World, get off the lying meme

Many believe the world is full of liars.

A couple of years ago a few of these believers made a movie, creating an opposite world.

I guess they thought this would be funny, and would resonate with the irony of the opposite. And maybe even be uplifting. Not to mention educational.

Right?

Well, No. The conceit failed. Despite featuring charismatic and popular stars, The Invention of Lying barely covered its costs.

I could have told them this would happen. I could have told them the irony would be feckless.

Guys, the reason the movie did not make money is your premise was wrong. The world is not made corrupt by being full of liars.

Yes, the world is full of people who say untrue things. But they believe in truth and consciously believe the things they say are true.

It is only subconsciously they know what they say is false.

And now a picture of some kids. Because kids [Hollywood's #1 audience] know.

They can tell that many of the adults in their world are not completely honest human beings. But also that they are not liars.

The lying meme is feckless. Please, world, get off it. That would be step 1 for you to begin to work out what is really wrong.

a movie about DeVere as Shakes-speare! Yippee!

In just a week or so, principal photography will begin on the first movie ever made about the actual author of Hamlet (& all that other stuff). It will no doubt show up in a few theaters in a few years + quickly end up on high-brow cable.

The working title of the movie is Anonymous (a good title for the story, and it might even resonate now, in the internet age).

The director is Roland Emmerich, an A-lister who most famous movie is Independence Day.
I imagine he got the money by agreeing to do the Isaac Asimov Foundation movie too.

William Shaksper could hardly sign his own name
The filming of the movie is historic, IMO. Considering how many movies have been made from "Bard" plays, and how much influence they have had.

Btw, the case for DeVere has gotten even stronger in the last 15 years or so.


a couple of starter links
'byanothername' blog
'Shakepeare fellowship'

As it happens, I never liked reading Shakespeare. I have followed this story simply because I hate bullshit. and the story of the Stratford man ("Shakespeare" without the hyphen) is grade A crapola.

from

And the timing gives me a buzz, too. A few years ago I happened to surf on TV into Shakespeare in Love, to me a mind-boggling work of unintentional disinformation (and it actually had won Best Picture!). It pissed me off so much I went to the trouble of writing the outline for a screenplay of DeVere's life. Not that I was (or am) much of a scholar.

I had planned a close-to-factual scene where a teen "noble" Edward DeVere was making out with a good-looking maid in the garden of his estate (not clear how seriously), and a "lowly" gardener who had eyes for the young woman, went up to them and said to the girl "Why are you making out with that queer?" and then DeVere gets up, fences with the gardener, and stabs him to death. Trained in fencing. was young Ed. And of course, he gets off, because he was aristocracy.

Then later (in my outline) DeVere is at Oxford and pens a juvenile play where a lover stabs an imagined rival. The ur-Hamlet. Again - this actually happened.

The Oxfordians know all about this link, and about many others. The life of the Oxford man and the words of the bard match just as you would expect if he was the author.
Which he was.

DeVere, btw, signed his name like this

Anyway, I am thrilled someone took up the task of writing of a bio (that matches the life the signature and the works) at the same time I did my halfass bit, and I am thrilled that someone finished that task.
No doubt that they did a way, way better job than I could have done.

But will the world learn something? I guess I have to quote Shakes-speare

"Well, if Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear."

people thinking about monkeys and the Apocalypse

Several years ago I spotted in a bunch of movies the underlying idea of a headless chicken.

Now it's monkeys combined with the end of the world.

The most popular sports site on the internet hosts Bill Simmons. In the last 2 days his ' report from NBA all-star weekend appeared.
An account of events last weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada.

It's not a great read but Simmons mentions

“Paris Hilton's birthday party on Saturday night featured a goat, a monkey, a naked woman on a bed of glass and the Kiss midget band. I think this exact scenario appears in the scripture passage about Armageddon.” more

Apparently unrelated, today on a football site someone started a thread with this

“The link is for the official trailer of Apocalypto... Safe for work, assuming you can watch movie trailers at work. Let the trailer load up.. about 80% of the way through, there is a screaming monkey. When you see the monkey, pause the trailer and rewind frame by frame.”

I didn't even look. It doesn't matter if Gibson's image is there or not. If it is then inside Gibson's head the name 'Apocalypto' is linked to a monkey. If it isn't then the same linkage is in the poster's head.

Paris Hilton isn't the only lonely rich person in the world. Maybe that's it. My basic point is, if these two people have recently been unconsciously thinking of apocalypses and of monkeys, then probably millions have been.

addendum
The midget theme, I think, is a more long-standing insecurity in the culture. As portrayed in this movie, or demonstrated by this company.

updated: 2007-07-25

Gromit is the Buddha

Here is a old-world Buddhist account, with two proper names replaced with the letters X and Y:

"X tested Y to the maximum, but the master was patient, forgiving, humorous and full of love. He never asked X to abandon reason, and he faced all of X's arguments and examinations with infinite patience. In time, X accepted Y, and while he accepted, his acceptance was whole-hearted. While Y predominantly taught duality and Bhakti to his other disciples, he taught X ... the philosophy of non-dualism."

