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A bunch of lowlifes blame society for their own self-inflicted wounds.
Misdirected angst, stupid lyrics and insignificant songs can't be saved by the energy of the actors who work hard for big bucks on Broadway and Hollywood. As usual, the real moral of the movie is the opposite of its superficial moral. Socialists make me puke.
Note: 4
It seems that they will not be content with the head of Ayaan, they want Omar's too. (They already got Piglet's.) But Hollywood leftists still think they are freedom fighters persecuted by the evil Cowboy. I'll tell you, I prefer Cowboys, and I mourn the soul Hollywood used to have when it promoted such Cowboys as the Duke or Marshal Will Kane.
Maybe some proponents of the Religion of Pieces (pieces of a torso over there....piece of a leg over yonder) can help us answer these five questions?
Nice pictures, nice actors, but my, what a heap of leftist nonsense.
( Read more... )Note: 4
My friend Jay initiated me to Bollywood movies. Here's the deal so far.
( Read the reviews... )The wrap-up: what's funny about all this kind of indian movies is that traditional culture is so controversial that the authors avoid ever discussing any specific of it, particularly so with two main opposing religions and zillions of sects that could gather violence against the authors of any movie that would go past censorship. This leaves western civilization as the culture by default of indian movie: something neutral, that doesn't force any belief upon you, and is thinly wrapped in little enjoyable bits of local folklore. No, there is no open defense of western civilization, of its actual culture, of its values; it is just civilization winning by corrupting the mores of backwards tribes with the technical advances that liberate individuals.
By trying to be consensual so as to sell more,
filmmakers are forced to avoid evil
-- to the point of lying in a historical movie.
The largest the market, the least evil they can afford,
because all evil has victims, and all victims are diminished market.
Of course, sometimes, seeking justice against yet unpunished criminals also creates victims
of sorts,
which means a diminished market, and so movie-makers will never actively seek justice against bad guys;
they might just spit on bad guys who have already been punished --
or on good guys too good to make any opposition.
Thus, mass-market movies are seldom the vanguard of good,
they often partake in some limited insidious evil,
but they are mainly the average bulk of a civilizing process.
The same can be said of all mass-market things:
the average bulk of an immensely good process -- civilization.
In the last few months, I saw the following movies.
Harold and Maude, 1971
A very touching movie.
Dark humor, sadness, true love, albeit unlikely,
and kind of a didactic movie.
Very good acting and direction.
As in many self-claimed convention-blowing movies,
there are a few cheap shots (notably against the military),
but all in all a good movie.
Now if you tried
swapping genders,
you'd see that this movie doesn't prove much.
Note: 6
The original french title is Comme une image
.
A good social satire.
A bit slow paced, like all such movies, but that's the way it works.
The story is articulated neatly enough to avoid repetition,
yet manages to keep things true sounding enough to be believable.
As with other movies by that couple,
it won't try to issue judgments for you:
you're able to say asshole
yourself.
Of course, the implicit judgment is fully intended,
but the authors will rest their case on the verisimilitude of the story;
you tell which parts of their story you think is believable or too cliché.
Note: 6
A poor mexican single mother becomes the housemaid
of a successful american family.
An unfathomable abyss of political correctness.
It raises a few potentially interesting issues,
but doesn't dare deal with any of them.
Hollywood smoothness makes a muddle out of morality.
And the acting is oh so conventional.
An illustration of the moral bankruptcy of the goodthinking democrats.
What a waste of film!
Note: 3
A young girl who's recovering from an open heart operation
shuns the people from her cosy suburbia,
and seeks the friendship of the lawnmower boy,
whose shack in the forest she equates with Baba Yaga's house.
Revolt without anything worthwhile to revolt.
Poetry here and there that's not enough to create an atmosphere.
It's nicely shot, nicely played, but the story is rather thin.
Note: 4
In those weeks without posting, I've accumulated a huge backlog. I'll start pouring the overspill with some movies seen this year...
The Monkey King
An early Stephen Chow movie,
loosely based on the legend of the Monkey King:
the Monkey King, a trickster god,
is ordered by the Celestial Emperor to atone
by accompanying a buddhist monk on his quest to India.
The Monkey King does his best to evade his fate,
in a two-episode epic with many characters
and a complex plot meant for a chinese public.
Lots of cheap special effects and vulgar chinese humor,
for a result too artificial for a westerner.
Still somewhat enjoyable, though.
And we already get to see Stephen Chow in his forever role:
the trickster superhero who is turned good in the end by higher forces.
Note: 4.5
Zoom to quite a few years later,
and give Stephen Chow access to computer generated special effects.
You get this great fun movie, with rhythm and martial arts.
It doesn't have to make too much sense --
it will just to exhilarate you.
And so far, so good.
I still prefer the unpredictable God of Cookery:
A great story beats special effects any day.
But hey, the Hustle was pretty good already!
Note: 7.0
My friend Tamu is organizing a special screening of Jason and the Argonauts in presence of Ray Harryhausen on July 24th in Montreal (not 23rd, not 25th), I unhappily won't be able to attend (I wish I could), but I thought some of you might appreciate, especially since you might be around Montreal at said date for Fantasia. I think Tamu clearly underpriced the session, at a 9 measly canadian dollars. Maybe she'll make up the difference selling beers and cheesecakes. Flock in and have fun!
I can but recommend the beautiful animation movie Howl's moving castle, by Hayao Miyazaki's studio Ghibli, based on a story by Diana Wynne Jones, which I recently had the pleasure to see. The movie tells of individuals striving to live for their own purpose, against collectivist calls to sacrifice for the sake of others. It is about learning to be free despite the curses cast by meddling aggressors who want to impose their will by force, most prominently including the government. It is about the power to create, versus the power to destroy. It is about genuine love, as opposed to cheap plastic imitations thereof.
