeking a job that requires more than some high-school education.<br />
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Cassius is dating a modernist artist by the name of Detroit, who is fully committed to the union movement, wears edgy feminist clothing, and obviously serves as a foil to her boyfriend. She’s also played by Tessa Thompson of <i>Thor: Ragnarok</i> and <i>Dear White People</i>, which means that try as it might, <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> cannot claim the infamy of being the worst film I’ve seen all year. Somewhere within the last 40 minutes, it’s revealed that another corporation, WorryFree, which mirrors Google in its paternalistic ownership of employees, has been turning people into human-horse hybrids for cheap manual labor. Anticipating a backlash by his mutant slave army, the CEO of WorryFree proposes a 7-digit sum to Cassius in exchange for him temporarily masquerading as a puppet advocate for the equesapiens. <br />
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The blatant takeaway of this plot twist is that capitalism figuratively strips workers of their humanity, reducing them to beasts of burden and raping them. In case the audience is too daft to pick up on his hilarious pun, Riley includes a scene of two people interpreting a lewd sculpture of a WorryFree executive and a horse-person. “I think the artist meant that WorryFree is literally dehumanizing people,” says Detroit. “And literally f___ing them?” rejoins the other bystander. America, I hope you’re taking notes on this important and timely statement.<br />
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Cassius exposes CEO Armie Hammer as a mad and cruel scientist on popular TV, which promptly leads to the businessman being praised by the president of the United States and exalted as the reincarnation of Jesus. Having lost any hope for recompense from the republican, legislative process, the equesapiens embrace violent revolution as their sole recourse and start wreaking havoc in the streets. The films ends with Cassius acknowledging the selfish error of his ways, saying something to the effect of, “Now that the Regalview callers have unionized, maybe we’ll start to see some positive change. I should have stuck with you guys all along.” Then he turns into a horse-man and barges through the door of Hammer’s house. I rest my case that this is a movie made for idiots. <br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">Old (<i>Brazil</i>) vs. new. Who wore it better?</span></div>
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Riley’s debut has been marketed as an energetic “surrealist” social commentary, in the vein of <i>Repo Man</i>, <i>Brazil</i>, or maybe <i>Joe Versus the Volcano</i>. Unlike those Criterion-certified classics and certain others, <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> gives no incentive for repeat viewings, since every aspect of its world is sharply presented in the foreground. Much of the movie is shot in generic indie shallow focus, drawing one’s eyes to the actors and regrettably obscuring their surroundings. Whereas a Terry Gilliam film invites careful inspection because of his wide-angle lenses and immaculate set design, Riley takes viewers on a programmatic tour of a near-dystopian Oakland, stopping to point out every oh-so-clever detail he imagined. I couldn’t rattle off from memory all the earrings that Tessa Thompson sports, or all the variations of the photo in Cash’s bedroom, but I wouldn’t be surprised by any of them the second time around. <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> mistakenly evokes <i><a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2014/02/pretty-much-everything-is-awesome.html" target="_blank">The Lego Movie</a></i> through a vulgar reality TV show that bears an insipid similarity to <a href="https://youtu.be/ZhaT7F7lMEY" target="_blank">“Where Are My Pants?”</a> One of the best satires of the decade, <i>The Lego Movie</i> manages to delight and grow on me every time by virtue of its manifold background details, which are merely seasoning on its funny and thoughtful story. Having sat through its third act twice now for research, I’d be lying to say the same about <i>Sorry to Bother You</i>.<br />
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To his credit, Armie Hammer tries his hardest to save the affair, giving his only great performance since <i>The Social Network</i>. Most of the actors are working in a grounded and natural register, reacting too incredulously to their world’s chaos, but Hammer seems to grasp the absurdity of the movie and takes his zealous, materialist villain appropriately over-the-top. In a boldly emasculating role, David Cross also dredges up cheap laughs as Cassius’ white voice, although I reiterate that the white voice could be removed wholesale without compromising the narrative. The musical score is never boring, dabbling in many genres and calling to mind older sci-fi pictures. Movies and music are different media, however, and the latter is but a tool to straighten out the essential form of the former. If I wanted nothing more than to hear some great music, I would just go listen to <i>Year of the Snitch</i> again. <br />
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Where <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> completely, irreparably lost me was a noxiously quirky stop-motion sequence credited in the film to a certain Michel Dongry. Any kino fans worth their salt would recognize this as a cheeky nod to the French surrealist director Michel Gondry, most well-known for the Oscar-winning <i>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</i> and a bunch of Björk music videos. Some people would undoubtedly praise this scene as a clever admission of and homage to Boots Riley’s artistic influences. I took it as a confession that he was wasting my time, which would be far better spent watching Michel Gondry or girding the capitalist system that made his facile message movie possible. It’s never too late to learn Mandarin, Boots. I hear that China has a thriving film industry built on freedom of expression.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Eighth-Grade Reading Level</span></b><br />
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Perhaps the most aggressively-pushed and Sundance-y movie to come out of Sundance this year, <i>Eighth Grade</i> is being hailed right and left as a small miracle of vicarious expression. Young cinephiles everywhere are wrestling with a conundrum, which goes something like, “How does a 28-year-old white male comedian who started out on Youtube understand so lucidly the ordeals of an awkward, reserved middle-schooler who happens to be the opposite sex?” The movie poster seems to capitalize on this perplexing contradiction by citing the always reliable pull-quote dispenser <i>Indiewire</i>, whose critic praised the movie as “so rooted in the feminist adolescent experience that it often feels as if Bo Burnham cracked open a whole mess of girls’ diaries to pen it”. <br />
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To be fair, I also might have wrestled with this question, assuming I’d never picked up a book by Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Pearl Buck, or even J.K. Rowling. At the same time, it shouldn’t surprise us that identity politics go hand in hand with diminished expectations. When “You can’t say that, only we can say that,” becomes the mantra of a stultified society beholden to Cultural Appropriation, the universal praise heaped upon <i>Eighth Grade</i> is a wholly predictable byproduct. “The fact that so-and-so managed to tell such an authentic story about X minority besides himself honestly blew me away,” remarks some L.A. cineaste who is paid much more than I. “This film is an instant masterpiece.”<br />
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Is it embarrassing to the state of American culture that writing a protagonist of a marginally different background than the author is taken as a symbol of genius? Probably so, but I’m not buying the marketing narrative that Kayla was a giant leap outside of Burnham’s comfort zone. Centered on a shy and web-savvy teenager who makes simple, unedited vlogs in her bedroom, <i>Eighth Grade</i> is hard to interpret as anything other than a thoroughly autobiographical film, laced with many updated memes and cultural references to misdirect the unwary viewer. Watching this in a packed theater on opening night lent an aspect that I wouldn’t trade for the privacy of my home. Lurking close behind me, a group of guys would whoop and laugh uproariously at every youthful idiom or piece of iconography: when Kayla signed off with a chipper “Gucci,” when the sex ed teacher said, “It’s gonna be lit,” and especially when the other staff member did a dab. Sitting on my other side, another spectator would add to the Regal ambience by firing off urgent texts at five-minute intervals. As if the 4K digital projection wasn’t already crisp enough, the glare of her iPhone in the darkened theater added a semblance of augmented reality to Burnham’s pressing techno-nightmare.<br />
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<i>Eighth Grade </i>was bought by the indie darling distributor A24, which has made a philosophy of taking generic tropes and formulae and smugly doing the opposite of them. This creative strategy, which itself passes over into formula with time, has resulted in widespread, unquestioning accolades for the company’s works, but tends to divide commoners suckered in by high Rotten Tomatoes scores. Look no further than A24’s horror offerings for a microcosm of the company’s reactionary approach to storytelling. <i>It Comes At Night</i> and <i>Hereditary</i> were championed by critics and the casual arthouse crowd for going so against the grain of “cheap scares” or “gore-fests”, but being artistically contrarian wasn’t enough to thrill general audiences or hardcore horror fans, who loathed and maligned such films.<br />
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Going into <i>Eighth Grade</i>, I expected certain rules to be broken, surprises to be sprung. Why else would the elites of A24 take it under their wing? Imagine my surprise when the actual film played out exactly the way that I predicted, over and over again. Alack and alas, I would go so far as to call it the most clichéd young-adult movie of the last couple years, in a genre that’s already steeped in clichés and platitudes.<br />
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All of Kayla’s peers see her as a quiet and insecure teenager, but her opening webcam monologue assures us otherwise. In reality, she’s just saving her words for the right people… cue a lesson in how to recognize your real friends from fake ones! Despite her warped perception of herself, Kayla reluctantly receives the Most Quiet student award, setting her on a path of glum introspection (and extrospection) compounded by a pool party for the popular Kennedy, appropriately dubbed the recipient of the Best Eyes award. In older movies, Kennedy might have filled a Mean Girl mold, but in <i>Eighth Grade</i> she doesn’t get to exchange more than a word with the hero, despite being the closest person to an antagonist. Nay, she hardly gets to speak a word at all, since the entirety of her character can be reduced to the evil hot girl who is too absorbed in her phone. At least Regina George got a personality. To point to <i>Mean Girls</i> as a great film or even a good one would be a nostalgic misstep, but Burnham inadvertently reminds us just how far YA movies have fallen with the advent of universal cell phone ownership. <br />
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At the pool party we get snapshots of two other characters who will add to the omelet of clichés: the confidently detached, profane Aiden and the nerdy, bespectacled misfit Gabe. The former character’s first appearances are humorously paired with throbbing EDM and slow-motion, accentuating the disconnect between Kayla’s infatuation and the older audience’s awareness that Aiden is a 14-year-old dweeb. Most of the funniest scenes can be credited to either of these young actors, though that doesn’t excuse their thoroughly exhausted roles. From the moment the Nerd pops up from underwater wearing oversized goggles, any seasoned coming-of-age viewer will be hard-pressed to miss that he’s the True Friend, and that Kayla will ultimately discard her bad boyfriend for the less popular, less cute guy.</div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">I couldn't fit this tidbit anywhere else in the review, but <i>Eighth Grade</i> would have the best use of an Enya song if not for <i>L.A. Story</i> and <i>Fellowship of the Ring</i>.</span></div>
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From recognizing bad influences to gaining respect for a downtrodden father figure, <i>Eighth Grade</i> follows convention to a T, only daring to break away in its relative lack of conflict. Kayla lives in extraordinary privilege and doesn’t have to grapple with much of anything, aside from standard boy problems and worries about sexual competence, which Burnham presents in a disturbingly forthright manner given Pedowood’s ongoing PR crisis—although let’s be honest, we all stopped paying attention to #MeToo about 10 months ago. While the movie could choose to explore the dynamics of a single-parent household, it never treats the absence of Kayla’s mother as a difficulty, relegating her to the perimeter of the film and passing most maternal qualities onto her father. Mark embodies a liberal’s idealized modern man: soft-tongued, sensitive, and supportive of his daughter no matter how impertinent and testy she can be. He never loses his temper, never raises his voice, never admonishes, and that makes for extremely cinematic drama! File this movie in the same critically-acclaimed cabinet as <i>Call Me By Your Name</i> and <i>Love, Simon</i>, which also featured the Progressive and Accepting Dad trope. If anything, the purity of Kayla’s father gives us license to loathe the main character, a bratty teenager who’s more attached to her screen than to the real people in her life. “You said on Saturdays I could do what I wanted,” she shouts at the dinner table, “And right now I want to look at my phone!” Charming.<br />
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Burnham constructs the film on such wooden stakes that the ending scenes undermine his itinerant, pseudo-realist Sundance foundation. When Kayla finally stands up to the evil hot girl Kennedy and scolds her for “trying to look cool all the time”, the impact of her courage is lost on us, not least because our protagonist spends about the same proportion of film time playing on her cell phone as our antagonist. Why does a film like this need to have villains, much less a triumphant arc in which a good guy lectures the bad guy about her moral superiority? If Burnham truly aspired to break new ground, then he would eschew such reductive character types altogether, but he’s too dedicated to plucking the essence of middle-school from his memory, withholding none of the angst or petty jealousy.<br />
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In fact, resolving for comprehensiveness in 90 minutes or less does more to handicap <i>Eighth Grade</i> than prop it up. Sparing even a minute of scrutiny to the sequence of events will cause the timeline to implode. Ostensibly the film takes place during Kayla’s final week of schooling, so one would expect the kids to be mired in final exams or panicking over them. On the contrary, though, most of the brief glimpses of class life suggest an academic year that is merely beginning. Hinting that the Parkland school shooting was a <a href="https://www.intellihub.com/parkland-teacher-code-red-drill-blanks/">theatrical</a> <a href="https://www.infowars.com/video-shooting-survivor-says-police-firing-blanks-for-drill-before-rampage/">drill</a> months before its two seconds of fame is certainly a bold artistic stroke by Burnham, but what does such a drill accomplish within the world of <i>Eighth Grade</i>, being staged two days before many of the kids transfer to a different institution that will necessitate a different drill? Kayla’s behavior is also irrational for someone on the cusp of high-school, as she desperately scrambles to expand her social circle two days before graduating.<br />
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This is the type of screenplay that will win over some for its “honesty” and “accuracy” and irritate others for those same reasons. In writing workshops, authors who are penning child characters will hear that they must forcefully strip away their pretenses and sophistication to sound more authentic. Bo Burnham appears to have taken this advice and executed it to the detriment of his final film. The dialogues in <i>Eighth Grade</i> form a knotty web of self-deprecating babble, sycophantic compliments, and monosyllabic words that don’t mean anything. Wouldn’t it behoove a girl interested in podcasting to find a more precise way of communicating her thoughts than “cool”, “awesome”, “weird”, “amazing”, or “dumb”? I’m not asking for these American teens to start spewing Aaron Sorkin speeches, or even to cut back on their ums, likes, and youknows, but I doubt it would lessen the film if the characters didn’t all express themselves the same way.<br />
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Aside from their obvious linguistic monotony, Burnham’s scenarios also tend to bore in their subject matter. Most of the conversations never amount to being about anything concrete, hence regressing into circular admiration and encouragement. With the exception of one late reference to <i>Rick & Morty</i>, the characters seem to inhabit a political, social, and cultural vacuum, to the effect that any dialogue must revolve around their perception of each other and themselves. This pattern is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t seen the film, so I will just say that the scenes documented herein are #notmyeighthgrade. As a 13-year-old, homeschooled grammar Nazi, I not only imagined myself to be the most intelligent person alive but wanted to prove as much to everybody else, dropping the most flowery words I knew and seldom foregoing a chance to argue about politics, books, or film. Even my friends who peppered their speech with superfluous “likes” took a keen interest in weighty classics, e.g. the <i>Divine Comedy</i>, or at least in Christopher Nolan movies that fused action entertainment with entry-level philosophical themes. Perhaps I’m inclined to reject the vacuity of Burnham’s dialogue for exposing just how unrepresentative my upbringing was, but I don’t think he does justice to the pretentiousness of eighth-graders.<br />