Since Y is described as 'the master' you may have to read it again to see that if moved to a modern world context, Y could be a dog.

My point is, I am pretty sure this is the unintentional, underlying plot for the Wallace & Gromit series!

These entertaining and soothing claymation movies (usually shorts) are often described as 'whimsical'.

I will only mention the 1st one. In it, the regular man (Wallace) announces he is short on cheese and thus will go to the moon to get more. His friend Buddha Gromit is non-plussed. The dog helps him build the spaceship and they successfully go for a lunar cheese picnic.
It it wise to be whimsical?

*Even if this is totally wrong, dogs clearly have some special meaning for other people, sometimes involving reincarnation. For instance, see TR's 2005 post and update.

more nonsense

• Gromit was originally to be a speaking part, but it became clear the clay dog's expressions alone would be sufficent. His meanings are literally wordless, like the Buddha's


• In the semi-crazy indirectEffect interpretation of the Modern World, cats and dogs have special importance. Cats are prana, while dogs are Buddha


• The closing credits for at least one of the W&Gs involve rising and falling bunnies. What are bunnies? ..they are rabbits fictionalized and unconsciously infused both with the Buddha and with prana.
  Yes, Easter is about reincarnation (don't get me started).


• At the very beginning Gromit was to be a cat. This means that Nick Park's self-healing with clay --his creating a dog-that-once-was-a-cat-- follows the natural yoga arc of stumbling upon wisdom when out looking for prana. Sort of.

A lot more could be said, but I will save some for another post.

a 2005 movie that had the guts to behead its chicken

Last November I wrote about the shared themes in the top ten US box office. Among the themes I saw embedded was chicken with its head cut off.

One month earlier the French movie Caché had premiered in the USA at a film festival. But I had not even heard of it.


Today, I finally saw Caché. It has a scene where a chicken gets its head cut off and then it flaps headless around a farmyard. This event is central to the story.

I have not seen Chicken Little, Jarhead, The Legend of Zorro or Saw II, but I say confidently that Caché gets to the metaphorical jugular better than they do.

It is personally satisfying to spot an underlying theme in a brief bit of cultural history, and then later to have that confirmed when it turns out there was another similarly-preoccupied movie.

Especially when that movie resonates.

tacked on

• If you have enjoyed high-brow movies in the past you might really like Caché. That is, unless you rationalize a lot (if you tell yourself 'white lies' on a daily basis that would make you the movie's target)


• At the beginning the movie seems to be about how terror unites a family. This is highly misleading. It is really about how adult personality forms.
  [in an interview on the DVD the writer/director, Michael Haneke, chuckles about how much fun he had misleading the viewer]


• The SF Chronicle referred to the chicken head-chopping scene as 'cruelty to an animal'. Strangely, the paper didn't say if they took ads from restaurants that serve chicken. .. In the same vein, the reviewer is somehow blind to the movie's considerable virtues.

changed on 11/28/2006

the symbolism in V for Vendetta

When I first saw the title, "V for Vendetta" I lamely joked "V for Vagina", knowing full-well it was a political, subversive movie ¹. Now that I have seen it (and read a few reviews) I think it's worth returning to this.

If you want to read about the politics, go here instead.

The character 'V' is a asexual masked enabler, allowing the dramatic arc of the secretary played by Natalie Portman. An ordinary, practical young woman is made into a political warrior.

In the original version of the story the female lead was different. David Edelstein writes:

"Evey might seem less of a goody two-shoes if she’d begun—as in the graphic novel—by turning tricks for money; and her relationship with another TV host, a melancholy teddy bear (Stephen Fry), is yawningly platonic. After Evey’s head is shaved and she endures a marathon torture session, we expect great things. It’s a lapse in the screenwriting that her new fearlessness is barely tested; she’s a Joan of Arc who never fights. But Portman’s watchfulness and unaffected beauty keep you entranced—and the movie from drifting into camp. Whatever else it is, V for Vendetta is not frivolous. The Wachowskis—one of whom is reportedly in the midst of a sex change—introduce a lesbian martyr to make a plaintive case for the right to be what one is."

The Wachowskis seem to have shifted the core symbolic struggle in the powerful material from
working-class prostitute holding off Thatcherism
to
virginal woman who sympathizes w lesbians holding off self-absorbed rapists
In every scene with V and multiple men V pulls 'his' knives out of their scabbards. They are shiny and sharp, and they cut the bad men. None will never have sex life again.
V as Edwards Scissorhands luckier older brother?

