Kill Your Darlings

       

An overwhelming approval of the critical world to this movie is additional signature of the decline of American intellectual. While this movie of some interest as a history, it failed to tell why the Beat Generation seemed so important when it emerged or why it is relevant now. It will change very little if the story told was, for instance, about young painters or astrophysicists. Biopics in general are a difficult genre, but there are decent examples. For example "Pollock" could stay on the message of painting and nobody would confuse Harris' character with a writer or computer pioneer.
         I perceive that the approval is the result of the general feeling that the movie is "about culture" and, somehow, must be important or good.

Blue Jasmine

The 80-90% approval of Blue Jasmine by the cineastes is indicative of intellectual decline of American people in the Late Imperial Era. The movie is a senile work with trivial, Hallmark card ideas, such as that the wealthy are immoral and vapid, and "(conjugal) true love turns a shed into a palace", which wastes the talents of great actors and comedians such as Kate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins and Louis C. K. Monologues and dialogues are stale. They are too moralistic for comedy and too lightweight for philosophy. "Why Woody Allen needs to shoot a movie per year? Is he short on money?" Even if he is into it to meet girls, the women of Blue Jasmine (unlike that of his other late movies) are far older than his usual dating contingent.

Lake Bell, In a World

In her NPR interview, multi-talented Lake Bell exercised surprise (mixed with disgust) that a modern culture promotes imitation of child-talk and intonations by the girls as sexy. But a (symbolic) pedophilia among the globalized ruling classes becomes a universal tendency. Half-jokingly, I attributed it to the decline of the American Empire imitating decline of the Roman Empire not only in substance but also in form (see my essay "Model Business" and comments).

Prostitution on Hollywood screen

Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in the still from the Pretty Woman (1990)

Woody Allen and Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite (1995).

Why strippers and prostitutes in Hollywood movies are smart, glamorous women with model looks? Why there are not depicted as ugly, stupid slobs? If you think this is the norm, think twice. The painters of the Weimar period who, probably, were closer to them socially and physically (I mostly mean crammed, urban quarters of post-WWI Germany) depicted them much more frequently according to the second stereotype.

George Grosz. Suicide.

Rudolf Schlichter. Tingel Tangel.

Noah Baumbach, Francis Ha

Noah Baumbach auditioning as Boris Berezovsky

You, the old geezers, ask why Hollywood does not do movies as good as it used to. Indeed, the only life experiences these new kids have are coming from high school dating and film school lectures. By the old age thirty when they are supposed to be accomplished or out they haven't known or felt anything except Bel Air parties and power lunches. Noah Baumbach proved that he learnt about the 60s New Wave in college. That's about it.

Someone of the greats, maybe Bergman or Fellini, said that anyone can make a good movie, once. This seems to be a case with "The Squid and the Whale" for Noah. But he is not beyond redemption. He is talented.

Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones 

Excellent Game of Thrones strikes me as excessively grim. I guess that was life like in the Middle Ages if you throw out theological debates, building of the great cathedrals, emerging science, engineering inventions and geographic discoveries: just power struggles between princes, murders and rape.

The society, invented by Martin has a social structure of Europe in the X Century but the resources and warmaking techniques of the XIV-XV Centuries. Thus, it all degenerates in unbelievable carnage. Naturally, the disordered societies of the Dark Ages had little resources to field large armies and fleets (probably, most "armies" numbered a few hundred men and a few dozen riders) and had little mobility because of the primitive logistics and poverty of the land. Population density was low and forests and rivers--impassable, so that, probably, many of the "conquered" tribes got aware that they were conquered only after several decades never having to meet their new overlords in flesh and blood. The warfare of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe was supported by denser populations but it was tampered by many strictures of the contemporary society: essentially extraterritorial nature of the Church, developing diplomacy, rise of the power of mercantile classes, etc. etc.

Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty

Ms. Kathryn Bigelow was disingenuous that her film does not endorse torture. She claimed that she simply showed things as they were without moral assessment.

Yet, the image of the torturer--intelligent, sensitive, animal-loving guy--which she created is her fantasy. Torture changes not only the tortured but also the torturers. All accounts tell that these positions very soon are becoming occupied by constitutional sadists and psychopaths for whom precisely the power of application or withdrawal of deadly force constitutes the main attraction of their occupation. While exceptions always exist, the art has a generalizing property which inevitably reflects on the artist.

In the end, as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake told General Jack D. Ripper about his Japanese captors "they were not interested in my answers. They were kind-of having fun." When Napoleon, the mass murderer and Jacobin General, instructed Marshal Berthier to prohibit torture he did so not out of humanistic impulses but because he insisted on unreliability and worthlessness of the whole procedure.

K-19, the Widowmaker

K-19, The Widowmaker

Image property of Paramount Medien (C ) 

The only Western film I know not showing "Russkies" as villains and/or bumbling idiots. It was rejected by the American public precisely because of that but also by survivors of the K-19 who were used to portrayal of Soviet military/navy in overtly heroic terms. Since Kathryn never mentions this movie in her interviews, it seems that she was bruised by this reception. That is what you get for being honest.

The flick by Kathryn Bigelow is painstakingly accurate to the minor details. Once looking at some submarine gauge, I registered--now I know what the factory my mother worked on was making--in silent feel of satisfaction. Uniforms are accurate; military ranks, decorations are accurate--Kathryn really did her homework. Both Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson are perfectly believable as the Russians of their generation.