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One of the most definitive motifs in <i>Eighth Grade</i>—that of endless, passive scrolling through selfies, gifs, and homogenized corporate entertainment—doubles as a perfect analogue for the experience of watching it. Like an adorable cat video, a reaction clip from <i>The Office</i>, or a stale Spongebob meme, the film offers nothing but a procession of things we’ve seen a hundred times before, and in a way that’s comforting. <i>Eighth Grade </i>doesn’t aim to challenge or upend anyone’s worldview, and so it is compulsively watchable and shareable. Whether you’ll want to hit that subscribe button and come back for more... well, that is a different question.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-46447213373330674562018-08-01T21:31:00.002-07:002021-03-20T15:11:16.829-07:00In Age of Trump, Pepperdine Weighs Validity of Free Speech<span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Pepperdine Professor Christopher Soper and the Intercultural Affairs office openly question the importance of free speech to a democratic society.</span><a name='more'></a></span><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Article written by George Stefano Pallas.</span></b> Democratic socialism and incivility practiced by the author are </i><i>his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i><br />
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For many Pepperdine University students, the Sandbar is a welcoming safe space to grab a $6 smoothie from Jamba Juice, retrieve the mail if they’re lucky enough not to have classes, snap some sunset selfies for their Instagram stories, and enjoy some hot beverages not from Starbucks while listening to all-acoustic covers of Disney songs during coffeehouse nights. Some have even gone so far as to call the Sandbar a “Third Place,” though this label may appear vacuous to any homeless man who tries to take a nap on the couches therein and is promptly evicted by DPS officers.<br />
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Unbeknownst to most frequenters of the Sandbar, the building also plays host to the communications of the Intercultural Affairs (ICA) office. ICA holds chief responsibility for “build[ing] a diverse community of respect, learning, understanding, equity, and inclusion.” As part of this mission, the department has reserved tickets for students to see <i>Black Panther</i> on opening night (under an event subtitled “Deconstructing Black Mythos”), sponsored bus rides to the 2017 Women’s March in L.A., and hosted various events on <a href="http://pepperdine-graphic.com/seaver-college-alumnus-omari-allen-talks-gun-control-prevention-at-phj-week/">gun control</a> and immigration enforcement.<br />
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The ICA office has a wall set aside at the rear of the Sandbar, nearby the restrooms, that changes in content roughly every month to reflect topical news items or subjects. For example, in celebration of Black History Month, the ICA wall featured several photos of African American artists who have made great strides to advance music as an art form. The artists spotlighted on the wall included Chance the Rapper, Drake, Beyonce, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole, among others. <br />
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In the middle of April, the theme of the ICA’s corner turned to freedom of speech, concurrently with several Pepperdine clubs that were reevaluating the virtues of that same right. Several posters were taped to the inside of cabinets, juxtaposing arguments in favor of free speech with arguments opposing it.<br />
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The display repeatedly called upon the reader to ponder the appropriate treatment of offensive speech, asking, “Are all forms of free speech acceptable?” “Should free speech apply for individuals in positions of power?” and, “Is there a difference between free speech and hate speech?” In the case of the last question, the author of the pro-free speech argument seemed to acknowledge the existence of Hate Speech but contended, “There is no free speech when banning hate speech… because the definition would be subjective.”<br />
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Contrarily, the anti-free speech argument insisted that Hate Speech is “not the same thing” and “should not be protected under the law.” The second text pointed to Germany for support of its position, commending the country for banning the expression “Heil Hitler” as Hate Speech. The poster neglects to note the <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/21/mark-meechan-uk-youtuber-convicted-hate-crime-teac/" target="_blank">successful, recent sentencing of a U.K. YouTuber named Mark Meechan</a>, who was arrested and convicted of “grossly offensive” behavior for filming and teaching his girlfriend’s dog to raise a paw upon hearing, “Sieg Heil.”<br />
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The Sandbar display concludes with an appeal to contact the ICA office, university chaplain, or counseling center “if you have experienced Harm by the speech of others.”<br />
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The Sandbar exhibit on freedom of speech only symbolizes one component in a university-wide reexamination of the issue enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. On April 9, 2018, the Convocation Office of Pepperdine held an hour-long event called “When Speech Hurts: Intersections of Faith, Speech, and Wellbeing,” in which four faculty members shared their views on freedom of expression, fake news, and constitutional limitations. <br />
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One of these panelists, Distinguished Professor of Political Science Christopher Soper, led by saying, “I am not a free speech fundamentalist,” and elaborated that some forms of speech should not be allowed because they “undermine self-governing democracy.” Dr. Soper received a PhD in political science from Yale University and currently teaches such classes to Seaver undergraduates as “Constitutional Law” and “Religion and Politics.”<br />
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When the conversation turned to an upcoming campus visit by Ben Shapiro, Dr. Soper said that he would not condone accepting Richard Spencer or Alex Jones to speak at Pepperdine, opposing the latter radio host on the basis that he “denies” the narrative of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Asked what students should do to prepare for a controversial speaker such as Mr. Shapiro coming to a sold-out event, Psychology Professor Nivla Fitzpatrick advised the crowd to go about all their daily routines, stay calm, and “let other people who speak up know that you stand with them.”<br />
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Both of these evaluations of free speech closely follow a trend at Pepperdine of reappraising the value of open discourse. In late 2015, BSA-affiliated students called the value of the liberal principle into question by appealing to President Benton to ban the since-defunct Yik Yak app on the grounds of the university, which is attended by more than 3000 voting-age adults. The campaign stemmed from anonymous texts allegedly posted by a student that were critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. <br />
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University Chaplain Sara Barton would later weigh in on a similar object of controversy, using her freedom of speech to publish a poem on the Freedom Wall denouncing the freedom of speech exercised by someone else. <a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2017/05/pepperdine-chaplain-sara-barton-writes-poem-for-freedom-wall-denouncing-the-freedom-wall.html" target="_blank">We covered Barton’s social protest</a> and the abasement of the Freedom Wall generally back in 2017. <br />
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Pepperdine’s annual tuition currently stands at $53,680, an increase of 3.7% over the previous year and not including rent, which totals between $1450 and $1625 a month for a shared bedroom.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-48263036918624567742018-07-10T01:18:00.001-07:002019-08-12T18:48:07.653-07:00"Solo" Redeems the Disney Wars – An Unexpected Appreciation<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">A radically traditional neo-noir cartoon romp, <i>Solo: A Star Wars Story</i> is simply the best film to bear the series’ name since <i>Revenge of the Sith</i>.</span></div>
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Even as an apathetic spectator of pop-culture, I regret that <i>Solo: A Star Wars Story</i> has incurred the most jaded reception in the series’ history. Internet geekdom long treated the very concept of a Han Solo standalone with derision, so after <i>The Last Jedi</i> literally and metaphorically killed the main story’s darlings, any attempt to resuscitate the franchise was bound to be met with hostility. Firing the original directors 80% of the way through shooting (an <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-star-wars-episode-ix-director-colin-trevorrow-is-fired-20170906-story.html">increasingly common business strategy for Disney</a>) did nothing to abate the internet’s gravest fear—that <i>Star Wars</i> had finally gone to the graveyard of creativity, sent there by people who didn’t understand its appeal. Consequently, <i>Solo</i> became a bona-fide box office bomb, which is a darn shame, because Howard & Lord & Miller have created hands down the most spirited, unapologetic, and commendable Star Wars outing since <i>Revenge of the Sith</i>.</div>
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Before diving into the virtues of the newest film, a brief review of Star Wars would seem in order, since I have only weighed in on <a href="http://www.cotekeller.com/2016/12/rogue-one-an-excessively-star-wars-story-and-the-2nd-biannual-trailer-update.html">one installment</a>. The credo of the Disney Wars films is well established by this point, as decreed by the dashing and unpredictable Kylo Ren. “Let the past die,” says the Millennial free agent to Rey in the most pivotal scene of <i>The Last Jedi</i>. “Kill it if you have to.” In other words, out with the Force Olds, in with the #ForceNews.<br />
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When <i>The Force Awakens</i> came out, fanboys celebrated (and later denounced) the conservatism of every creative choice and plot beat. J.J. Abrams had settled for rebooting the ’77 <i>Star Wars</i> with updated computer graphics, but he also had enough business sense to fortify his film with Marvel-esque banter and bland tokenism, accordingly ensuring good ratings from critics. In technique, pacing, worldbuilding, and characterizations, <i>The Force Awakens</i> couldn’t be further removed from George Lucas’ widely-loathed prequels, and disciples of the <a href="https://youtu.be/FxKtZmQgxrI?list=PL9A12F8F947849C30" target="_blank">Mr. Plinkett reviews</a> could have a field day checking off all the artistic caveats Abrams clearly borrowed from YouTube. Nonetheless, one could still make out the skeleton of vintage <i>Star Wars</i>; the influence of George Lucas may have been excised, the prequels effectively eradicated, but the soul of the original trilogy remained intact.<br />
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Disney would not commence systematically dismantling the classics until <i>Rogue One</i>, which felt like a joyless act of sabotage, trying to don the habit of a war film for grown-ups and looking like an expensive fan project in the process. <i>The Last Jedi</i> steered <i>Star Wars</i> in an even more revolutionary direction, from its demonization of a beloved, pre-established hero to its already dated political sloganeering. Ridicule me all you want, but right and left should be able to acknowledge the revisionist, leftist politics of the Disney Wars films. Oliver Jones of the <i>Observer</i> snarkily commented, “[<i>The Last Jedi</i>] pushed the corporatized franchise in surprising new directions and reexamined flyboy machismo central to the Lucas mythos… Plus it had the added bonus of ruining several people’s childhoods.” I won’t even graze the numerous, mostly well-substantiated blog posts analyzing <i>The Last Jedi</i> as a repudiation of White Supremacy and The Patriarchy.<br />
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<i>Solo</i> enters the overcrowded summer landscape at a time when <i>Star Wars</i> movies have been retreating ever further from their roots, boldly chasing the status quo with aspirations of socio-political currency. By comparison, this spin-off feels both traditional and ironically radical, a compelling argument for a return to a purer, more imaginative brand of cinema. For the first time in three years (and probably for a while afterwards), we have a <i>Star Wars</i> film that genuinely emanates pride in being a <i>Star Wars</i> film, that embraces the series with all its blemishes, and that doesn’t arrogantly aim to erase the prequels from history. <i>Last Jedi</i> apologists or general skeptics may write this movie off as “unnecessary” or “shameless fan service”, both of which may be accurate descriptors, but assuming that cinema has declined into reactionary fan service, at least <i>Solo</i> serves from a place of love instead of from corporate apathy.<br />
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If George Lucas brought anything to the table that <i>Solo</i> lacks, it would be pathos. Irrespective of <i>Episode 3</i>’s animated clone troopers, dated anti-Bush commentary, and intermittent slapstick shenanigans, nothing in <i>Star Wars</i> history has begotten so many man-tears as Obi-Wan, when he famously stood over his bisected padawan and cried out in anguish, “You were my brother, Anakin! I loved you!” The closest that the prequels come to high cinema may be <a href="https://youtu.be/_hoXNXSpmng" target="_blank">a wordless scene</a> in which Anakin and Padme stare forlornly across the Coruscant skyline at sundown, isolated in their respective frames yet joined by a premonition of the unspeakable evil that is about to consume him.<br />
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<i>Solo</i> seems to pay homage to these images in its penultimate scene, but with a romance hastily concocted over an action-packed two hours, it simply can’t drudge up the same tragedy as <i>Sith</i>, which had an entire racing sports film and romantic comedy building up to it. In fact, Ron Howard’s film has nothing approaching emotional vulnerability at all, and that should not be mistaken for a fault. The cold and stoic exterior goes hand in hand with the theme of the film, which many people may deny on impulse but which readily presents itself to anyone who’s paying attention. Unlike the increasingly absurd episodes, which glorify outnumbered heroes who triumph by courage, sheer determination, and unearned brawn, <i>Solo</i> magnifies the less attractive underbelly of the <i>Star Wars</i> universe—the street urchins, the convicts, and the dispossessed outcasts, who have to rely on their wits to get ahead in an unforgiving world.<br />
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Some people have deplored the lack of a central character arc, but screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan shrewdly forgoes the origin story formula that has reached a point of pablum. This is not a film about Han blossoming from a selfish thief into a dutiful servant of justice and democracy. On the contrary, it’s a film about a world-wise Han preemptively cheating the scoundrels who would try to cheat him first, about a man who lives according to Locke’s state of nature and can’t afford to give strangers the benefit of the doubt. Han’s decisive act of shooting first doesn’t necessarily surprise, though it does seem a little edgy and counter-cultural for a Disney consumed with propagating niceness and tolerance. How this series went from a mantra of “Love Trumps Hate” to “Don’t Trust Anybody” in the span of one movie eludes my understanding, but <i>Solo</i> solidifies itself as the most non-Disney movie released in years.<br />
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<a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/movie-review-solo-star-wars-story-blurs-outlaw-hero/" target="_blank">Armond White has noted</a> that the opening text of <i>Solo</i> references a Raymond Chandler essay on the prototypical hero of detective fiction. Coming from the writer-director of the acclaimed neo-noir <i>Body Heat</i>, this allusion can hardly be taken lightly. I’ve seen people try to make sense of <i>Solo</i> as a “space western” or “heist film”, and while it certainly has components of those genres, Kasdan’s work is best interpreted as a neo-noir, live-action cartoon, perhaps the very first of its kind. Even Emilia Clarke <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/emilia-clarke-solo-a-star-wars-story-ron-howard-1201968675/">has said, with some scorn</a>, that Lord & Miller had such a vision in mind. Critical consensus seems to hold that Bradford Young’s cinematography herein is really bad, because there aren’t a lot of light sources, people’s faces are obscured in shadow, and the environments look murky and ugly. I can sympathize with that notion, particularly in scenes of the bad guy’s unostentatious lounge, though I demur that the dimness is a deliberate and motivated choice. Just look at some of the screenshots below and tell me I’m stretching to find justification for my arbitrary genre of choice.<br />