*
V for Vendetta is very good movie. I doubt it could have been made any better. Despite the surface material it is not pretentious - it's makers worked with the anti-authoritarian pulp roots like gardeners transplanting a precious young tree.

Good for them!
*
The movie may not have the most enlightened deep meanings possible, but sexual subtext in political movies truly can matter.

I do not have the writing skills to explain how these kinds of messages can stick over time. But they do.

For instance, this happened with 2 influential, quality movies about WWII. In both Open City (1945) and the Longest Day (1962) the authoritarians were depicted as gayer than they actually were, while simultaneously the freedom-fighters were made straighter.² No doubt this was done with the best intentions - but a generation later the stereotype of the mincing Nazi is entrenched, and millions of homophobic authoritarians today are unable to use the past as a mirror.

To directly compare the symbolisms, the gayness in the intervening 50 years has shifted from the authoritarian sadist not to the victim but to the enabler of the victim's righteousness.


notes
------

1. More things could be said. #1 on the list, possibly, is that the some of today's Guy Fawkeses are likely heterosexual men who had been sexually molested as boys. But that as a subtext could not explain the doppelganger wannabe relationship between the authoritarian and the terrorist (that they are each other)



2. The layering of "the Longest Day" Nazi train sequence and the emphasis on the heterosexuality of the French Underground is profoundly ahistorical. It implies something very different from the truth. In reality that movement was largely comprised of the French that would have been vulnerable to the Nazis, that would have been taken in any secondary wave of arrests. Who was the most vulnerable? ..gays and freaks of all kinds (bless them all), as well as the socialists, former labor union organizers and anarchists. These groups largely were the French Resistance (and their prior experience in keeping secrets helped them). Instead of showing this the movie shows a stereotypic man + woman cooing at each other, just stopping to fight the Nazis. ... "Open City" is a translation of Roma, città aperta (I'll add to this note later).

Videodrome (1983) vs en Passion (1969)

I watched Videodrome (1983) last night. It is maybe one of the top 50 movies all-time. It's not for everyone, though.

Imagine an R-rated Twilight Zone episode, written by an angry screenwriter on hallucinogens for the first time. In this movie's low-brow but existential plot television is compared to hard-core pornography.

Imagine the famous blindfolded Lady Liberty holding her scale: in one copper tray the earth, in the other a tv set. Then imagine simultaneously she is on all fours being whipped. Well .. you don't see that. But that's kind of its style. And in VideoDrome the fate of the world lies in the balance.

Many commenters say Videodrome was ahead of its time but its ending is incoherent. Some say appropriately so, others say forgivably so.

I did not experience this incoherence but maybe I don't suspend disbelief in the normal way. I cared more for the fate of the metaphor than the fate of the main character.

I saw that the love interest needed to talk out of a television, even if she was dead. This was right because the plot is about pornography in the abstract. Also, the movie's finale had the only possible moral (try to guess it!). It involved a kind of squirming unease, but it had to be that way.
a few hours later
I was still thinking about it. And that was when I remembered a 2nd movie I found more comprehensible than most viewers: En Passion (1969).
Aka, 'the Passion of Anna', made the same year the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman was divorcing his 4th wife AND breaking up with the actress Liv Ullman.

Not surprisingly, Bergman cast Ullman as an unconscious murderer!

Like Videodrome, En Passion

• has dream sequence(s)
• includes the theme of sexual perversion
• has death(s) revealed as murder
• is about the danger of narcissism

En Passion was a boring mess, and few have seen it. And it's clear that Bergman lost control of the production.
Viz: the sideplot involving the mystery of who is abusing farm animals is referenced disjointedly; an important sequence involving the key romance appparently was cut out in editing; spliced in are interviews with the actors.

needless to say
Bergman's overall set of work surpasses Cronenberg's. Amazing but true: including love and redemption in your worldview can help your career.

[significantly modified on 2006-07-10, then cleaned up on 2007-2-21]

An I For An I

One of today's value systems is called "political correctness". People have reduced this name to an acronym: "PC".

An amazing thing about political correctness is that it is only indirectly about politics. Directly, PC is a set of speech guidelines for specific and general settings.

At the surface PC's appearance shut down the common use of jokes demeaning groups of people. But a priori to these guidelines PC is a categorization of reality. Like other value systems, it dictates which entities are to be referred to by which words.

PC itself flouts PC
Generally, PC applies when the subject is gays, or people with disabilities, or people who are not caucasian. But PCs strictest mandate is that these must not be grouped together! For example, PC commands that homosexuality must not be spoken of as a disability.

