jeanrenoir

It's as depressing to compare Don't Look Up with Dr. Strangelove as it is to compare Amor Towles' Rules of Civility with The Great Gatsby, since both contemporary works are such reflections of the vapidity of American culture, and most artists, today, compared to the genuine, profound critical geniuses the American arts used to throw up. All right-thinking people will agree with Don't Look Up's mockery of the vapid stupidity of American culture and Americans today, but the movie mostly wastes some of the best actors Hollywood has on its own artistic ineptitude.

Just saw US. Liked Get Out better. People who think US is a great horror movie either have never seen The Shining, which makes US look pathetic, or can't get anything more complex than US. In the beginning, I thought Peale was doing something interesting in apparently satirizing the complacency, blandness, and "normality" of contemporary upper-middle-class suburban black professionals, and showing them that they are culpable for doing their best to wear "Howard" sweats as symbols of how they've left their shadow selves in the ghetto behind. But when Peale doubles their white upper-middle-class pals, too, suddenly the movie is incoherent. If Peale's trying to show whites in his audience that they are just as bad for forgetting about their own poor white, low rent "shadow," that be okay. But by showing all the red horror figures of either race as shadows of the American middle-class masses epitomized by the vapid idiocy of "Hands Across America" Peale is shooting fish in a barrel. It's all to easy and simple-minded. Kubrick was a genius. Geniuses produce works of art as complex and mysterious as genius itself. Peale's just a talented journeyman Hollywood director who gets overrated because he's black and black directors are still too rare. US is sort of the horror genre version of the action genre megabit Black Panther. Both films are shallow and ultimately rather empty, but they get lots and lots of extra points for the blackness of the principles involved. This overrating of works by blacks is actually a form of patting them on the head, as if it's "amazing" "they" can do so well, when their "so well" would have gotten a yawn from whites. Moonlight is incomparably the best black film in American history, on every level, and is one of the great American films period. It makes US look like a crude comic book. Black Klansman, not to mention Do the Right Thing, was a much better movie than US.

A movie needs more than "diversity" to carry it at the box office. People are not going to movies out of virtue. The movie either delivers the entertainment goods (which could be totally serious, not necessarily comic, of course), or it doesn't. Compare Wrinkle with a really good fantasy movie by a director who knows what he's doing like The Shape of Water, and you instantly see the limitations of DuVernay's talent. One doubts that she'll ever get $100 million to play with again.

The most critically overrated movie I can remember. It's like critical affirmative action and actually insulting to serious black artists in all media to overpraise such junk just to be PC. I never go to Marvel films, so maybe they are all as cheesy as this, for all I know. But this movie has pathetic production values compared to Star Wars A-list movies, for example. But at the heart of the film is simply preposterous nonsense. It's pathetic that some African Americans seem to find the movie somehow uplifting or inspiring. It will be great if the movie teaches black kids that STEM courses might be cool, so they should work hard in school. But what's with the fantasy that there's a magic African country that bears no relationship whatsoever to the real black African world? The late great black cultural critic Stanley Crouch used to talk about how African Americans need to stop being "lost" by orienting themselves strictly to the truth and reality as their only hope for actual advancement for themselves individually and for their race in America. The silly fantasies of Black Panther are a step backward into flattering fantasies of lostness, instead of a serious grappling with things within the black community holding blacks back.

A gorgeous non-linear poem of a movie. Obviously an update of La Dolce Vita, showing how much further into decadence and shallowness the upper classes of Italy (and the globalized world?) have descended in the last fifty years or so. But also a film about the possibility of transcendence of the whole farce of the emptiness of the lives of the rich. The final tracking shot of the gorgeous Tiber River and its bridges, accompanied by profoundly beautiful, soulful music epitomizes the capacity of the human mind to move to a very different plane from that on which the film's hero wastes most, but not all, of his time on earth.

I may be forgetting something, but, to me, Rush is the best film about sports I've ever seen. The race sequences are beautifully, brilliantly enthralling. But the greatness of the film lies in its characterization of the psyches of its rival protagonists, Hunt and Lauda. The whole cast does an excellent job, but Bruhl as Lauda is absolutely superb. And the script gives Bruhl plenty to work with in making Lauda as complex as he does. An Oscar performance if there ever was one. One of the most convincing acting jobs I've ever seen in my life in a big-budget Hollywood film. One of the great Hollywood studio films of all time. Howard certainly deserves an Oscar.

I find it weird that there are no user reviews for this film, which is one of the very best of the year. Incomparably better than Museum Hours, an okay film which gets an 86 Metascore while Arendt gets a mere 67. All aspects of Arendt are superb: script, direction, cinematography, acting, you name it. And, of course, the subject is one of the most fascinating women of all time. What's not to like?

The Social Network is a good movie, not a great one. A great movie, a 10, is The Lives of Others, Tokyo Story, The Leopard--films like that. That said, a key reason The Social Network is so over-praised, and many viewers and critics are so thrilled by it, is because so many viewers and critics of the film, critics especially, are bi-coastal Jews who are thrilled by the film's story about a "meritocratic" Jewish "genius" at Harvard who screws the WASP Porcellian aristos, whose club he could no more join than jump over the moon, out of the profits for their own idea by stealing it. It's the ethnic and class politics that make the film over-rated the way Sophie's Choice, a good but not great film too, also was. David Denby in The New Yorker even calls Zuckerberg a "hero." Of what? Moxie? Chutzpah? By that standard, Madoff was a super-hero. At the same time, the film itself seems almost a critical meditative allegory of the way the battle for money and status in America that Jews have had to wage, by hook or by crook, against the once-dominant, anti-Semitic, and exclusionary WASP upper-class has warped some Jews and undermined the moral values of both the Jewish religion and secular Jewish humanism. In fact, Zuckerberg in the film is the most negative image of a Jew in a mainstream American film I can recall. He's an arrogant, creepy, borderline sociopathic jerk, with no evident ethical principles at all. He happily stabs his Jewish only friend in the back right along with the WASPs. He's a sort of Shylock of software, but much less ambiguous morally and humanly than Shakespeare's great creation. He makes Sammy Glick look like nothing. Sorkin and Rudin seem deeply interested in the cost of the Jewish race for wealth and status in Madoff's America. A timely theme indeed, and one that must be especially pertinent for Hollywood insiders like them. For unethical Jews from Madoff to Zuckerberg, America seems to have been closer to Babylon than Jerusalem, and this is a point well worth making in a film like The Social Network. Zuckerberg is a sort of book-end with Dustin Hoffman's breakthrough role for Jews in The Graduate forty five years ago. That Mike Nichols film cheered, and we all cheered with it, as Ben stole Katherine Ross from the Berkeley WASPy golden boy at the Christian altar itself. It was about time that Jews won victories like that in America with hustle and character (vs. the WASP's frat boy entitled vapidity). But instead of presenting a likable Jewish hero at odds with "plastics," The Social Network gives us a total jerk unredeemed by his clumsy geekiness, a thief who seems to personify the cost in corruption of forty years of endless, relentless striving by Jews on the make like Zuckerberg in Madoff's America.