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The noir embellishments of <i>Solo</i> extend beyond the visuals to the story itself, and especially to love interest Q’ira, who represents one of the most positive backslides for Disney as a whole. It’s been well documented by this point that the state of women in Disney’s <i>Star Wars</i> leaves much to be desired. Even with the prolific and successful Kathleen Kennedy in the producer’s chair, these films had long struggled to introduce a single interesting or grounded female character, being more focused on upending gender norms and providing “strong”, “independent” “role models” for the most lucrative demographic of <i>Star Wars</i> fans: teenage and pre-teenage girls. <i>The Last Jedi</i> took this transparent agenda to a distracting extreme, but not in a satirical or jesting way. Much like David Lynch, Rian Johnson stuck me with more questions than answers, questions like “Why are 80% of the Resistance fighters women?” or “Why are all of the men in <i>Star Wars</i> now impotent, effete, or impetuous, while all of the women are icons of perfection?” If this series is based a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, let alone one ravaged by war, then why was it starting to veer so closely to a 3rd-wave Feminist utopia?<br />
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When film students of the future are writing “research papers” on the Disney Wars that they hastily plagiarized from popular YouTube video-essayists, one attribute they’ll focus on is the near-total eradication of gender distinctions from the universe. Thereupon do I base my case that <i>Solo</i> is the most realistic and human <i>Star Wars</i> film since George Lucas lost creative control. Granted, Q’ira can’t remotely hold her own against the beguiling dames portrayed by Bacall or Stanwyck (or even against late-century femme fatales, e.g. Sean Young in <i>Blade Runner</i>), but her presence in the wayward <i>Star Wars</i> breaks new ground simply because Kasdan allows her to be human: morally dubious, manipulative, sultry, and sexual.<br />
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This being a modern action movie, the directors can’t resist the impulse to have her beat up several opponents with kung fu, but at least <i>Solo</i> offers some sort of explanation for her fighting prowess, unlike the episodic films, wherein Rey and Jyn Erso are naturally gifted at quelling trained and heavily-armed soldiers. Daisy Ridley responded to critiques of her indefatigable, flawless character by <a href="https://youtu.be/1kmggaXRUKc">playing the Sex Card</a> and insisting, <a href="https://youtu.be/E4e9nnJYJ9E">“I don’t really believe in weaknesses in people.”</a> <i>Solo</i> responded to such criticisms by creating an intriguing, original character who could conceivably shoulder a movie by herself. One can argue that Q’ira is underdeveloped due to the story’s limited point-of-view, but her greatest asset critically lies not so much in physical power as in her propensity to leverage charm and deceit to get ahead.<br />
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I contend that many of the Disney Wars’ problems can be credited to the nebulous existence of sexuality, which diminishes their urgency and palpability. Consider that <i>The Force Awakens</i> and <i>Rogue One</i> feature nearly identical scenes of a male sidekick trying to save a female protagonist who promptly proves his help unnecessary. Consider also that all the young stars are trapped in strictly platonic, grade-school friendships, and whenever they manage to exhibit more humanity than machines (I refer to the shirtless Kylo Ren meme and the stolen kiss in <i>The Last Jedi</i>), it feels awkward and discontinuous with the sexless void that is the Disney Cinematic Universe. <i>Solo</i> marks the first time in 9 hours of live-action <i>Star Wars</i> material that gender and reproductive activity evidently exist. The film not only acknowledges and plays upon the sex appeal of Clarke, Donald Glover, and Alden Ehrenrich, but also introduces the concept of nontraditional relationships in a comedic and risqué way that I was not at all expecting from Disney. A supporting character establishes that robot sex is very much a lifestyle choice in <i>Star Wars</i>, bringing the world closer to 21st century society than any episode since the prequels, which dealt extensively with slavery, terrorism, and republican government.<br />
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While <i>Solo</i> is demonstrably more grounded than its predecessors, showing among other things that <i>Star Wars</i> has its own breed of social-justice warriors rallying around “droid rights”, it also revels in the weirdness and extravagance that space-fantasy makes possible—hence my cartoon label. I briefly thought that <i>The Last Jedi</i> had the right idea when Luke Skywalker was extracting green milk from the teat of a bloated alien mammal, but most of that movie took place on a spaceship, and it ultimately retreated into familiar settings. Team Lord-Miller-Howard, however, consistently surprise with unorthodox art direction and dialogue, harking back to the ramshackle indie vibe of the original <i>Star Wars</i>. Take Han’s criminal overseer Lady Proxima, a grotesque ten-foot centipede who burns when exposed to sunlight, or any of the gamblers in the scene below. Indeed, this rendition of <i>Star Wars</i> has more in common with Douglas Adams or <i>Valerian</i> than with the stale and well-worn fan service that Disney repeatedly commissions.<br />
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This is not to suggest that <i>Solo</i> is free of fan service. I reiterate that this is the most referential and self-enamored <i>Star Wars</i> film in years, to an extent that will either irritate or enthrall. The film doggedly strives to demystify almost every element of Han’s backstory, from how he got his surname to why he has a pair of dice hanging over the Falcon’s dashboard. The explanations it proffers are almost uniformly lame, some of them begging the question of whether the directors or the Kasdans were wryly belittling the very concept of corporate-mandated prequels. Considering Lord & Miller’s hyper-reflexive, satirical resume (including <i>The Lego Movie</i> and <i>22 Jump Street</i>), it makes sense that a spirit of good-natured trolling should infuse <i>Solo: A Star Wars Story</i>, for which it is all the better.<br />
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Nonetheless, it lacks the anarchistic fervor of <i>The Last Jedi</i>, referencing other <i>Star Wars</i> films with too much enthusiasm. There are, of course, many obligatory callbacks to the original trilogy, both spoken and visual; I particularly like the way they paid homage to the kiss between Han and Leia. What I appreciated even more were the multiple shameless references to the prequels, which less convicted directors have tried to sweep under the rug, fearing their unpopularity. More so than Rian Johnson, the creators here seemed to grasp the importance of judicial precedent in storytelling, which is why lines like, “Well negotiated!” or, “I’m gonna be the best pilot in the galaxy,” routinely rear their heads in this film. The cameo towards the ending may evince scoffs and derision, though it arguably marks the biggest leap for <i>Star Wars</i> going forward, raising the possibility of cinematic entries that aren’t anchored to the Empire-Rebellion conflict.<br />
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In fact, <i>Solo</i> feels more connected to entertainment history as a whole than most blockbusters in recent memory. Many of these parallels could be coincidental, but I caught myself flashing back to <i>Starship Troopers</i>, <i>Paths of Glory</i>, <i>Spongebob Squarepants</i>, <i>Barry Lyndon</i>, <i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i>, <i>Uncharted 2</i>, <i>A.I.</i>, <i>Forrest Gump</i>, and <i>Pee Wee’s Big Adventure</i>, roughly in that order. The presence of such allusions doesn’t inherently seal the movie as fantastic, but they do comprise a nice reward for those who’ve been closely following genre films over the years. Both in its broader associations and in its sheer density of <i>Star Wars</i> references, <i>Solo</i> is firmly addressed to long-time followers, more than to “the new generation of <i>Star Wars</i> fans” or to opportunistic <i>Salon</i> bloggers who obsessively scrutinize race or gender in casting.<br />
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While being a noble, old-fashioned effort for a post-Lucas <i>Star Wars</i> adventure, <i>Solo</i> struggles to attain greatness, mainly on account of its divided personality. A few years ago, Lord & Miller were two of Tinseltown’s most commercially viable directors, practically a god-send for <i>Star Wars</i> or any franchise. It’s unfortunate that their fast-paced, humorous interpretation had to be diluted with the relative blandness of Oscar-winner Ron Howard, who still manages to deliver some exhilarating action. The film was obviously rushed into theaters over a very short timeline, as the macro-editing isn’t even finished. “Smile is <i>the word</i>,” says Q’ira to Han before their paths diverge forever. “I smile whenever I’m on an adventure with you.” This confession is clearly meant to serve as a dramatic pay-off, a la, <a href="https://youtu.be/Ltx3BuVVEr8" target="_blank">“My name is Max,”</a> but the conversation setting up the unspoken word didn’t even make the final cut. Oops.<br />
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The film also feels pressured to shoehorn in a “voiceless” child soldiers subplot, which feels abundantly redundant after the last three Disney Wars. So superfluous are the Rebels in <i>Solo</i> that they could be substituted for stormtroopers in a single scene and then removed without impacting the plot, but that would require Kennedy to frame these stories on some other pedestal besides eternal political #Resistance.<br />
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Perhaps that’s asking too much innovation from the current Disney regime, but I myself will celebrate <i>Solo</i>’s persistence, in spite of the innumerable odds.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-36417114246150483392017-11-25T13:29:00.002-08:002019-08-21T15:40:36.371-07:00Listening to "Homogenic" in 2017<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The Author poses a retrospective appreciation of Björk’s <i>Homogenic</i>, a seminal electronic record sure to enrich western pop culture if more people would listen to it.</span><div>
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This weekend marks two of the most momentous occasions of 2017. For most of the English-speaking world, it is a time for rushing out to dying retailers and buying scads of normally overpriced consumer goods, but for the more snobbish vestiges of the internet at large, it symbolizes the arrival of the tenth international studio album by Björk (counting <i>Selmasongs</i>). Having refrained from listening to the <i>Utopia </i>leak, I must admit that Björk’s public activities have put a bit of a damper on my expectations, seeing as she first contributed an older song off <i>Post</i> to the benefit vinyl “7 Inches For Planned Parenthood”, which is basically tantamount to gloating over homicide, then joined the trite coming-out party on social media for sexual harassment enablers and faux victims. I’m not ashamed to report that allegations about the character of Lars Von Trier, withheld for 17 years and unsubstantiated, haven’t influenced my opinion of <i>Dancer in the Dark</i>.</div>
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No matter my misgivings about the present-day Björk, I still can’t help being awestruck by her finer moments, and with <i>Utopia</i> garnering so much early attention, now seems like the perfect time for reflecting on her pre-shill discography. Coincidentally, 2017 also affords a reason to celebrate 20 years of her most acclaimed album, <i>Homogenic</i>, which didn’t exactly alter the mainstream of pop or electronica but certainly formed a landmark in its artistic cohesiveness. Now I’m far from the first to single <i>Homogenic</i> out for praise, and none of this explication should prove novel to those already versed in Björk. Most of my generation, however, isn’t versed in her at all, and it’s with the intention of initiating such people that I’ll hereby proceed to rehash what I assume is a lot of fairly common knowledge.<br />
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I can’t remember the first Björk album that broke my indisposition towards her voice. As a freshman trying to develop a tolerance for some of the more eccentric artists commended by an older friend, I understandably enjoyed most of the singles from <i>Debut</i>, catchy as it is, and found most of her music from <i>Medulla</i> onward unbearable. Now I’ve reached such a plane of enlightenment that I can safely regard <i>Medulla </i>as her second-greatest album, but I had to learn how to like <i>Homogenic</i> first. In retrospect, Björk’s third album may do the most to ease in wary newcomers, who if nothing else can at least absorb themselves in its lush soundscapes.<br />
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<i>Homogenic</i>’s overarching theme is the merging of the organic and the mechanical, a characteristic conveyed in its production, lyrics, and especially its music videos. For all the quaint, racially based hoopla raised last year over Beyonce’s “visual album” <i>Lemonade</i>, I think it bears mentioning that Björk and her collaborators were doing the same thing two decades ago, on a more cerebral and mesmerizing level. Consider the then-groundbreaking video for “All Is Full of Love”, which in its pristine white visuals clearly passes as a precursor to <i>I, Robot</i> and <i>Ex Machina</i>. The symbolism is a tad on the nose: two humanoid robots pining for connection consummate their mutual desire in a kiss, but Björk’s haunting overlaid vocals elevate the material above its simple, science-fiction foundation. The music videos for “Hunter” and “Joga” extend the technological tapestry of the album, distorting images of the natural, i.e. Icelandic landscapes and Björk’s head, into some hybrid reality by the virtue of computer graphics.<br />
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Björk opens the record on a softly ascending, swirling beat that immediately presages a more complex album than <i>Debut</i> and <i>Post</i>, the latter of which blared into the listener’s consciousness with an aggressive trip-hop sound. Her singing first enters in the wind-like backing vocals, signifying that her voice itself is going to be a important instrument in defining the palette of <i>Homogenic</i>. On “Hunter”, Björk impresses on us a state of restless searching and detachment, which will pervade most of the songs to come. <i>Homogenic</i> defies easy comprehension as a concept album, but the majority of the tracks seem to be articulating vexation or regret over a distanced lover, making the parting, New Agey hymn “All Is Full of Love” that much more satisfying. Björk’s romantic depression manifests in conceits both poetic and tactile. “While you’re away / my heart comes undone / slowly unravels / in a ball of yarn,” she muses in an emotional, spacey song, the expressed favorite of Thom Yorke. The next song, written by Icelandic poet Sjōn, piles on the metaphors to a degree approaching glorious melodrama, and the music unabashedly follows suit. Björk fluctuates here between hushed appeals to a man who keeps leaving her in ruin and unrepressed wails on the outro. It’s rare to see predictable rhyme and meter observed so faithfully in her discography, yet “Bachelorette” nonetheless condenses all the pain that Björk has been feeling into several extraordinary couplets.<br />
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I’m a path of cinders burning under your feet /<br />
You’re the one who walks me, I’m your one way street.</blockquote>
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On the instrumental side, foreboding piano keys and industrial programming crash against each other like violent waves, joined eventually by a swooning string section and accordion. Björk may not have got her feet wet on film scoring until three years later, but the musical peaks of <i>Homogenic</i>—“Joga”, “Bachelorette”, and “All Is Full of Love”—sound more like self-contained movies than anything else she’s recorded.<br />
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But one should not infer from these that <i>Homogenic</i> is all intensity and gloom. Before long it applies its central strings-and-beats formula to tracks that range from reflective and monotonous (“All Neon Like”) to elated and buoyant (“Alarm Call”). On the latter of these, Björk revives a little of the dance flavor from her previous albums, all while reveling in her carefree emancipation: “It doesn’t scare me at all,” she repeatedly exults. The instrumentals here particularly highlight her and Mark Bell’s versatility with electronics. Whereas the textures in the first half of <i>Homogenic</i> were cold, at times cacophonous, in “Alarm Call” they seem to emulate the chirruping of birds.<br />
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I didn’t initially favor the ninth track “Pluto”, which computerizes Björk’s voice for the first time and clatters along on a frigid, electronic drum pattern, but now I’m convinced that the whole wouldn’t function quite as well without it. More than just a breakup lament or a dubiously prescient enactment of the artificial supplanting the natural, <i>Homogenic</i> works because of its meticulous balancing of contrasts, and if I never had to suffer the artist’s theatrical, warped moaning on “Pluto”, then the ending surely wouldn’t fill me with such bliss.<br />