This incongruity was humorously revealed recently when TV news' Cynthia Izaguirre substituted 'gay' when the teleprompter said 'blind'.

they're trying to make a better world
PC advocates share a motive with the proselytizers of classic religions. As the former demand the term 'gay' be used instead of 'homosexual', the latter demand 'the 10 Commandments' be put in every schoolroom.

Of course, these are not identical approaches. We can safely say one approach is newer & more intellectualized and the other is older & hoarier.

writing down a value system
The rules of PC are not supposed to be written down. Today people's pre-conscious pretends this is because of PC's superficial fascist nature (no PCer wants to be caught coming across like ten-commandment type). But in reality this is done because of 1) the contradiction 2) breath taboos.

New Age interpretation
The West is becoming more and more a settler culture (and less of a warrior culture. It is also merging with nomadic culture). As this happens its 'breath-death wish' is weakening.

Also weakening is what Alan Watts referred to in 1966 as 'the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are':

“It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity.” [from]

The weakening of this taboo means knowledge of the contingency of the breath is reaching modern pre-conscious. The (in some ways) over-educated middle-class of the West has now sensed what Watts sensed. But they disagree with his advice

“We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience--a new feeling of what it is to be 'I.'”

Instead these moderns invented a new value-system: Political correctness.

the current behaviour
In their relation to PC, Moderns behave one way or another

• some never flout it
  (or feel guilty if they do by accident)
• some flout it superficially
  (by making a joke demeaning one of the 'victim' groups, or a medical/political claim about one of the victim groups)

Each of these two groups pretends they are the free speakers, even as each of these two groups obeys different taboos. In other words: not everyone acquiesces to PC , but everyone acquiesces to its opacity.


added 2006/06/16:
The acclaimed-but-little-seen 2002 movie Far From Heaven represents a similar conflation (as PC itself does, as Cynthia Izaguirre did). In it the director -Todd Haynes- shows what it might have been like in the USA in 1957 for middle-class closeted gay men and their wives.

Haynes set the drama in Connecticut, and he has said this was partly to take advantage of the fall foliage. But for some reason Haynes included a sub-plot involving race-relations. This, even though in interviews it's clear he had done no work on what race-relations were there then (he makes it seem as if every white person in the state then was a committed racist).

Far From Heaven's twin themes do ring true. It's a good film. However, to me there is an echo in the movie not of reality but of the Western identity issues PC is partly designed to cover up. Westerners -trained to equate race prejudice with sexual-orientation prejudice (while simultaneously trained never to think about them together!) - have been largely ineffective in ending either.

If I haven't been clear: Both racism and prejudice against gays are wrong. And egregiously stupid. I just think there's a reason modern people who share with me the desire to end both have no idea why either prejudice exists. They think they know (they think these are taught behaviors) but they don't.

updated 2006/07/08

Benchley obit, and Jaws symbolism

Speaking of the V-shape, Slate's obit of Peter Benchley.

Apparently the man was a Puritan, and possibly his story about sharks (and their jaws) originally had an underlying meaning, somewhat lost thru editing and then later dissipated in the movie version.

“Start with heavy-handed symbolism: The seaside town the shark will terrorize is called Amity. Next add ungainly metaphor: "The past—like a bird long locked in a cage and suddenly released—was flying at her, swirling around her head, showering her with longing." Finally, throw in a charmingly awkward lovemaking scene: A couple "thrashed with urgent ardor on the cold sand." The novel opens with that ardor, and after its climax, the still-naked woman slips into the ocean, becoming an opening course for the shark circling below.”  [italics added]

also

“The Associated Press reported this week that Benchley's initial 100-page book draft was filled with puns. His editor, Thomas Congdon, wrote in the margins "NO JOKES,"”

I do not believe Spielberg 'rooted for the shark', btw.

[originally appeared in a longer post
about Backwards City vias]

link to Portman interview about V for Vendetta

An interview with Natalie Portman about V for Vendetta.

I guess with that title your unsconscious is supposed to wonder 'what else could V stand for?". Heck, the letter is practically a pictograph!

[originally appeared in a longer post
about Backwards City vias;
See also the later, longer post on this same topic]

a movie composer's breakthrough score mentioned

One of the best movie scores I have heard recently is from Sur mes lèvres (2001). The English title is Read My Lips.

It's classical music. The closing credits have a nice long chunk.

We hear bells as if from far away. Then a string section rises sadly into a melodic interplay with a horn section. After that dialog completes, it's back to the distant bells.

Not too many Americans have seen this interesting thriller because it's French. It does seem likely it will soon be remade by Hollywood (because of the way lip-reading is tied into the plot). However the soundrack might not be the same.

