Year: 2019

Around 9 am this morning Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn posted an analysis piece titled “Audiences Aren’t Getting Dumber, They’re Just Overwhelmed.” No offense to Eric, but I found a comment thread riff by a guy named “Jasper” (a nom de plume inspired by Chinatown‘s “Jasper Lamar Crabb“?) to be slightly more interesting.

“We’re living in oversaturated media times and it will only get worse, because everybody will [eventually] be a filmmaker, a studio and a distributor at the same time. All technology is going into this direction. Moving images will eventually be an ‘extension of man’ that Marshall McLuhan didn’t dare to dream of.

“Entertainment will always matter because life is actually pretty boring: Children are boring, jobs are boring, everything will bore you after a while…even sex. But cinema never gets boring, because it constantly re-invents itself and is open for new content.

“Moving Images are also a technique of creating ‘proof’ and to communicate your experience. For example take a look at “Camino-One feature length selfie” (2019).

“To see films on smartphones is okay if the films were made for smartphones to begin with. There are other films, of course, that were not intended to be seen this way. Perhaps they could carry a warning’ at the beginning or a ‘plan’ how to watch and show them?

“First Reformed should definitely be seen in a dark, big cinema full of people, otherwise it probably doesn’t work as intended.”

HE to Jasper Lamar Crabb: Good movies are about real life with the boring parts removed. Your job may be boring (sorry if that’s the case) but writing never is. Plus I’ve never found young kids to be boring. You know what’s vaguely boring? That short hiking film that you linked to.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s smackdown essay about Barack Obama‘s Best of 2018 roster (“What Barack Obama’s Year-End Movie List Reveals About Him“):

Excerpt #1: “I found it dispiriting — an example of caution masquerading as daring. The critically approved good taste that Obama displays in his list of favorite films is so impeccable that I kept combing through the list in search of a flaw in the diamond, a micro-glimmer of vulgarity or surprise, or just something a little offbeat, a dollop of idiosyncrasy that might tell us a bit more about who Barack Obama is, apart from someone with a platonically perfect record of movie fanship.”

Excerpt #2: “His taste in movies is so good that it’s too good for its own good.”

Excerpt #3: “It’s a bit strange to peruse Obama’s list for a glimpse of what’s inside his heart and mind, only to be confronted by the hive mind of the cinephile-industrial complex. Maybe that’s just who he is, but if you accept the list as Obama’s own, what it reveals about him is that he’s a man who instinctively focus groups his own taste to within an inch of its life.”

Excerpt #4: “Obama entitled his list ‘My favorite movies of 2018,’ but did he choose the movies he loved or did he get with the program? The most telling thing about his list is that there may be no difference.”

Posted on HE, 12.28.18: “Barack Obama‘s list of his favorite 2018 films reflect his sophisticated-cineaste sense of taste (he knows the turf) and eye for quality. It’s a list that Eric Kohn, Alison Willmore, Justin Chang or any scholastically correct, Sight and Sound-approved critic might have assembled.

“And yet I’m sensing that Obama chose these films very carefully, which is to say with a partial eye toward what the cool kidz on Twitter (i.e., the SJWs, the woke fascists) might say. Which is to say his list doesn’t seem entirely, real-deal honest.

“Obama’s list is partly ‘this is who I am’ and partly ‘these are the films that I know are the most critically approved and therefore the safest for me to include.'”

On this, the first day of 2019, a reminder that in choosing the best of the year and especially Best Picture, Academy and guild members are obliged to vote according to four criteria or lines of thought — (a) honoring unfettered quality, (b) voting in solidarity with megaplex ticket-buyers, (c) serving or following the industry’s woke political agenda, or (d) voting in order to tell the politically correct, beaver-hat-wearing lefty commissars to shove it for the sheer pleasure of saying that.

One, Academy and guild members can vote for the best or boldest or most affecting artistic achievement, which in today’s context would be Roma — let’s be honest. Or Cold War, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Favourite, Vice or Green Book. Or, if you’re into the slavish Wong Kar Wai tribute aesthetic, If Beale Street Could Talk.

Two, they can vote for popcorn-with-extra-butter megaplex movies, or films that have simply connected with the peon class (which Hollywood Elsewhere understands and feels a certain bond with) — A Star Is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book and BlacKkKlansman (partly a serious drama about America’s racial past but primarily a popcorn movie about a police caper).

Three, they can vote for films that embody or reflect upon Hollywood’s political-social merit badge mentality, and which also reflect favorably on the voters’ own socially progressive convictions. The recipients of these films would be Black Panther (which is also the only film in contention that qualifies as a Hollywood historical benchmark breakout flick, and is also a worldwide hit), If Beale Street Could Talk and BlacKkKlansman.

And four, they can rally behind Green Book as a protest vote against the lefty woke thought-police scolds who, outside of the entirely necessary and long-time-coming movement to push back against sexual predators as well as discrimination in all its forms, are trying to muscle everyone and push them around and tell them how to think and talk and in so doing are generally ushering in a climate of politically correct terror that is beginning to rival the ’50s Commie-witch-hunt days and has already summoned parallels to the French terror of the late 1700s,…the idea is to take the “woke” criticism of Green Book and turn the tables by telling those Stalinist goose-stepping SJW assholes to sorta kinda GO FUCK THEMSELVES. In a polite, jovial, fraternal way, of course.