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Björk has created one of a select few ironclad records that I sincerely believe would enrich the state of western culture if every person listened to it once, and preferably twice. Some people will no doubt find Björk’s vocal styling unpleasant and shrill, as if they’re being musically assaulted, and to these people I can say, “Me too... I’ve been there.” But if <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bjork/posts/10155782628166460" target="_blank">Danish film directors</a> have taught us anything, sometimes you have to put up with a little discomfort to reap the best rewards.</div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-4435776887037002132017-08-27T12:00:00.000-07:002019-09-15T13:06:28.964-07:00We Did Some Research Into Spotify, And Here Are The Five Worst Hate Bands That Came Up<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">You probably won't believe who's #1.</span><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Article written by George Stefano Pallas.</span></b> Musical illiteracy and shareability practiced by the author are his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i><br />
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Spotify. You use it, we use it, it seems like practically everybody uses it. For the paltry sum of more than $100 a year, people can rent an almost limitless selection of music that doesn’t include King Crimson, Tool, or many film soundtracks, <a href="http://theauthorsfiles.blogspot.com/2016/06/spotify-is-bad-for-civilization-on-genre-music-discovery-and-the-decline-of-taste.html" target="_blank">a limitless selection from which they’ll listen to maybe a hundred tracks and blissfully ignore the rest</a>. Whether one is working out, making out, or getting turned up, Spotify has a playlist for pretty much every mood, making it the primary streaming service to beat up to this point.<br />
There’s no denying the power Spotify wields over a society that almost exclusively listens to music from the last six months, and with that staggering power comes a huge responsibility to the people. As any parent who reads blogs aimed at single, unemployed millennials should know, music is one of the most instrumental factors in sculpting developing minds, which often don’t reach full maturity until the child enters his or her mid-20s. Intellectual experts agree that media can have profound effects on consumers’ psycho-social growth, so it’s absolutely vital to control the messages that kids are exposed to during this vulnerable period.<br />
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Spotify has recently taken strides to thwart the surge of Nazism in a sharply divided America, <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/08/16/spotify-remove-neo-nazi/" target="_blank">removing from its platform dozens of White Supremacist artists whom the credible Southern Poverty Law Center formerly condemned as Hate Bands</a>. This is a noble effort that we’re sadly unaccustomed to seeing from major tech corporations like Google or Twitter, which have struggled to crack down declaratively on violent speech, but when it comes to pointing out hatred and bigotry, there’s always so much more work that can be done. Accordingly, a team of journalists for <i>The Author’s Files</i> undertook an extensive investigation into Spotify’s catalog to identify extremist Hate Music the company may have missed. These are the five most egregious artists we came across in our study.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">5. Run The Jewels</span></b><br />
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Run The Jewels are cited as one of the most cutting-edge duos in hip-hop culture, and in many ways they exceed the reputation. El-P couldn’t put out a fire beat if he tried, and Killer Mike stands at the forefront of hip-hop activism, writing socially conscious songs about how the 13th Amendment enables slavery and endorsing Bernie Sanders for president – how much cooler can someone get than that? Unfortunately, for all the good that both these poets have contributed to society, they’ve had some missteps that make them undeserving of Spotify’s recognition. The most notable of these occurs on their biggest single to date, Close Your Eyes and Count To F***. Raps Mike (verbatim from the liner notes):<br />
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Where my thuggers and my crippers and my blooders and my brothers<br />
When you niggas gon unite and kill the police, motherf___ers?<br />
And take over a jail<br />
Give them COs hell<br />
The burnin of the sulfur goddamn i love the smell<br />
Now get to pillow torchin<br />
Where the f___ the warden?<br />
And when you find him we don’t kill him we just waterboard him<br />
We killin them for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom<br />
And even if some good ones die f___ it the lord will sort em</blockquote>
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Run The Jewels have done a lot of positive things for the artistic advancement of their genre, but literally calling for the indiscriminate murder of police officers and rioting in prison isn’t one of them. In fact, one could even argue that it crossed a line of basic decency, and hearing hate speech being espoused by Killer Mike is all the more disappointing knowing how erudite he is.</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">4. The Chainsmokers</span></b><br />
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The Chainsmokers nowadays are known mainly for sugary, harmless electropop that appeals to the broadest coalition of music fans. They’re also one of Spotify’s most valuable artists, laying claim to two of their 10 most-streamed tracks of all time. What few people remember is that The Chainsmokers started out as a mean-spirited Hate Band of the lowest order, employing brutal satire to disparage and harass people they don’t like, especially women.<br />
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The duo first landed on the map via their misogynistic anthem, #Selfie, which callously pandered to the lowest clichés of anti-feminism. The single in question cruelly mocks the insecurities of girls over their appearances, a daily struggle to which most men will never be able to relate. “So like, what do you think?” rambles the speaker on the track, a vapid valley girl who rains shallow judgment on party-goers. “Did you think that girl was pretty? How did that girl even get in here, do you see her? She’s so short and that dress is so tacky – who wears cheetah?” The Chainsmokers clearly fail to understand the societal pressures on women to be beautiful, but instead of acknowledging their male privilege and whiteness, they treat women’s desire for acceptance as an object of scorn and ridicule.<br />
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The track only gets more crude and disgusting as it gets to the third verse. “Is that guy sleeping over there?” the singer continues. “Yeah, the one next to the girl with no shoes on. That’s so ratchet! That girl is such a fake model, she definitely bought all her Instagram followers.” Not content to simply make a selfie-shaming song, making a joke out of women’s self-esteem, The Chainsmokers glorify slut-shaming and attempt to erase the immeasurable progress that’s been made on gender equality.<br />
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Between the radio, TV commercials, and college dance parties, The Chainsmokers are inescapable pretty much wherever one goes, but that doesn’t mean that Spotify has to condone their hate as well.</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">3. Ministry</span></b><br />
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With a name like Ministry, it’s not surprising that this group would attempt to stoke the flames of controversy. Ministry immediately evokes a wide range of traumatizing religious terrorism, from the Islamophobic, blood-soaked Crusades to the innately Christian heritage of the KKK, but that’s not the full extent of their toxic prejudice.</div>
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The group started out a relatively innocuous synthpop act, riding the coattails of popular bands like New Order and Talking Heads, but when Ronald Reagan was elected president twice in a row, it emboldened them to bare their true colors and turn their music into a deadly weapon. Ministry officially reformed as an “industrial-metal” band at the nadir of the Reagan era, combining the well-documented white nationalism of heavy metal and the virulent fascism of the industrial genre, which arose out of the Greedy 80s and was a celebratory ode to the inhuman working conditions of the industrial revolution.<br />
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The first album the Hate Band put out under their new style was The Land of Rape and Honey, another reference to Old Testament fundamentalism and to the neo-Nazi tenet of divine selection, a.k.a. “the promised land”. In 1990, the band recorded a live version of the opening track, Stigmata, which climaxes in a profanity-laden attack on numerous minorities. For more than a minute Alan Jourgensen howls obscenities into a crowd, riling them into a frenzy of hate and rage. We’ve condensed this portion of the song for brevity and for the comfort of our readers.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
F___ you! … F___ everyone!<br />
F___ the church! F___ Jesus! …<br />
F___ the Jews! F___ the Buddhists!<br />
F___ the Hindus! F___ George Bush!<br />
F___ his ugly wife! F___ Tipper Gore! …<br />
F___ Gorbachev! … F___ all these a__holes!</blockquote>
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Hate speech is not a victimless crime, and Ministry have made it a mission to wound as many people as possible with their words. Hopefully Spotify will take steps to prevent them from marginalizing any other defenseless groups.</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">2. Sublime</span></b><br />
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Now we know what a lot of you are thinking. Bradley Nowell died and Sublime stopped recording more than 20 years ago, so what’s the point in trying to suppress their music today? “Just let Bradley rest in peace,” fans might say, “He can’t hurt anybody anymore.” To some this would sound like a very common-sense proposal. After all, music does have cultural and historical value, and how is censoring music one doesn’t like any different than right-wing Nazis burning books, or uptight parents banning them from schools?<br />
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Unfortunately, Bradley’s crude and disgusting lyrics still have the potential to seduce the uneducated, which makes it all the more imperative to keep them in the shadows where they belong. Consider his notorious, self-loathing radio hit Date Rape, in which he perpetuates rape culture by saying that he “would never get laid” otherwise, or Wrong Way, in which he calls a 12-year-old girl named Annie a “whore” and gloatingly admits to taking advantage of her.</div>
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When it comes to Sublime’s problematic lyrics, though, nothing takes the cake more than April 29, 1992 (Miami), a graphic reconstruction of the L.A. riots wherein Bradley recklessly urges peaceful protestors to retaliate with violence. “But if you look at the streets,” he sings, “It wasn’t about Rodney King, in this f___ed-up situation and these f___ed-up police. It’s about coming up and staying on top and screaming 187 on a motherf___ing cop!”<br />
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A 1-8-7, for those who don’t know, is police code for a murder, homicide, or execution. In other words, Sublime is inciting violence against a group of state workers based on nothing more than their profession – the definition of hate speech. Would Spotify’s partners really approve of their advertisements being run on top of such objectionable Hate Music as Sublime’s?</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">1. Kendrick Duckworth Lamar</span></b><br />
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Kendrick Lamar needs no introduction. By far the most revered and musically progressive artist working in his genre today, or perhaps in all of music, he’s reaped resounding accolades from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Anthony Fantano, and even President Obama. At the same time, Kendrick has curried more controversy than pretty much any other recording artist, basically embodying an inversion of Kanye West. Whereas the latter has reveled in proudly Black, self-worshipping bangers like I Am A God, Jesus Walks, and Runaway, Kendrick has made a career out of self-loathing, subtly regressive songs that appear to promote Black Lives Matter but actually slander it.<br />
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Case in point: the penultimate track on his landmark, 79-minute record <i>To Pimp A Butterfly</i>, titled The Blacker The Berry. As in much of his art, Kendrick slyly inoculates himself against criticism, disguising his internalized racism as a denouncement of hate. “You hate me don’t you?” he repeatedly snaps. “You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture!” This refrain alone has convinced many critics – <a href="http://theauthorsfiles.blogspot.com/2015/07/we-study-rap-music-in-public-school-now-america.html" target="_blank">Brian Mooney among them</a> – of the artist’s good intentions, but when one reads the lyrics more closely, Kendrick is telling a far different narrative. He once refers to himself as a “proud monkey”, casually dehumanizing people of his ethnicity, while he calls himself a hypocrite a total of four times. As the hip-hop rhythms dwindle, Kendrick’s isolated vocals takes on a new urgency, taking aim at Black culture itself and all of its most cherished traditions, including Black History Month and diversity in Hollywood.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So don’t matter how much I say I like to preach with the Panthers<br />
Or tell Georgia State, “Marcus Garvey got all the answers,”<br />
Or try to celebrate February like it’s my B-Day<br />
Or eat watermelon, chicken, and Kool-Aid on weekdays<br />
Or jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements<br />
Or watch BET cause urban support is important</blockquote>
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Yet Kendrick’s crashing wave of hate rolls on, taking a radically subversive turn in the last verse, when he abruptly draws a false equivalency between institutionalized racism and the specter of black-on-black crime.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It’s funny how Zulu and Xhosa might go to war<br />
Two tribal armies that want to build and destroy<br />
Remind me of these Compton Crip gangs that live next door…<br />
So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?<br />
When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?</blockquote>
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In one fell swoop Kendrick brushes aside the social significance of Trayvon Martin, a one-armed, black teenager who was murdered by a White-Hispanic neighborhood watchman and never received justice through a jury of his peers. Whether by accident or by design, The Blacker The Berry exonerates a system that persecutes blacks by suggesting that blacks persecute themselves, which somehow makes systemic police brutality OK.<br />
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The music of Kendrick Lamar isn’t going away anytime soon, and will probably wreak damage against downtrodden communities for years to come. Spotify cannot hope to silence him completely, but they can refuse to act as hosts for him, or any other Hate Artists of his kind.</div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-71635971399404045792017-08-17T19:12:00.001-07:002019-09-15T11:15:49.586-07:00Overlooked Asian Movies: Devdas, Metropolis, As Tears Go By<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The Author reviews three unrelated and underrated movies from India, Japan, and Hong Kong that none of the <i>HuffPo</i>'s or <i>Indiewire</i>'s of the internet have given their proper due.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br /><b style="font-size: xx-large;">Devdas (2002)</b><br />
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Earlier in the spring, I told a friend I aspired to watch more movies hailing from India, not because of some trendy commitment to physical diversity or because Indians are aggressively marginalized as a minority – Lord knows Asian-Americans are the most overlooked opportunity for virtue signaling in the nation – but because I’m fascinated by the massive variance in filmmaking techniques around the world. The first stop on my tour guide through the region was the much-lauded Apu trilogy, actually originating from Bengal and resurrected by the good film fans at the Criterion Collection. I muscled through this 5.5-hour epic with a fellow tourist of short patience, who was staunchly fixated on sores like a repetitive soundtrack and remained unmoved by its depictions of maturity, loss, and life lived in accordance with simplicity. I appreciated the series as a whole, even though it died out (literally and figuratively) towards its end, but wouldn’t remotely call it emblematic of “Bollywood”, per my stereotypical understanding of it. Clearly this wasn’t the key text for such sprawling crowd-pleasers as <i>Slumdog Millionaire</i> or <i>Moulin Rouge</i>, both made by western directors who were inspired to imitate the country’s cinema.<br />
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Fortunately enough, an Edwards multiplex in my mostly Caucasian area makes an inexplicable habit of showing Indian blockbusters every couple weeks, and so I drove out on a whim one night to catch a film from 2002 I’d never heard brought up in any forum. <i>Devdas</i> clocks in over three hours long with intermission – absolutely unfathomable for any American musical – and runs about an hour longer than any of the Apu movies, but feels less laborious than any of them. Just in terms of being compulsively watchable, it may surpass every film that stretches on so long, but lost in the nearly nonexistent conversation surrounding it is the wallop of cinematic splendor that its director lays over an extremely sappy story.<br />