The composer's name is Alexandre Desplat, he'd been sort of France's Danny Elfman. When Sur mes lèvres came out he had already done scores for 77 movies&TV shows.

Other people I guess were impressed because it was just after that Desplat started getting hired by Hollywood. In the last few years his scores have included Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Upside of Anger, Syriana and Firewall (now in a theater near you).

[modified]

double 'pink' coincidence

In 1963 a comic caper movie was made that was supposed be about a knighted British jewel thief. The part of the bumbling French policeman on the case went to Peter Sellers, an English comic actor.

By the time the movie came out, the movie was called 'the Pink Panther', referring to a diamond. A cartoon pink panther appeared in the opening credits portraying sexual elusiveness.

As many know, the movie was a hit. The thief character was deemed inessential, and 5 more Sellers 'Panther' movies were made (as well as a few without him). The diamond was not in all those but they all had the phrase in their title, the teasing pink creature + the vamping music in their credits¹ and featured the incompetent French policeman.

The most striking feature of the Sellers' character was that he wasn't just incompetent, he was essentially a eunuch. The blatant subtext of the movie series was that France has no balls.

No male eunuch character before that or since has been such a hit in the USA, as far as I know. Supposedly this was because of Sellers' skills.

possibly helping the popularity
It may be no accident that the movies' prime years coincided with the Vietnam War. The original came out more or less when the French basically pulled out of the conflict leaving the USA to fight it alone.²  Personally, I believe that is why the word 'Pink' ended up in all those titles. It just worked at an unconscious level, in my opinion [reading pink=eunuch, not pink=commie].

It is not clear that the rights holders thought this, however. The 'Panther' movies kept being made even after the Vietnam war was over. But maybe they should not have, because these were not nearly as successful at the box office.

the revival
In the nineties, apparently, another Panther script floated around (at one point the idea was floated that Chris Tucker could play Clouseau).

Then in December 2003 -doing interviews promoting another movie- Steve Martin told interviewers that he had been working on the Panther script, and was planning to play the lead.

The movie was, in fact, greenlighted and now 2½ years later is now in theaters [promo photo]. Critically panned, it is nonetheless #1 at the box office. After its opening weekend anyway.

again, a political coincidence
Not to get too political but in 2003, France had ducked out of another war the USA was entering into. Rightly or wrongly. France refused to join in the new Iraq war and some people in the USA then revived the 'surrender monkey' insult, the WWII claims and so on.³

Someone could ask Martin (and everyone else involved) if -in 2003- they had cynically been thinking that anti-French sentiment would help ticket sales in the USA.

But no-one will ask.

btw, when I posted this idea on a webboard last week someone asked me if I just thought of it .. the truth is, i had never seen it anywhere.

1. the theme by Henry Mancini has since become famous


2. As far as some in the USA were concerned France did not do enough to fight the Nazi in WWII either. That is too political to get into here. I am just trying to analyze the movie


3. in March of that year that the US Congressional cafeteria had changed the name of french fries to 'freedom fries'. Remember all that?

the subversive sequence in Who Killed Bambi?

Qui a tué Bambi? is a sexy-thriller set in a hospital, from 2003. Very cinematic, it's not a really good movie.

The best thing in it is a throwaway sequence intended to increase the mystery surrounding one of the characters. Watching that part of the movie makes one wonder (even more) whether this man is a sociopathic murderer or just a handsome doctor lacking a wife ...

the game

Isabelle takes a sleeping pill but, for one reason or another, ends up in a nightclub before it takes effect. A bunch of people at work have set up an outing there.

At the moment of her waking, everyone else giggles and urges her to play a game. Lights are pulsing - it is all very strange. The doctor pretends to have had a dream and Isabelle has to guess it using 'Yes' or 'No' questions only. She reluctantly agrees.

She asks things like
  'Was it an erotic dream?' (he answers 'yes').
  'Was there sex?' (he answers 'no').

A dream emerges from the questions, about a man in clothes, a nude woman, starlight.

Finaly Isabelle asks if the nude woman is her. At that point everyone laughs and tells her it is all a trick! They explain to her that -whatever she asked- the mysterious doctor answered Yes if her question ended in a vowel, otherwise he answered No.

In this game French works well, as it has key optimistic words ending in vowels like Ici and oui.

As they laugh at her that such a romantic scenario emerged from herself, Isabelle quickly leaves the room.

Oh my God! It's not you, it's me!

I can't remember a better screen depiction of projection (the psycholanalytic term).¹

The sequence is subversive, in the best sense of the word. Marvelously indirectly-direct. Everyone who has watched the sexy thriller has learned in the marrow of their bones what projection is, if they did not already know.