A great libertarian movie.
At the ITA movie night this week, we watched Mulholland Falls by Lee Tamahori (1996). A good film noir on the Evil of Power. Synopsis: little evil meets Big Evil and gets a glimpse of what Evil is. The philosophy of evil is randianly summarized thus: "The cornerstone of civilization is human sacrifice."
I wonder what is the class of statements that a movie can illustrate. Could it be possible for a movie to illustrate that "Power is not evil in itself, Power is Evil itself"? How can a movie provide for economic reasoning rather than mere accounting fallacies? (Using "Run, Lola, Run" techniques, maybe?)
sleepyThis weekend, I've been sorting a lot of old paperwork from my previous life, trying to find a few things to liquidate all my pending business in France. My oh my. I just re-saw Brazil and it feels so true-to-life.
While digging through the pile of paper, I found a few melodies I had written, but also this AFCish haïku:
Thunder in a tin
Waves of flesh, seeking mates
Failure self-fulfills
House of Fools. The greater madness takes place outside the walls. Made me laugh. Made me cry. What a movie.
It has lots of consistent retro-modern late 1950's like design, including the music score. It has developed psychology for all characters, be them heroes, villains or secondary characters. It knows how to build upon clichés rather than blandly restate them. It has great acting and impeccable story-telling. Last but not least, what I always fall for, it has a didactic story, -- and what more, one where adults learn, too. Where ethics and esthetics join. I'm sure Ayn Rand would approve. The greatest movie I've seen in quite a long time.
Avec son ton léger, très vivant, ponctué par les chants des griots, Madame Brouette est un conte de fée réaliste qui ne tourne pas rond, un condensé de la société sénégalaise et de ses drames structurels, et une ode à la vie qui reprend toujours le dessus malgré tous les obstacles. Le film sent le manque de moyen et l'amateurisme d'une partie de la production; mais loin de chercher à le cacher ou à le nier, le film en prend son parti, et le tourne en un avantage, une note de spontanéité et de vérité, prise avec humour. En fait, comme c'est un film sur la vie dans un pays pauvre, cette pauvreté survécue avec brio est l'objet même du film autant que son cadre. (Spoiler Alert: la suite de cet article révèle trop de l'histoire du film.)
( Lire la suite... )Je pourrais en raconter plus, mais j'en ai déjà dit plus qu'assez. Je vous laisse découvrir un bon moment de magie nègre, débordant de l'exhubérance de l'Afrique.
I quite liked the initial movie Spiderman, which was a didactic story about a geek whiz kid who discovers his moral choices make a difference (and other people's too). But this sequel is more than disappointing: where the first issue was an original ode to morality, this second issue is a boring cliché that instead that promotes a form of moral lunacy, of inversion of values, of philosophical absurdity -- the seed of madness, which leads its individual or collective victims to self-destruction.
( Read more... )( ... ) If I am to guess from the title of this movie, it tells the story of a foreign invader fighting some country's domestic tyrant. Sigh. Yet another movie about Bush's war in Iraq.
( Read more... )Since several friends did recommend this movie, including David Madore, and despite the gripes of Lew Rockwell, I went to watch I, Robot this weekend with my cousin. As was expected, it is quite far from being an immortal chef d'œuvre, but it's indeed a rather well-realized action flick. However, it is only in the very end, and with a twist, that it turns out to be somewhat faithful to the claimed inspiration from Isaac Asimov, and not at all with the original Robot series. Beware: big spoilers ahead.
( Read more for spoilers... )In my series of ideological analyses of popular shows, here is one about Troy, the latest movie, which I saw a few weeks ago, right before breaking up (Brad Pitt is a difficult rival to beat). Just like an earlier Troy movie, it takes sides with the Troyans, and strips the godly quarrel from the story, to make it kind of a realist and romantic war film. My friend David already did a nice review of the movie (in French; beware: spoilers), so I'll only add my opinion and a few more spoilers.
( Read some spoilers... )Here are a few haikus for my plane trip back to Europe. | Voici quelques haïkus pour mon vol de retour vers l'Europe. |
Arrived in Japan today. Greeted with cherry blossom trees losing their petals at the wind. Nice. People are very friendly and polite. Streets are clean. Feels like more civilized a country than France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, and maybe even Switzerland. I now have three weeks to prove that white men in Japan can aspire to become something else than mindless armored racketeers proud of rampaging and murdering.
Some time ago, I watched The Last Samurai. Quite a nice picture, with Tom Cruise playing the white guy (to whom the domestic american public can identify) who becomes a Samurai (common kid fantasy) and on the way goes places and meets people few japanese (and no gaijin) have ever had the opportunity to. Ever since Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee entered King Arthur's Court, there has been no limit to what your average american may dare fancy becoming. Of course, it is usually ignorance and lack of ambition, not knowledge and wisdom, that prevents non-americans from daring as much. Oh well.
The plot is so predictable that if you've seen the trailer, filling in the rest of the script with the prototypical elements and constraints of the genre is an academic exercise: please make it a politically correct blockbuster, in a japanese medieval setting, with historical pseudo-accuracy, flavors of war and exotism, and a touch of leftist pseudo-philosophy. After you've seen the movie or completed the above exercise, you may read the following comments without fear of spoilers.
( Read more... )Since I don't escape the current events, but only report them late, here is the inevitable Tolkien entry for my blog.
( Read more... )Il y a deux semaines, je suis allé voir un film de Samouraï, Zatoïchi. Une histoire classique remise au goût du jour; j'aime beaucoup. (Attention, spoilers dans la suite du texte.)
( Lire la suite... )