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In its form, <i>Devdas </i>defies comparison to pretty much any American film besides <i>Titanic</i>, but content-wise it basically resembles an extremely expensive Hallmark or edgier Lifetime movie, focusing on love triangles, generational conflict, and class division. The story is much too complicated to recount accurately several weeks after watching it, but the plot heavily depends upon such familiar tropes as alcohol addiction, unreturned letters, avaricious siblings, unsympathetic parents, and arranged marriage, one of which is not as endemic to American entertainment. What raises Devdas on paper above and apart from standard made-for-TV fare is the immense verve with which it treats its subject matter, never once succumbing to condescension or laziness. There’s not an inkling of cynicism to be found in the movie’s monstrous length, and one can sense vicariously through the screen that Sanjay Leela Bhansali is fully invested in the star-crossed lovers’ fate. The creators’ empathy even touches archetypes who are stereotypically slighted, specifically a courtesan vying for Devdas’ love, depicted here as a lonely and compassionate soul rather than a jealous whore (as many characters malign her).<br />
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<![endif]-->I get the impression that many self-tokened cinephiles dismiss Bollywood as a movement, either because traditional media ignore it altogether, because the posters look unappealing, or because they perceive it as uniformly ‘cheesy’. If sincerity is sufficient grounds to convict something of cheesiness, then <i>Devdas</i> definitely reeks of cheese, and should be considered all the bolder for it. One can draw a teachable contrast between this and <a href="http://theauthorsfiles.blogspot.com/2017/03/2016-film-in-review-la-la-land-and-how-oscars-degrade-movies.html" target="_blank"><i>La La Land</i></a>, another film lauded for an ostensibly surprising ending that doesn’t really shock in retrospect. Damien Chazelle orchestrates his picture with a prevailing spirit of distance and elitist enlightenment; he isn’t fashioning a conventional musical so much as a commentary on classic MGM musicals, thinly veiled as just the thing he’s taking apart. I second <a href="https://www.steynonline.com/7663/la-la-land">Mark Steyn’s assessment of the film</a>, calling it a “half-hearted semi-musical” by an author who doesn’t believe in the versatility of the form, and the twist ending of <i>La La Land</i> doesn’t register as much of a twist once one realizes how Chazelle has been skewering musicals all along. Unlike the newer movie, <i>Devdas</i> doesn’t deliberately slip out of musical mode halfway through to make a snobbish point about the harsh onset of reality. In fact, the movie commits even harder to the musical routine as it chugs along, reaching for ever greater emotional heights. Bhansali not only includes a drinking song as the last in the soundtrack but plays it completely straight, provoking laughs while shedding light on how far the alcoholic singer has fallen from grace. <i>Devdas</i>’ coincidence of mirth and seriousness reels viewers into a lengthy tale of unsanctioned love, and its over-the-top finale feels genuinely affecting having established that connection.<br />
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<![endif]-->Notwithstanding its fairly formulaic narrative, the film is bursting with extravagant flourishes to make the most bombastic Michael Bay production look relatively restrained. The costumes and sets are gorgeously realized, of course, and the camera impressively remains in near-constant motion. The editing masks the runtime quite efficiently and makes creative use of match transitions, though the presentation is somewhat marred by ‘hard’ audio cuts-out that seem like they were plucked from an older movie. Otherwise the sound mixing is fantastic, and decidedly non-Hollywood. Instead of enlisting musically untrained actors to provide the soundtrack, as is the custom of today, Devdas delegates the responsibility to a different set of professional singers, soaks their recordings in reverb, and allows the cast to lip sync while emoting and dancing. As a result, the musical numbers relish their fakeness and come across as larger than life, averting the periodic plague of blatant over-dubbing that surfaces in <i>La La Land </i>or other movies sung by their casts that want to be taken as realistic. Seeing this in optimal viewing conditions with blaring surround sound, I sometimes neared a state of euphoria I hadn’t experienced since <i>Arrival</i>.<br />
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<![endif]-->If there’s one word to encapsulate the effect of <i>Devdas</i>, it would be euphoric. As cheesy as it sounds, the film immerses people in a rush of Pure Movie Magic, and how could anyone fault it for that? Would that there was a respectable home video release to replicate my experience, but <i>Devdas </i>is pretty much out-of-print and can only be rented via arguably unethical sources like Google or Amazon. Even the subtitles in the theater seemed to have been translated literally by a first-year Hindi student who didn’t bother to make the English idiomatic (characters say, “Only if such and such…” when in English they’d say, “If only such and such…”).<br />
<br />
On the bright side, this is the type of the story one can follow with or without understanding a word of dialogue, which might explain why Hallmark movies continue to find their crowds.<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Metropolis (2001)</b></span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W-R5ZmAATVk/WZZLRF9qE6I/AAAAAAAADVU/yIXcA1ZjmAAV_nvIKcaKZ67_7jojLnOxQCLcBGAs/s1600/Metropolis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="329" data-original-width="600" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W-R5ZmAATVk/WZZLRF9qE6I/AAAAAAAADVU/yIXcA1ZjmAAV_nvIKcaKZ67_7jojLnOxQCLcBGAs/s1600/Metropolis.jpg" /></a></div>
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I’ve seen a lot of people online erroneously classify the Japanese anime <i>Metropolis</i> as a remake or homage to the silent film <i>Metropolis</i>, which nobody I know in person has seen. Perhaps they’ve been led to believe this because the movie is named <i>Metropolis</i>, and it’s inconceivable to them that a movie about a metropolis wouldn’t be related to Fritz Lang’s <i>Metropolis</i>, but the 2001 film is actually based upon a 52-year-old manga written by Osamu Tezuka, who never saw more than a still image from the 1927 one.<br />
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Regardless of inspiration, it’d be more fitting to peg the Madhouse production as an accidental remake of <i>Akira</i>, written by the same man who made <i>Akira</i>. Self-plagiarism is real, alack and alas, and in <i>Metropolis</i> it’s working overtime. Consider that both movies are set in vaguely constructed future worlds, both incorporate corrupt bureaucratic officials abusing science, both concern the doomed friendship of teenagers on the run from the military, and both abruptly escalate to an explosive climax in which a super-powered mutant/cyborg unleashes chaos on the city in retribution. Maybe it’s unfair to knock <i>Metropolis-the movie</i> for this, considering that the comic series predated <i>Akira</i> by three decades, but Katsuhiro Otomo’s script still doesn’t deviate much from well-tested narrative structures: this is basically a cyberpunk amalgamation of <i>Blade Runner </i>and <i>King Kong</i>, the overlap becoming especially blatant in the last eight minutes. <br />
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Most of the praiseworthy attributes in <i>Metropolis</i> can be traced to its aesthetics. Tezuka more famously created the Astro Boy series, and the characters herein share the same rounded, wide-eyed features that place them firmly in cartoon land. The art designers deserve the utmost credit for imbuing each model with distinctive and immediately telling characteristics. <i>Metropolis</i> is an adult-oriented movie that has no moral qualms about teaching viewers to profile people by appearances; the scrawny, Boy Scout-ish good guys look like good guys, while the beak-nosed, sunglass-toting bad guys look like bad guys. The city itself has magnificent depth, stretching from a prosperous and colorful surface district overrun by levitating cars to a dingy, industrial underworld populated mostly by repurposed, robotic trash cans. Director Rintaro keeps a rather leisurely pace, content to wander about the metropolis’ many levels for the first hour, but injects just enough chases to sustain interest. For its lighting, hand-drawn animation, and grandeur alone, <i>Metropolis</i> more than justifies itself to a narrow demographic of animation devotees. <br />
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What makes <i>Metropolis</i> a vertically segmented film as opposed to the broadly appealing <i>Devdas</i> is its disjointed worldbuilding and preoccupation with sci-fi clichés over telling a compelling story. A hefty chunk of the middle act deals with left-wing “revolutionaries” leading a coup against the “fascist” government of Duke Red, in order to restore “the rule of law” and be recognized as a proper political party, but Otomo doesn’t visualize how any of the rabble are being oppressed, or even articulate what the ruling class’ policies are. Trying to pick apart the movie’s setting poses even more of a challenge in 2017, when our language has trivialized political terms like “fascist” to the point of making them vacuous. The rest of <i>Metropolis</i> wants to make audiences ponder over “robot rights” and the ethics of “robot labor”, without really developing a single robot character. The themes that come to dominate the film have been discussed so much better in so many other pictures that their inclusion in the anime feels rote and trite, like a tacked-on plea for legitimacy from American critics that wasn’t ever needed. <br />
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Rintaro and Otomo thus compose a beautiful and confounding shell of a motion picture, one that’s sure to alienate casual moviegoers but leaves on such a high note that fans of anime will readily forgive it. <i>Akira</i> and <i>Metropolis</i> are interchangeable in many ways – their stories, their visuals, their characters who constantly cry each other’s names in anguish – but for all the things the latter carries over, it misses the element of tragedy and unchained adolescence that’s made <i>Akira</i> a grandiose, disturbing classic.<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>As Tears Go By (1988)</b></span><br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-feYJd3JSsRU/WZZKmywuCeI/AAAAAAAADVE/M6EisWwbgPMLoLynJaCP0mhRs5cC12eowCLcBGAs/s1600/As%2BTears%2BGo%2BBy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="510" data-original-width="340" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-feYJd3JSsRU/WZZKmywuCeI/AAAAAAAADVE/M6EisWwbgPMLoLynJaCP0mhRs5cC12eowCLcBGAs/s1600/As%2BTears%2BGo%2BBy.jpg" /></a></div>
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<![endif]-->Danny Boyle once remarked that the best film any director will make is his first one, precisely due to the imperfection of it. So reasoned the British director:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It may not be your most successful or your technically most accomplished, whatever. It is your best film in a way because you never, ever get close to that feeling of not knowing what you’re doing again. It's guesswork, inventiveness and freshness that you never get again… The Coen brothers are geniuses, but they never made a film as good as <i>Blood Simple</i>.</blockquote>
<br />
Boyle is right to sing the praises of <i>Blood Simple</i>, a 96-minute beast of a movie that requires no defense, but <i>As Tears Go By</i> also makes a pretty sturdy pillar for his hypothesis. Wong Kar-Wai has gained a reputation in western media as a romantically-minded genius, mainly celebrated for leisurely, moody art pictures like <i>In the Mood For Love</i>, but <i>Tears</i> stands out as the kinetic, scattershot work of someone who’s still fermenting his style and eager to announce his presence to the world. It’s undeniably sloppy, but the shortcomings here are exactly what make Early Wong so likeable and entertaining, more so than the languid, critic-proof dramas he turned to making after <i>Chunking Express</i>.<br />
<br />
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<![endif]-->The story, for those to whom it matters, concerns a mobster named Wah who’s attempting to balance his girlfriend woes with a hazardous lifestyle that frankly can’t sustain itself. One day he gets a call that his cousin will be staying at his place, which ultimately leads to a taut relationship that I’ll presume is much less controversial in Hong Kong than it would be in America. The narrative unfolds through a series of repetitive, increasingly violent bouts with rival gangsters, from which the protagonist has to whisk away his younger brother all while he feels drawn to leave the criminal life. As in <i>Devdas</i>, the movie primarily occupies a kind of fantasy land of the director’s imagining, wherein emotions are heightened and consequences downplayed, but a final act pivot takes the story in a direction that seems at first unsatisfying, yet inevitable.<br />
<br />
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<![endif]-->If we’re being brutally honest, storytelling generally falls secondary to Wong Kar-Wai’s singular visual impulse, and why would he have it any other way? Critics love to prostrate themselves before the ambiguous or inscrutable for the sake of looking more perceptive, so Wong has shrewdly produced a string of pictures that eschew traditional narratives and don’t challenge his viewers’ expectations. Nearly 30 years ago, however, the man directed a relatively linear story that also retained the visual flourishes bound to become his signature. <i>As Tears Go By</i>, consequently, may be his most engaging and spirited creation, uncorrupted by artistic snobbery or melancholic brooding over detachment, the latter of which characterizes nearly all his later output.<br />
<br />
If nothing else, and even if one deems the premise in poor taste, it’s simply a joy to watch a director flawlessly navigate and synthesize so many disparate genres. Part of the film is clearly taking after John Woo, besting all Wong’s other pictures for the sheer frequency of fists being thrown on screen. His favored step-printing technique (which reduces the frame rate and blurs the image for artistic effect) often distracts in his more grounded tales, but feels right at home in <i>Tears</i>, giving a vicious and strained quality to the action. When the violence abates, though, the film starts to play as an earnest romance, reaching peak melodrama in a glorious, nearly wordless sequence that’s scored to a cover of Take My Breath Away. At other points, <i>Tears</i> functions like a goofy parody of <i>The Godfather</i> or other American gangster films, which makes the ending even more of a left field closer.<br />
<br />
The tension between the romantic and criminal sides
of this madcap movie directly ties into its main theme, if Wong had one in mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like a lot of Japanese and Chinese cinema,
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Tears Go By</i> shows a concern with masculinity and femininity in modern
society, juxtaposing the aggressiveness and impulsivity of its male characters
with the fleeting tenderness of its female ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wong <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>certainly goes out of his way to showcase
Maggie Cheung’s luminous beauty, and none of the men adhere to metrosexual
ideals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film wouldn’t be all that
smart if the paradigms merely stopped at gender, but I’d argue that they stand
for more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andy Lau’s opposed
allegiances, to his little brother and his cousin, don’t just symbolize a
choice between two lives: a hard one and a stable one, one marked by
competition, the other by love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
symbolize a choice between youthfulness and maturity, the former being spent in
isolation or platonic friendship, the latter in committed marital harmony.<br />
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Underneath the obvious generic dressings, this is at its core a coming-of-age story, reinforced by the vocabulary of the film itself. On one hand, the protagonist has his fraternal and filial duties to carry out, both in service to people who may or may not be related to him by blood (“The Godfather” figure and his “little brother”, which could be a term of endearment). On the other hand, he feels an irrepressible attraction to multiple women, with whom he might start an actual family of his own instead of idling his days away in the mock-family construct of the mob. Far more than just time-filler, Wah’s ex-girlfriend performs an indispensible part in his character arc. The uncomfortable scene where the two meet in the pouring rain and Mabel reveals that she’s married is brimming with Wong’s stylistic hallmarks, yet it also signifies a kind of epiphany for the hero, that the friends he’s grown up with are entering adulthood and leaving him in their wake. <i>As Tears Go By</i> presents several opportunities for Andy Lau to leave the quagmire of his youth, and how he deals with them forms the heart of the movie’s drama. <br />
<br />
Wong’s first directing foray is certainly uneven and slapdash, the invention of a former screenwriter who’s still figuring out the craft. Its lack of precision may pose stumbling blocks to those who celebrate <i>In The Mood For Love</i>, which is more pristine and pruned to a degree that none can sneer at it, but the infectious energy and imbalance of <i>As Tears Go By</i> make it the creator’s most accessible and meaningful expression, a colorful, neon-drenched <i>Blood Simple</i> for a Romantic auteur.</div>
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<![endif]-->The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-30567931175389159132017-07-14T21:10:00.000-07:002019-09-15T11:20:45.498-07:00Spider-man: Homecoming" and Why the MCU No Longer Works<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The Author offers his belated yet obligatory thoughts on <strike>Disney</strike> Sony's latest.</span><div>