That Isabelle is the heroine, that she has been victimized (in a way) into creating this projection strenghtens this effect. This because many people who need to come to terms with their own projections feel themselves as victims. Watching poor Isabelle, they will have no problem internalizing the concept.

the screenwriter's title

Btw, the title (translated in English as 'Who Killed Bambi?') was clearly chosen for it's cleverness. It's certainly evocative and probably helped sell the movie (a good thing). But it gives a misleading impression of the plot. More accurate would have been the working title, translated in English as 'Run away, Bambi, Run away!".


added later: in 1998 a sexy thriller was released in France called "Cours, Lola, Cours" (translated from its German title: Lola Rennt, aka "Run, Lola, Run"). It is possible this clever title inspired the original screenwriter to write what he called 'Fuis, Bambi, Fuis' (different plot). Also, I guess it is possible that in 2003 when the movie came they didn't want it to sound too similar to the German movie.

They might also have discovered that in 1992 a book had been published in English called "Run Bambi, Run", and didn't want to be sued if they used the working title (fyi: "Fuis" can be translated as "Flee" or "Run Away").

1. This is not a classic case of projection. The dream is never within Isabelle, formed as part of her.

[modified]

the gay cowboy movie's existence

Released 6 years ago, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon cost around $15m to make. In the USA alone it grossed $128m. That's $100m profit.

ASFAIK, in Hollywood it was co-distribution deal, meaning the profits were spread around.

Naturally the director got another chance. He made .. Hulk. It's budget was $120m. In the USA alone it ended up grossing $130m. Not a huge money maker, but a pretty good result for a disappointing, arty-type monster movie.

Among the director's earlier movies was Sense and Sensibility, a big moneymaker.

Ask yourself this - let's assume Ang Lee is liked, a good guy. We know he made pots of money for Hollywood. What do you do if you run Paramount and this director shows up with a well-crafted script about gay cowboys, two major stars have signed on and .. the budget is only $14m?

Answer - you don't run Paramount, you're reading this.

Seriously, if you did run a movie studio you would agree to finance the movie. Every time you would agree to this. Every single time. It is called 'business'. And guess what? ... So far the gay cowboy movie has grossed $42m.

What do you now?

Answer - you promote the movie for an award because that's free publicity.

There is no gay agenda in Hollywood. I am not gay myself but in reality 6-10% of the world is. Yet a far smaller percentage of movies Hollywood makes feature gay characters. It has got to be less than 1 tenth of 1 percent. From this statistic alone is easy to see Hollywood does not have a gay agenda.

The fallacy is that this movie is lauded because it's gay. I haven't seen it but a gay movie is never going to be made unless the script is superior to other scripts in the first place. And the big stars the studio demanded would not have agreed to do it unless they saw it as Oscar material.

An equal fallacy is the one about how so many of the best American movies over the last few decades involve gangsters and/or torture. This does not mean the USA is a gangster nation. Does it mean we're a torturing culture? Does it mean Hollywood likes to see people's ears cut off, or horse's heads cut off? No it does not. That is also a fallacy for similar reasons.

The secret is not giving a crap about hype. Too much hype .. turn off the TV.

chicken Chicken Little

Chicken Little is a classic story. Last year I predicted a 200M gross for Disney's animated version.

The movie is out. Now it looks like the pros were right and I was wrong¹. The movie will be no Shrek (it has managed to cross the road).

The studio has crassly reversed the meaning. In the original the foxes of the world take advantage of naive conspiracy-theorists hens but, thank God, are themselves controlled by noble hunters.

One would have thought that would be a sufficiently authoritarian fable for Disney.

But no. Now the sexless hen turns out to have been right - The sky is falling. The studio has its young hero finding a little square blue piece of sky and then, after everyone ignores this warning ... dangerous aliens land.

Far from their Chicken Little being a welcome diversion from these paranoid times, the company made it as part of these times. They have made a War of the Worlds for kids². And so far they are not making the money they expected³.

*

I am particularly offended by Disney's linkage of the sky itself with danger.

I have a work in progress on the how people experience the sky & the horizon (update: here). The gist here would be that our planet's canopy has been for millions of years an invaluable force for healing. Thus any company believing in family values (as Disney fancies itself) would never introduce a childrens' story with such a sky (a sky introjected with devilry, signifying danger).

What's next from the staggering and manic-compulsive industry dinosour? A kids movie where milk & cookies everwhere are poisoned but a clever band of youngsters manage to save the city after only some die a painful, puking death?⁴

1. I did not know Disney was making the movie all by itself (with no help from Dreamworks or Pixar). These days the company has as much chance of solo marshalling sufficient creative juices for a crossover kids CGI blockbuster as Quentin Tarantino has of making an impact on the culture without a torture scene. You are who you are (almost always).


2. That Tom Cruise vehicle was probably in overlapping production, and the suits may have been afraid to compete. They may not have wanted to aim at children what amounted to an expansion of fear, but that was their market so what else could they do?
   
   For whatever reason, Disney chose not to add to Chicken the usual amount of adult trim jokes/verbalisms. The most cynical possibility is that they sensed most grown ups are fed up with the story of dangerous aliens landing, and expected to do better than War of the Worlds (since they had a more gullible audience).


3. Coincidentally or not, the content is apparently awful. Steve Rhodes:
   “Our packed audience of kids and their parents was clearly not impressed. The comedy uses gags such as having Chicken Little being forced to run around in his tidy whities, much to his brief embarrassment, and showing small animals talking in mass on their cells phones. About the best that the movie can come up with is a barbell made out of two donuts and a pencil. If I ever smiled during the movie, I don't remember it.”


4. Done in CGI, called 'Cookie Monster', with the bad guy voiced by Tom Sizemore?

updated: 2007-07-25

top 10 movie titles streaming into consciousness

The current top 10 movies in the the USA, in order:

Chicken Little     Jarhead  
Saw II     The Legend of Zorro 
Prime
Dreamer     Good Night, and Good Luck
The Weather Man     Shopgirl 
Flightplan

Streaming into consciousness are the shared themes:

A little chicken is a semi-frightened chicken which is a stupid chicken which will soon be a chicken with its head cut off (which is like someone with a jar on their head). Speaking of cutting flesh, saw's do it in II, and so does Zorro (in three neat strokes).

Less surgically and more optimistically, with good luck on a good night all of us manage to be dreamers. For instance, a weather man could make love to a shopgirl (in the unlikely event many sunny days are forecast and no killer sales are planned which would swamp the department store where she works).

The deep secret is that we all plan to flee these 'memes' but are always thwarted, as these days are all about many-digited numbers (and the chances the lottery lands on ours is the same as the chances ours is a prime).

the Star Wars movies compared to the Thousand-Hand Guan Yin

An explanation and video of a dance called the 'Thousand-Hand Guan Yin'  [faster download]

In the dance the Goddess is made up of many women. The eyes on the many hands represent her ability to see suffering in a lot of places. The hands represent her compassion.

human hands vs movie frames
Compare the hands of the dance to the frames as collected on a Star Wars fan page

“I trimmed 81 frames from the beginning of AOTC, 49 frames from ROTS, 25 frames from ANH, 25 frames from ESB, and 26 frames from ROTJ, so the first frame of the Star Wars logo in each movie coincides.”

When assembled by the human eye in both cases the ephemera merge into a being (or beings) that is a powerful friend with special powers.

Notably, even assembled both the dance and the movie use the theme of elegant coordination.¹ Someone who unconsciously wants to know if he really has such a friend -and experencing that theme- might easily be compelled to study the orginal frames.².

The Star Wars student goes so far as providing photos of the frames in order to demonstrate that 'The first appearance of Palpatine in TPM and AOTC is ON THE SAME FRAME'. He finds this one of many 'funny and cool coincidences'.

roughly speaking

• The context of deafness -- The women in the dance are all deaf. And Lucas is so well-known for his tin ear, he once joked about another director, "before I met him [Francis Ford Coppola], I couldn't write a word, and now I'm the King of Wooden Dialogue".



• the context of regeneration -- the Guan Yin bodhisattva represents 'a being who is enlightened and ready to transcend the cycles of birth and death'. While Lucas 'force' also passes thru these cycles by being carried in a priveleged family (Luke, his Dad, his sister, and so on).

important:
This post is not commenting on the relative or absolute values of Buddhism or the Star Wars movies.

1. In the case of the movie I refer to the use of light sabres.


2. The ancient bodhisattva dance is more overt in this regard. Part of the reason, I guess, is because film has not always been around.

[updated]

zombies agree to have their life story patented!

The USA issued its first patent to a storyline on Thursday, apparently.
Either someone is being witty, or the specific storyline and title is an ironic coincidence:

“Knight's story, The Zombie Stare, tells of an ambitious high school kid, consumed by the anticipation of college admission. He prays one night to remain unconscious until he gets the good news from MIT. The letter arrives - 30 years later, due to a postal error - and he wakes up. He soon discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived a normal life. Thus he endeavours to regain 30 years’ worth of memories, lost as an unconscious, philosophical zombie.”

I say much of the leadership of the US govt are themselves 'unconscious philosophical zombies' whose state also comes from being terrified of not being in the elite.
Agreeing that this is a terrible trend:
 -Most Slashdot posters
 -novelist/blogger 'storytelling' [details]

about MSNBC Jarhead review quote

A MSNBC review of Jarhead starts by quoting the book:

“All Vietnam films were pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended … [They] watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills ... Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man.”

from a novel by Tony Swofford,
based on his own experiences [ellipted]

The reviewer says this new movie -in its way- keeps true to this by having no battle scenes (thus being more effectively antiwar).