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I went into the sixth Spider-man movie, deceptively titled <i>Homecoming</i>, with measured expectations amounting to exactly nothing, and in some places it exceeded them. <i>Homecoming</i> marks the second collaboration of sorts between Marvel Studios, which produced the film, and the stagnant Sony Pictures, which has been brazenly churning out one box office dud after another, viz. <i>Ghostbusters: Answer the Call</i>, <i>Passengers</i>, <i>Life</i>, and <i>Rough Night</i>. As far back as 2014, Sony <a href="http://deadline.com/2015/03/amazing-spider-man-2-profit-box-office-2014-1201389608/" target="_blank">barely managed to turn a profit</a> with their abominable sequel, <i>The Amazing Spider-man 2</i>, but now they get to reap the fruits of Marvel’s ironclad business model after loaning them Peter Parker for last year’s <i>Captain America: Civil War</i>, a film that people would have gone to see regardless of whether Spider-man appeared in it for 15 minutes. Somehow this is supposed to benefit both parties in the long run, but to me it looks like Marvel and Disney are getting the short end of the stick.<br />
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Distribution economics aside, <i>Spider-man: Homecoming</i> predictably combines the more banal aspects of both Marvel and Sony, narrowly scraping by on the paltry virtues of the former and surviving the toxic signatures of the latter. Like many Marvel products before it, <i>Homecoming</i> suffers from an excess of humor and weightlessness that impedes sincere connection with its more dramatic moments, if and when they happen. As an example, Michael Keaton disintegrates one of his henchmen fairly early on and the film milks the death for an “Oops, I grabbed the wrong gun” joke, which both undercuts the value of human life in this comic book world and makes Keaton seem like a cartoonishly callous villain, an image we later learn that Marvel was trying to subvert.<br />
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Even the movies that I really admire from the studio, e.g. <i>Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2</i> and <i>Thor</i>, show a lack of restraint in the humor department, pursuing gags where sobriety would be more appropriate. And yet <i>Spider-man</i> has nothing on the Guardians movies in its comedic discipline. I’ve seen at least one fan try to fault <i>Guardians 2</i> for feeling “like a sitcom”, with characters constantly trading insults and sparring wits with one another, but for me this style testifies to James Gunn’s talent as a writer and observer of human behavior. Whereas the jokes in <i>Guardians</i> largely stem from characters’ idiosyncrasies and dynamics, which require an incisive script and are arguably harder to write, most of the humor in <i>Spider-man: Homecoming</i> is of a stock situational variety that rarely surprises and thus rarely pays off. One trick the movie relies on a lot is contradiction humor, whereby one character will say something like, “Whoa, Peter, you can’t just quit on us, stroll up, and be welcomed back to the team!” and the camera will immediately cut to another character who says, “Hey, Peter, welcome back to the team.” I can recount at least three instances of contradiction humor, but there are probably a whole lot more that I forgot.<br />
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But I shan’t dwell too much on comedy, being as tenuous as it is, and some other irksome things about <i>Homecoming</i> should only be treated briefly. Like all the Spider-man movies before it (except maybe the second one, which I haven’t seen), the sixth one builds to an incomprehensible battle set at night for the sake of saving money on special effects, and Peter Parker doesn’t get the girl for the umpteenth time. Some bloggers have been comparing this to a John Hughes high-school comedy (perhaps because it references <i>Ferris Bueller</i>), but none of the kids in it drink, have sex, or call each other demeaning slurs, so it’s a very neutered, 21st-century imitation of John Hughes. The alternative superhero movie <i>Chronicle</i> from 2012 did a far superior job depicting the rebellious fever of the teenage years, while keeping within the confines of a PG-13 rating. Intriguingly, <i>Homecoming</i> appears to homage <i>Chronicle</i> in its first minutes, when Peter records low-quality video logs of scenes we saw in <i>Civil War</i>, but the movie drops this gimmick soon and proceeds in a very routine, unadventurous style.<br />
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I also don’t think I’ve ever seen a more distracting case of stunt casting in a superhero film than here; consider that Michael Keaton has gone from playing a Batman to playing a Birdman to playing a meaner, metal Birdman, or that the busboy from <i>Grand Budapest Hotel</i> is still playing a high-schooler, or that the director of <i>Iron Man</i> has a supporting role (I guess he was in the previous movies too), or that rapper-actor-comedian Donald Glover shows up for two scenes to do literally nothing aside from pointing Spider-man in the direction of a ferry. I won’t even comment on the deliberately controversial presence of Disney star Zendaya, who will presumably be playing a bigger role in future installments.<br />
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Perhaps the biggest detriment of <i>Homecoming</i> is that so much of it, including Zendaya’s moody SJW, piggybacks off an increasingly convoluted Marvel saga instead of focusing on being a good story. Maybe Marvel meant to lather on the interconnectedness in this movie especially, to celebrate the happy union of their characters and Sony’s, but whatever rationale is guiding their creative process, it hasn’t been contributing to the ongoing coherence of their works, and <i>Homecoming</i> marks the messy culmination of numerous wrong steps taken in deference to the universe’s “lore”, which must be reviewed and re-examined leading up to every new release.<br />
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The movie opens shortly after the climactic battle of <i>The Avengers</i>, introducing Michael Keaton as some kind of contractor who’s driven to become an arms dealer when he acquires some of the glowing purple tech left behind by Loki’s alien army. Eight years later, Keaton pilots an aerial suit not unlike Tony Stark’s and bosses around a group of thugs who use Gordon Freeman’s gravity gun to pull off bank robberies and other heists. I can see the mindset behind creating a more modest villain like this, who isn’t obscenely over-powered, vengeful, and bent on the destruction of New York, but Marvel arguably overreaches by handicapping him so much. Benefiting from Kevin Feige’s surely monstrous resources for research and development, <i>Homecoming</i> feels meticulously doctored to minimize backlash from self-affirming Youtube channels that echo the same praises and criticisms, but the patently obvious motions it takes to avoid the series’ documented flaws just end up weakening it in other ways. Vulture is clearly supposed to serve as a smaller-scale criminal on the level of a Friendly Neighborhood Spider-man (a term Stark uses verbatim), but knowing that he gained his powers essentially by accident prevented me from being remotely intimidated or awed by him. It also doesn’t make much sense how a guy who starts out as a blue-collar worker – a family man who feels his livelihood impinged on by the Department of Damage Control (also headed by Stark) – is able to muster the money and time to manufacture sci-fi weapons out of elements from another galaxy.<br />
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Yes, Marvel does circumvent another boring antagonist who wants to destroy the world for some indefinite reason, but is an antagonist predicated entirely on events that happened in <i>The Avengers</i> that much of an improvement? On the contrary, the viral infusion of Avengers plot points into every facet of <i>Spider-man: Homecoming</i> constantly muddles the core story of Peter Parker while reminding me that I’m experiencing an insignificant chapter in a larger narrative. It also indirectly lessens the feats of all the other Marvel characters; when any Joe Schmoe can become a super-powered menace to society by taking advantage of some circumstance or device from a previous movie, the actual titans of the increasingly over-crowded universe lose a lot of their luster. Tony Stark isn’t such a genius anymore, just an egotistical public figure with billions of dollars to burn.<br />
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Similarly, Tom Holland’s Spider-man is more of a Spider-kid, whose power isn’t really explained and who derives most of his abilities from the generosity of another Avenger. “I’m nothing without this suit,” he pleads to Robert Downey Jr., the highest-paid star of the Marvel universe who now lurks in the background of every movie. If Parker is nothing without an expensive Stark Industries suit that talks back to him, does that make him an Iron Man-lite, someone who couldn’t exist if the U.S. government did not decree it? Why does the viability of Spider-man need to be inextricably tied up in the enterprises of Marvel’s most successful superhero? Thanks to <i>Homecoming</i> and Marvel’s multi-movie profit scheme, Peter Parker has regressed from an exceptionally bright and self-reliant kid into a good-hearted 15-year-old who got bitten by a spider and is propped up by the bottomless coffers of a bigwig superhero mentor.<br />
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It also goes without saying that the political backdrop of these movies has spiraled out of control, bending over backwards to justify the inclusion of Marvel stars who have no business being in the story. Sometime between <i>The Avengers</i> and this film, Captain America has apparently produced a number of videos for public high-schools, ranging in content from detention counseling to sex education (“So your body is going through some changes—I know how that feels.”). The script even jokingly acknowledges the absurdity of this development, having a P.E. instructor remark, “I’m pretty sure this guy is some kind of war criminal now, but whatever.” I don’t recall the Captain America stand-alones well enough to confirm if he is indeed a war criminal, or if S.H.I.E.L.D. even exists anymore, but Steve Rogers has definitely led a libertarian streak whether the writers intended him to or not, fighting against mass surveillance in <i>Winter Soldier</i> and U.N. globalism in <i>Civil War</i>. Bearing both these stances in mind, along with Cap’s background as a patriotic soldier frozen in the 1940s and reawakened in the modern day, I just can’t accept that the guy would ever debase himself to appear in such a cheesy and condescending campaign for Big Education, nor can I follow how the government and Avengers have gotten so intertwined over the years.<br />
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One of my biggest problems with <i>Civil War</i> was that the script didn’t give a very compelling reason for Tony Stark to break from character and submit himself to multi-national regulation, simply because the Avengers caused some civilian casualties in the process of saving the world from imminent catastrophe. For a character as independent and strong-willed as Stark to undergo such a reversal of personal values struck me as a shallow and unmotivated pretext for the better half of the Avengers to fight each other at an airport. With every episode in the overarching story, internal consistency falls further down the studio’s list of priorities, superseded by the need to incorporate certain characters in fun or oddball ways, even if they don’t make sense.<br />
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Having said all that, though, <i>Homecoming</i> is far from the bottom of the barrel in terms of superhero entertainment. The action is well executed apart from the ending, a third-act twist got audible reactions from audiences both times I went, and it does have an interesting message that runs counter to the prevailing current of comic book movies. <i>Homecoming</i>’s Peter Parker restlessly nags Stark about their next big mission and zips around Queens looking for crimes to thwart. Like a typical impulsive, idealistic teenager who’s eager to defend the defenseless, he’s convinced that taking forceful action is always the best solution for public threats, and in a crucial scene he berates Stark for not doing more to stop Vulture. As the movie progresses, Peter has to learn that intervention often escalates dangerous situations rather than removing them, that not every problem is within his ability to rectify as a man, which is a surprisingly sage takeaway from a genre film concerned with heroes who violently intervene in dangerous situations.<br />
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The rest of the movie seems perfectly content to follow formula.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-78290178565364643972017-07-03T08:00:00.000-07:002019-09-15T13:03:16.011-07:00The 9 Wokest Celebrity Reactions to North Carolina's Discrimination Bill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">We compiled a short and comprehensive list of how A-list celebrities are responding to North Carolina’s discriminatory parking law.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Article written by George Stefano Pallas</i>.</b></span> <i>Tiny fever and shareability practiced by the author are </i><i>his alone and do not necessarily reflect nor should be construed as those of the Author.</i></div>
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In the past, courageous entertainers have spent more time than any other group fighting at the front lines for civil rights and social justice, from the Beatles during the Jim Crow era, to Katy Perry and John Legend in the historic presidential campaigns of Barack Hussein Obama.<br />
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In 2017, a bunch of artists are making their voices heard again, rallying their young and socially conscious fans into action on what many are calling a new battlefield of human rights. North Carolina’s newly-enacted discrimination laws have divided America more than anything in recent memory. Some (mostly conservative) pundits have tried to justify the measures as “common-sense”, while others including the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center have denounced them as unconstitutional and based in hate.<br />
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With the proliferation of fake news and fast-paced nature of modern politics, it’s easy to lose track of where the stars stand on issues that matter most to voters. Our social media feeds are filled with provocative and insightful content, and while we love <i>The A.V. Club</i>, <i>Vox</i>, <i>The New Yorker</i>, and <i>Jezebel</i> as much as the next person, we also miss the bygone day when pop stars and people famous for pretending to be other people would tell us how to vote or think.<br />
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That’s why we at the Files decided to do our homework and figure out just what the hell is going on. Here is a short, comprehensive list of how recognizable A-list celebrities are reacting to North Carolina’s controversial segregation policy.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">1. Bruce Springsteen</span></b><br />
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The Boss reminded everyone who was in charge when he cancelled his forthcoming summer gigs in the state, refusing to compromise his moral integrity by collecting whatever money he would lose from fans who’d already planned expensive trips to see him. Springsteen explained his decision on his website: “Parking Bill 2 (or PB2) attacks the rights of TINY citizens to sue when their human rights are violated on public property. Some things are more important than a rock show, and this fight against prejudice and bigotry is one of them.”<br />
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Springsteen isn’t just one of the greatest rock musicians ever, he’s also one of the most human, and this quote proves it. The man is pushing 70, but showing empathy and solidarity has kept him relevant even to this day. Rock on, Boss!</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">2. Chris Evans</span></b><br />
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<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/9361112257/in/photostream/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Gage Skidmore</span></a></div>
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What more American figure could one ask for to defend tiny house owners than Captain America himself? As anyone who crushes on the Marvel superstar as hard as us should know, Evans’ brother Scott lives in a tiny house, which is why he takes personal offense to North Carolina’s “embarrassing” and “heartbreaking” discrimination. <br />
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“Are you kidding me?” he asked on <i>The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon</i>, visibly perturbed. “It’s insane that civil rights are being denied people in this day and age. I’m completely in support of tiny houses and the right to park wherever you want. In 10 years we’ll be ashamed that this was an issue.”<br />
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Marvel recently ran a series centering around a new Captain America, Sam Wilson, who confronts a white supremacist militia intent on oppressing undocumented immigrants. Hopefully the superhero juggernaut will do something similar in the future on behalf of tiny homeowners who are being denied their basic dignity. In the meantime, Chris Evans is demonstrating to his myriad fans that TINY advocacy is more than the right thing – it’s also sexy as f**k.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">3. Steven Spielberg</span></b><br />
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The legendary Jewish director yelled, “Cut!” on any future filming in North Carolina until the state ceases and desists from its “hateful” and “divisive” behavior towards minority homeowners. His full justification read as follows:<br />
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By writing discrimination into the state’s constitution, they seek to eliminate the right of each and every citizen to comfortable living, regardless of what their housing preference is. Tinyphobia is on the rise because there’s no difference between anyone who is discriminated against. Whether it’s the Muslims, or the Jews, or minorities on the border states, or the TINY community, it is all one big hate, and at some point, good men have to stand up and say, “Stop.”</blockquote>
Having worked on Oscar-winning historical dramas like <i>Schindler’s List</i> and <i>Lincoln</i>, Mr. Spielberg knows better than just about anybody what the dark side of humanity looks like, and his defense of the TINY– (pronounced “tiny minus”) community shows he knows better than to repeat the genocidal mistakes of the past.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">4. Ellen Degeneres</span></b><br />
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Ellen Degeneres has held many professions: comedian, human rights activist, and the voice of Dory (yes, <i>that</i> Dory, from Pixar’s 2003 classic). One thing that she’s never done, though, is stand idly by while a minority is persecuted.<br />
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“It’s the definition of discrimination,” she explained in her signature hilarious yet relatable way. “So two cupcakes walk into a school parking lot and they want to cast their votes. But the school principal doesn't believe in letting the cupcakes park there because cupcakes aren’t allowed to vote. Tiny homeowners are, though, so let them use the damn parking lot.” <br />
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As someone who’s faced extreme hardship and bullying throughout her career, it’s no surprise that Ellen would choose to out herself so fearlessly as a TINY– ally.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">5. Brad Pitt</span></b><br />
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The star of <i>World War Z</i>, <i>Troy</i>, and multiple great movies from the 90s sounded off on TINY– rights almost immediately after the news from North Carolina broke. Like many others, Pitt sees no distinction between the rights of tiny house owners and the rights of everybody else because supporting the former is same as supporting rights for everybody.<br />
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“It is each American’s constitutional right to live in a house that they love, no matter what state they inhabit,” he said. “No state should decide where someone can live and where they cannot. Someday soon this discrimination will end and every American will be able to enjoy their equal right to housing.”<br />
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By declaring open war on tiny homeowners’ right to park, North Carolina’s politicians hoped to wreak havoc on the state’s TINY communities, but Brad Pitt’s words have sent a powerful message against broken households that no one can ignore.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">6. Bernie Sanders</span></b><br />
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Running as an openly irreligious, democratic-socialist outsider with unfaltering progressive values, Bernie Sanders stunned the world with his performance in the 2016 primary of the Democrats, a center-left party historically favoring moderates like Presidents Clinton and Obama. Many political experts still seriously wonder if Sanders could have beaten Donald Trump in the electoral college. Although he couldn’t compete with the electrifying candidate Hillary Clinton, Senator Sanders remains a vocal advocate for oppressed minorities, including TINY– members.<br />
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“It’s time to end discrimination based on housing style or homeowner status,” he said firmly on ABC’s <i>The View</i>. “This law has no place in America. I hope we remember what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told us. You judge people on their character, not on the color of their skin. And I would add to that, you do not judge people by the size of their house or what they do with it.”<br />
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TINY-shaming is still a prevalent problem in society, and PB2 is sure to exacerbate the hateful behavior, so it’s reassuring that people like Bernie Sanders are pushing back against state-sanctioned discrimination in North Carolina.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">7. Father John Misty</span></b><br />
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<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/theholygrail/23215011279/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Bruce
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Father John Misty, a.k.a. Josh Tillman, has been making incredible indie music longer than most artists do in a lifetime, longer even than Kendrick Lamar, if not as long as Coldplay. Never one to shy away from political statements in his music, Tillman came out swinging against bigotry with the same sharp wit that sets his lyrics apart:<br />
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The bill is obviously bullshit. Some may wonder why I even consider playing for fans in a state that lets fear and ignorance dictate how it treats impoverished homeowners. I also play states that have oppressive drug laws designed to imprison the disenfranchised, rig elections, deny women their dignity, defend the reckless and insane practice of selling guns, and sustain a permanent underclass with hypocritical, opportunist readings of archaic documents written by land-stealers who never intended political privilege to extend past their buddies. But for me, this show represents a start in investing in the plight of tiny Americans.</blockquote>
Though Father John Misty didn’t go to the radical lengths of Bruce Springsteen, he did promise to donate all the proceeds of his North Carolina show to a nonprofit TINY– charity called the Center for TINY Solutions, which focuses on raising awareness about tiny houses among undergrads and college graduates. In a political climate marked by fear and uncertainty about the future, it’s good to see respected artists using their influence for such a noble cause.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">8. Kamala Harris</span></b><br />
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The recently elected senator and former Attorney General of California laid down the law on what she called the “prejudiced and fearful” PB2. Harris took to social media on Saturday to slam North Carolina’s Jim Crow-style legislation, succinctly posting the following update.</div>
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And we are so glad that she did. So much of the debate surrounding tiny houses has centered on protecting children from “creeps” or “predators,” but this is rooted in outdated myths about tiny house owners, who remain misunderstood and feared by the older generations. In fact, surveys have shown that the vast majority of kids in elementary school don’t have a problem with people living in public school parking lots.<br />
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This begs the question, if the 10-year-olds who actually go to school feel safe around and accepting of TINY– people, than why are we seeing such a mad dash to strip away their rights? The simple reason is that bigotry is learned, not inborn, and we personally can’t wait to see what Senator Harris does in the 2020 presidential race.</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">9. George Clooney</span></b></div>
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Clooney has a reputation for more than just his striking good looks and Oscar-worthy acting chops. He’s also been politically active throughout his career, a qualification that’s reflected in his films <i>Good Night, and Good Luck</i> and <i>The Ides of March</i>. Clooney spoke bluntly about North Carolina’s parking law: <br />
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“It is astonishing that tiny and sustainable Americans are still treated as second-class citizens. At some point in our lifetime, tiny homeownership won’t be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.”</blockquote>
When asked by the magazine <i>TINY Life</i> about rumors that he once lived in a tiny house, the star would neither confirm nor deny the speculation, saying that it was irrelevant and unfair to his friends who live in tiny homes. “I think it’s funny, but the last thing you’ll ever see me do is jump up and down, saying, ‘These are lies!’ I’m not going to let anyone make it seem like living in a tiny house is a poor or shameful thing.”<br />
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Clooney clearly understands that the size of one’s residence shouldn’t be an object of judgment or ridicule, and for that we can only respect him all the more.</div>
The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4674871730026898132.post-83433300094011646252017-06-27T23:04:00.002-07:002019-09-15T11:34:12.316-07:00NWTE – "Warriors of the Dawn" Review and the 1st Biannual Trailer Update<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The Author complains about condescending tropes in a Korean action movie no one's seen and reviews 53 trailers for overhyped films that will probably disappoint.</span><div>
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Around the middle of <i>Warriors of the Dawn</i>, a guy gives an amateur screenwriter, foreshadowing speech to another guy about the imprudence of attacking an enemy that’s backed against a wall. “Courage comes from fear,” he says, or something like that. Hence, he reasons, the protagonist needs to face his fears soon, lest he never mature from the fledgling, cowardly prince that he is into a commanding and magisterial king.<br />
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In a more intelligent, realistic, and ‘sloppy’ script, this quip about being cornered against a wall would merely be a throwaway line used to illuminate the characters and their quirks, but <i>Warriors of the Dawn</i> had already given me so many reasons to doubt its basic competence that I spent the rest of the feature wondering whether the king and his mercenary entourage would end up fighting a larger force with their backs against a wall. This they inevitably do, but more than that, the guy who earlier forecast the plot even prods the audience to recall this dialogue, literally telling the king to his face that he’ll be fighting with his back against a cliff, as if to scream out for the audience’s benefit, “This is where the plot is going to effect a change in the protagonist!” Such an exchange is more noxious than the Special Move trope that pervades animated kids films, whereby the main character practices and fails to execute a certain fighting maneuver that is reincorporated in the climax to represent how far he has come. Those who have seen <i>Wonder Woman</i> (at least 20 million people in America by this point, estimating by box office) should have encountered a live-action version of this cliché, coupled with the equally clichéd word of inspiration that the protagonist crucially repeats when she comprehends its meaning (“It’s not about deserve, it’s about what you believe”).<br />
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I’ve got nothing against set-ups and payoffs or some modest narrative symmetry; many of my favorite Korean movies recycle or reframe images for dramatic effect, and a surprising number begin upon the ending or something resembling it (<i>Stoker</i>, <i>Barking Dogs Never Bite</i>, <i>Poetry</i>, <i>Memories of Murder</i>, and <i>Mother</i> to name a few). <i>Warriors of the Dawn</i> doesn’t even feel like a Korean film, though; it has the timbre, and the title to boot, of an overlong, stupid Hollywood movie cobbled together from assorted Hollywood tropes, with the notable difference of having an all-Asian cast. Apparently the movie was produced and distributed by Fox International Productions, though I find that an inadequate explanation for the movie’s failure, since Fox just a year ago produced Na Hong-Jin’s riveting and thoroughly Korean genre-bender <i>The Wailing</i>. Between <i>Warriors</i>, <i><a href="http://theauthorsfiles.blogspot.com/2017/05/alien-covenant-a-litany-of-reasons-why-it-is-just-the-worst.html" target="_blank">Alien: Covenant</a></i>, <i>Wimpy Kid 4</i>, and <i>A Cure For Wellness</i>, maybe the corporation has been making a streak of stinkers on purpose in the hopes of reducing its tax liability. Maybe they brought this movie to the West just to drop a truth bomb on Asia-fetishizing, self-loathing white males, the type who elevate Kurosawa, Miyazaki, or Wong Kar-Wai to god status while making stupid generalizations about the quality of American cinema.<br />
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Rarely does it cross these people’s minds that countries like Korea and Japan make scads of cheap entertainment every year that never make it America, and most of the films they deign to love so much are weeded out from the chaff through festivals. Every now and then, though, something like <i>Warriors</i> or <i>The Man From Nowhere</i> seeps through the cracks to prove that eastern directors make dumb action movies just as proficiently as American directors. Few films show such a fervent dedication to hitting all the right notes as this, so it would appear fitting to enumerate at least a couple of the tropes herein, such as:<br />
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* The song-and-dance routine placed in between action sequences to prolong the movie artificially and give some requisite humanity to the soldiers. <br />
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* Overly dramatic score supplanting the diegetic sound midway through the dance routine because the director can’t convey the impact the dancer is having on his spectators by purely visual means. <br />
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* Goofy and nameless side characters who disappeared earlier in the movie showing up before the climax and saying, “You didn’t think we were going to let you save the crown prince all by yourself, did you?” <br />
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* Sniping with 16th century muskets (stupid in <i>The Revenant</i>, and still stupider here). <br />
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* A straggling woman making the long dash back to the fortress, the Japanese on her tail. Her countrymen are cheering her on from the gate, all seems well, the path is clear, but then slow-motion – she’s shot before all their eyes! The hero screams in agony, and his scream reverberates through time, as screaming in slow-motion tends to do.<br />
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* “Let’s make it out of here alive first, then I’ll tell you my true name.”</div>
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Even before the so-called “proxy soldier” spoiled how the movie was going to culminate at a wall, I was sorely tempted to leave the theater, feeling the wasted hours being wrenched from my life as brutally as digital blood was being wrenched from actors on screen. Curiosity stayed my legs, however, as well as the nagging echo of <a href="https://youtu.be/DrRALdo5nZ4">a video log in which Mark Kermode discussed the professional ramifications of leaving a movie prematurely</a>. “You can’t review the film if you haven’t seen it to the end,” the British critic said, recounting the story of a cursed Nicolas Cage screening he attended. “And I really had suffered through it up until that point… So I saw the whole film, from beginning to end… which means I’m perfectly justified in telling you that it’s rubbish.”<br />
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<i>Warriors of the Dawn</i> is a 130-minute indulgence in rubbish, but only 44 people have seen it between IMDb and Letterboxd, so I guess it doesn’t matter. The movie is currently playing in Regal specialty theaters nowhere near you, and it would probably be rated R for violence, although its horrible CG blood effects are impossible to take seriously. <i>Lone Wolf and Cub</i> or <i>Oldboy</i> this is not.<br />
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<u><span style="font-size: x-large;">The </span></u><u><span style="font-size: x-large;">Author’s</span></u><u><span style="font-size: x-large;"> 1st Biannual Trailer Round-up of 2017</span></u><br />
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<b>Born in China –</b> This is a movie made for babies, and kind of unbearable to me having seen non-narrative nature films like <i>Baraka</i> and <i>Koyanaisqatsi</i>. The whole thing has this constant, cloying voiceover projecting human attitudes and thoughts onto the animals so that little children won’t get bored and start talking aloud in the theater. Or maybe the soothing, gentle narration is supposed to put babies to sleep at home – I don’t know. Either way, it vexes me that bland Disney features like this always crowd out documentaries that generate a lot more buzz, e.g. <i>Tickled</i> or <i>Voyage of Time</i>, the latter of which looked stunning but played in 15 theaters over three days.<br />
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<b>Silence –</b> Pretty good film, far more moving and invigorating than <i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i>. The trailer doesn’t really capture how long and arduous and painful it is to watch.<br />
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<b>Dunkirk trailer #X –</b> This movie has been over-advertised to oblivion, and none of the umpteen trailers since the teaser have given any intriguing information about the plot, so what’s the point of them?<br />
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<b>The Founder –</b> This is the biopic about the man behind McDonalds starring Michael Keaton that I was always begging for Hollywood to make. <br />