The reviewer then moves seamlessly from this subtle lw deconstruction into statements implying a rw reality!

• it implies there are lots of exciting, honorable battles going on in Iraq that could have been put into the movie


• it compares the movie to bad sex

WTF?

vile Spartan

The man that made 2004's Spartan seems to have decided that if he sipped expensive scotch and wrote the most depraved script possible, then he would make a lot of money.

The violent first reel of the movie may have prevented the movie from being a hit. Box office history shows that if -in the first 30 minutes- you show torture, suicide, and shotgun blasts to the chest then few wives or girlfriends will be willing to watch. Which means couples won't go.

Even if she agrees with the politics, she wont go. She wont be drawn in by droning, robotic music, either. Or by one dark, asphalt set after another.

Evil movies like Spartan tend to slip under the cultural radar. It's only later --when a teenager from nowhere commits a horrific suicide-shooting spree, leaving a note that says that viewing the movie in question a few years before had inspired him-- that people even begin to wonder if it wasn't so wholesome, after all.

The hinge of the plot

The stereotypes in Spartan are political, and the movie amps them up to a level usually seen only in satire.

The US President's daughter disappears and is now probably in the hands of sex-slavers. We see a Secret Service agent tied to a chair and beaten. Then we see this agent's brains on the floor, an apparent suicide. With this turn of events someone has to take charge, right?

..In stalks a man scowling so ostentantiously we know he is top dog (and used to it). This stereotype pulls out a photo of the young woman in a Catholic-schoolgirl outfit. He shows the photo to the assembled flunkies. He asks them what will happen to this precious person (besides being drugged and gang-raped, that is).

A flunky dutifully responds that since the President's daughter is famous for having red hair, the young woman will be killed because she has just dyed her hair blonde and cut it short, and thus the sex-slavers will not realize whose daughter they have got.

This is a script contrivance of unusually-high decadence. The script uses the line 'when her hair grows out'. I am convinced the writer intended that some of the movie-goers would switch the meaning of this line. That some will get a particular image into their heads, and the secret of her real hair color will be out in another way (since the woman has been sold into sex-slavery).

the script's depravity

Q: what is the most reactionary plot possible in a movie?
A: nothing is more exploitable than a script involving sex slavery

Q: how do you adjust a movie script that involves the kidnapping and raping of women to make it as manipulative as possible?
A: write it so a rich person's daughter is a victim

Q: what are the most cynical plot turns that could be added next?
A: Adding race issues would do it

Writer/director David Mamet does all this, and worse. He writes is so the young woman's father is the President of the USA. He writes it that she goes to a famous elite college. He symbolizes virginity by making her red-haired. He adds degraded 911 subtext to the topic it is exploiting: it turns out that the sex-slavers are  [drumroll please]  Arabs!

Mamet sells these plot-choices as color-blind and realistic. You decide if they are (but first read up on it).

I have never hated a movie more. Spartan is insulting to the victims of the world sex-slave trade and to their families. It's fake story exploits and twists any possible recognition of these tragedies evilly.

I mentioned the race-baiting, the Arab sub-plot. This piece of crap movie also includes a black sidekick who is shot and badly injured ... twice. Yet who has a loyalty to the white hero like a puppy-dog.

what other people think

Depressingly, the movie was critically well-recieved in many places. IMDb members currently rate it 6.9 out of 10.


==>Liberal USA reviewer Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars. His review has this:

“The particular pleasure of "Spartan" is to watch the characters gradually define themselves and the plot gradually emerge like your face in a steamy mirror. You see the outlines, and then your nose, and then you see that somebody is standing behind you, and then you see it's you -- so who is the guy in the mirror? Work with me here. I'm trying to describe how the movie operates without revealing what it does.”

I think Mr. Ebert's mirror stayed a little too steamed-up that day (he is an under-rated critic, though).


==> A site calling itself Culture Vulture - choices for the cognoscenti ends its review with this

“Always rooted in thoughtful ideas and graced with irony, his stylized dialogue has the effect of focusing attention on what is being said, as contrasted with, say, more ordinary thrillers in which the dialogue is generally little more than a series of plot-moving cliches. With that stylization, Mamet balances on the narrow line separating reality and a theatrical abstraction. ... It's all enhanced by his sense of visual style (a very dark palette, lots of saturated blues and greens here), his ability to draw out the best from his actors, and his devilishly imaginative way with Byzantine plotlines.”  [ellipted]

You are right, dude, you are a vulture. And the movie is devilish.

edited 11/28/2006