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<b>Gold –</b> You say, “Inspired by true events,” I say, “Looks like a boring movie about a white guy trying to get rich without doing any real work.” I also can’t wrap my head around why The Weinstein Company would think it smart to remake <i>Fool’s Gold</i> with the same guy who starred in <i>Fool’s Gold. </i>Do they really take the public for such fools?<br />
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Stupid question. This is The Weinstein Company.<br />
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<b>Monster Trucks –</b> Well, that thing happened. <br />
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<b>The Circle –</b> The trailer really undersells what a fascinating mess its movie is.<br />
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<b>Zookeeper’s Wife –</b> I’m getting kind of tired of liberal Hollywood’s endless parade of mediocre Holocaust programming that expects to be praised merely upon its weighty subject matter. <br />
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<b>The Last Word –</b> Looks like one of those unfunny, feel-good indie movies, but I give props to whoever wrote this for shining a light on the unsung profession of obituary writers. <br />
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<b>The Nut Job 2 –</b> This was a Lego Batman trailer and I didn’t pay much attention, for obvious reasons. <br />
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<b>Power Rangers –</b> And the most unoriginal use of a Kanye West song in a movie trailer goes to… In fairness, they did get one thing right about this, when the voiceover man said of Elizabeth Banks, “She is pure evil.” <br />
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<b>Despicable Me 3 teaser –</b> To Illumination’s credit, they did mostly leave the minions out of this ad, and one has to appreciate a studio that uses animation aimed at kids to mock Apple’s anti-gun messaging. The movie still looks like a psychological torture device ready for Club Gitmo. <br />
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<b>Despicable Me 3 “Gru’s brother trailer” –</b> If I was a parent, this would make me want to take my kids as far away from the theater as possible. <br />
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<b>The Boss Baby –</b> Glad to see Alec “____sucking fag” Baldwin back up on the big screen in a movie made for families. Incredibly, <i>The Boss Baby</i> is nowhere near the worst that 2017 has had to offer in memes. <br />
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<b>Lego Ninjago –</b> I rather hope that these Lego flicks don’t become a biannual, Marvel-like extravaganza, because if they do, their self-aware and hyperactive style of humor is going to wear out fast. With that said, Ninjago may be Lego’s most definitive and versatile property, somehow blending skeletons, snake monsters, mechs, and transforming ninja, so I’m sure this will reward on a visual and comedic level. <br />
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<b>Kong: Skull Island –</b> Most of the warning signs issued in the trailer (bad one-liners, CGI, and a Suicide Squad-esque soundtrack) were delivered on in the final product, but it still succeeded at piquing my interest. <br />
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<b>Life –</b> Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum? Check. Counterpoint reading of children’s book / nursery rhyme playing over escalating scary music? Check. Letting it get to earth will risk all human life? Check. Not showing the monster except fleetingly? Check. This is a movie trailer, and one that does a pretty fair job presenting the pointless <i>Alien</i> mimic that <i>Life</i> is. <br />
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<b>Ghost in the Shell trailer 2 –</b> There’ve been much worse movies released so far this year, but <i>Ghost in the Shell</i> was still a dull and flavorless adaptation of rich source material, pressed down on the boilerplate of generic sci-fi ideas, most of which are disclosed within the trailer (“They created me, but they cannot control me.”). I’ve already written a Not Worth the Effort review of it, which may or may not see the light of day depending on whether I find another film to pair with it. <br />
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<b>Alien: Covenant –</b> Even the trailer was a disappointment. <i>Alien: Covenant</i> parodies certainly haven’t taken off in the same way that “<i>Prometheus</i>-style” trailers did. <br />
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<b>Deadpool 2 –</b> I think I laughed harder at this cheap, protracted joke than I did through the entirety of <i>Deadpool 1</i>. <br />
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<b>Fast and Furious 8 trailer 2 –</b> Looks stupid. I only watched the climax of this movie and a bunch of other snippets like the jailbreak, but I’d sooner see the rest of <i>Fate</i> than sit through all of <i>Transformers 5</i> again. At least this series has a smidgeon of self-awareness, plus the Rock. <br />
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<b> Unforgettable –</b> Two of my friends with weird senses of humor laughed uncontrollably at this in the theater, and I don’t think that anyone there objected. An epic trailer in its scope, it runs the gamut of emotions and TV movie storylines in two and a half minutes flat. <br />
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<b>Atomic Blonde –</b> And the best use of Kanye West in a piece of advertising goes to…</div>
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<b>A Ghost Story –</b> I was really looking forward to this for a while, but A24 has been on a bit of a losing streak with their more arty, unconventionally shot movies, so I’m checking my enthusiasm now. It goes without saying that this is a really manipulative piece of marketing, between the music and the low-angle shots and the adulatory pull-quotes… so I guess it passes the Author’s trailer test? <br />
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<b>My Cousin Rachel –</b> Whose bright idea was it to make this period romantic mystery out to be some kind of dark erotic thriller? They probably hurt this movie’s business in the long run by selling it to the completely wrong crowd. <br />
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<b>Wish Upon –</b> American teens are growing up with warped perceptions of the horror genre and its possibilities, all thanks to a steady stream of crap like this. My generation sorely needs an Argento of its own, but I doubt we’ll ever see one surface if high-school girls (and it is mostly under-25 females who go to these) keep financially endorsing flicks like <i>Lights Out</i>, <i>The Shallows</i>, or those darned <i>Insidious</i>-<i>Conjuring</i> movies. I’m used to hearing, “I don’t like scary movies,” from peers, but horror movies don’t need to revolve solely around “scaring” or startling people, and it’s regrettable that the <i>Wish Upon</i>’s of the industry have conditioned people to think of horror in such terms. </div>
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<b>Ingrid Goes West –</b> Yay, a movie that makes fun of Millennials’ addiction to their handheld devices, starring Aubrey Plaza from the ingenious comedy <i>Parks and Recreation</i>. Hilarious and original. <br />
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<b>Valerian trailer 2 –</b> This is going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. <br />
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<b>Baywatch trailer 2 – </b>“Get Rocked, Get Ef’d” is funnier as a tagline than any ‘joke’ in this future heavy-rotation FX movie. <br />
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<b>Annabelle 2 –</b> Cross-apply everything said about <i>Wish Upon</i>. The only creepy doll movie I want to see in 2017 is <i>Freddy Vs. Chucky</i>, long overdue. <br />
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<b>The Beguiled –</b> I’m not a fan of Sofia Coppola’s previous work (or the work of any Coppolas saving the O.G. Francis Ford Coppola). In fact, I’ve actively hated a majority of it, but this looks like it could actually be good, mainly due to the presence of an unhinged, yelling Colin Farrell. I’m kind of concerned about Elle Fanning’s career after she runs through all of these trashy virginal-teen-on-the-brink-of-sexual-awakening roles. <br />
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<b>Coco –</b> As if I needed any more fuel to light my contempt for Pixar, now they’re ripping off <i>The Book of Life</i> but doing it in their trademark flat, computerized art style, because Donald Trump is president, or because the Fast and Furious movies showed there’s good money to be milked from Hispanic-oriented pictures, or because <i>The Book of Life</i> has garnered a small cult following and Pixar thought, “Let’s do more of that mariachi player and Day of the Dead stuff, but slap the Disney Pixar label on it, so we can reap at least $300 million from parents who unconditionally patronize everything our company produces.” <br />
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And don’t give me any of those “<i>Coco </i>predated <i>The Book of Life</i> but took six years to make because of Pixar’s high standards” excuses. For one, the director/writer of <i>Book of Life</i> was developing it with Dreamworks as far back as 2007 <a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/el-tigre-creator-jorge-gutierrez-moves-into-features-with-book-of-life-76863.html">according to one article</a>, but even if Pixar had no knowledge of the project whatsoever, I find it implausible and incredibly daft that no one behind <i>Coco</i> watched the other movie or suggested, “Maybe we should switch gears on our own film so it doesn’t share so many indisputable similarities with this smaller film that preceded us.” <br />
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I can’t be the only one who sees this as a crooked and unethical move by a powerful corporation that has the resources to turn countless original ideas into profitable films. <br />
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<b>Cars 3 –</b> I didn’t pay close attention to the commercial and didn’t care to revisit it. As I predicted, the tone had completely changed from the uber-dramatic teaser, and it looked more or less interchangeable with all the other Cars and Toy Story movies. <br />
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<b>Wonder Woman “Origin Trailer” –</b> I’ll probably be chiming in a little on this movie later, like all the tech blogs in the country, but first I have to comment on the hatchet job that Warner Bros. ran promoting it. I didn’t ask to be shown Diana’s 30-minute backstory (most of which was omitted from the teaser trailer), the highlight scene of Wonder Woman storming the village, most of the London fish-out-of-water jokes, the kissing scene, the poison gas, or a lot of the destruction in the last ten minutes, but DC exposed me to all of this as I sat unguardedly in the theater, waiting for <i>Your Name</i> to start. I’d be lying if I said that anything in <i>Wonder Woman</i>’s story surprised me, or that the trailer impeded my enjoyment of it, but next time I’d appreciate it if Warner left their Good Parts Versions of a given movie online for fans to seek out of their own volition.<br />
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<b>Spark: a Space Tail –</b> Ratchet and Clank called an hour ago. They want their space adventuring and straight-to-DVD animation back. <br />
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<b>Baby Driver –</b> I am going to watch this for two reasons, which are essentially the same. The first reason is that the star of <i>Cinderella</i>, Lily James, is in the movie, and the second is that I’m like Steve Martin from <i>L.A. Story</i>: a big dumb male. <br />
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On a more serious note, <i>Baby Driver</i> will likely pack a wallop of toxically unfunny humor but make up for it in its chase sequences. I intensely dislike Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy (best known for <i><a href="http://theauthorsfiles.blogspot.com/2015/08/horror-movie-roundup-shaun-of-the-dead-is-scientifically-unfunny.html" target="_blank">Shaun of the Dead</a></i>) and would consider it the most overrated series ever if not for Toy Story, but this looks more like a romantic action thriller than a straight comedy, and Wright does tend to handle action and romance quite well. So as a wise man once said,</div>
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<b>Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri –</b> <i>In Bruges</i> is an awful, awful movie, but I’ll still take a chance on this one because Frances McDormand is a badass. <br />
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<b>Megan Leavey –</b> More of a dog lover’s movie than a war movie, or so it seems. I skipped it. <br />
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<b>The Big Sick –</b> Not directed or written by Judd Apatow, but looks a lot like Apatow’s annoying shtick all the same, and so the trailer wants you to believe. I’m betting that the white people mistaking the Pakistani main character for a jihadist is going to drag, but there aren’t a lot of movies that tout themselves as semi-autobiographical, so I guess I’m somewhat intrigued. <br />
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<b>It Comes At Night –</b> Arguably the worst horror film ever made, and I’ve seen a lot of them. “It” may not come at night, but <i>It</i> does come with the most willfully dishonest ad campaign since Hope and Change. Half of the shots in the trailer that are meant to disgust and horrify the viewer are taken from dream sequences extraneous to the plot, ergo they don’t happen in the movie’s own reality. Lots of websites are comparing <i>It Comes At Night</i> to <i>The Witch</i> as a case study in misleading marketing and ensuing consumer backlash, but <i>It</i> has nothing on <i>The Witch</i> artistically, and trailers for the latter movie didn’t blatantly lie about its subject matter. <br />
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I hope to write more about this soon. <br />
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<b>Blade Runner 2049 –</b> Directed by Denis Villeneuve, shot by Roger Deakins, and scored by Johann Johansson, this is already shaping up to be one of the decade’s most impressive features, just aesthetically. The story itself is vague and up in the air, but if we’re being honest, most people don’t revere <i>Blade Runner</i> for the story. <br />
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<b>Kingsman 2 – </b>It’s obviously hard to judge with so little context, but bringing back Colin Firth kind of mitigates what happened in the first movie and reeks of a studio crunching numbers for profit. It did get a song stuck in my head, though, so kudos for that. “And now the end is near…”</div>
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<b>47 Meters Down –</b> Obligatory summer shark movie. <br />
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<b>The Hitman’s Bodyguard – </b>I had to go peruse some comments online to figure out that this is parodying a Whitney Houston movie from the 90s called <i>The Bodyguard</i>, which I’ve never heard anybody speak of in my life. In any case, Ryan Reynolds continues to cement his status as the go-to guy for lackluster buddy cop/agent/spy movies. Remember <i>R.I.P.D.</i>?<br />
<b><br />Murder on the Orient Express –</b> Features possibly the worst use ever of an alternative radio song, and when will Hollywood learn to stop casting former USA Today contributor Josh Gad? <br />
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<b>Geostorm –</b> Obligatory summer weather disaster movie. A bunch of cynical strangers in <i>Wonder Woman</i> were audibly snickering at it. <br />
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<b>The Mountain Between Us –</b> Obligatory hiking disaster movie (although these are less common than obligatory weather disaster movies). <br />
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<b>Justice League –</b> Not as pathetic as some others have claimed, but it’s still the most try-hard trailer released so far this year, mainly on account of its phony, hackneyed Beatles accompaniment.<br />
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<b>The Dark Tower –</b> The moment Idris Elba said, “I don’t kill with my gun,” I knew he was going to finish by saying, “Guns kill people, pound sign Not One More, stop the killing.” How predictable. <br />
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Nah, I’m just kidding, he says that he kills with his heart.<br />
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<b>Good Time –</b> When in want of a better pitch, just throw some neon and synthwave on it. <br />
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<b>Battle of the Sexes –</b> “I’m going to put the show back in chauvinism –” But do male chauvinists think of themselves as chauvinists? This looks pretty bad. <br />
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<b>Star Wars: The Last Jedi –</b> A lazy and formulaic tease for a movie I could hardly care less about after Disney looked over <i>Rogue One</i> and said, “There! All ready for public consumption. Good job, everybody, that’s a wrap.” </div>
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<b>Thor: Ragnarok –</b> The Author’s personal pick for trailer of the year, which he’s more shocked about than anyone. Marvel keeps plot details to a minimum, chooses an awesome Led Zeppelin single over stock epic trailer music, showcases a lighter, goofier tone more suited to a series about Norse gods, and caps the whole thing off with a hilarious and completely natural joke.</div>
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“I know what you’re thinking,” Thor says to some unknown audience, but also to us. “How did this happen? Well, it’s a long story.” Trailers are not an optimal medium for for telling long stories, but it’s reassuring to know that somewhere out there an editor still understands their purpose.</div>
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The Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06348542336556124585noreply@blogger.com1