Day: October 23, 2021

Two days ago Vladmir Putin sized up U.S. wokesterim and found it not just wanting but reminiscent of Bolshevism. He basically said that the U.S. is undergoing cultural decline in the name of social justice. Putin is no dummy. Ruthless, okay, but he knows how the world works.

Consider this portion of a speech he gave during the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi. The excerpt was posted by Rebel News and forwarded by Jordan Ruimy:

Putin: “We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business. We are keeping out of this.”

“Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, ‘reverse discrimination’ against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender…they believe that all of these are [milestones] on the path towards social renewal.

“Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this, [but] we are keeping out of this. But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society — it would be more correct to put it this way — has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.”

“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead.”

“The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all,” Putin continued as he highlighted the similarities between woke progressives to the Soviet revolutionaries who took over Russia.”=

“It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones — all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today.

“By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”

“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now,” he said. “Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past.”

“The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past — such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward,” he said.

“The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

Read more

For your reading pleasure and Oscar-race upkeep, the bend-over-backwards contemplations and industry strategies of Variety’s Clayton Davis:

Peter Bogdanovich‘s The Last Picture Show opened a half-century ago plus a day — 10.22.71. Bogdanovich was 32 when it opened, and in the weeks that immediately followed he became the hottest director on the planet. Or certainly one of them. He owned everything, ruled the realm…he planted his feet, looked people in the eye and told the truth.

Posted on 5.31.20: After his three-year, three-picture hot streak (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon), Peter Bogdanovich injured himself and his career in three significant ways.

One, the smug and arrogant thing, which seemed to intensify after Peter and Cybill Shepherd were the focus of a 5.13.74 People cover story. Two, Bogdanovich seemed to give up on the idea of substantive, reality-driven subjects after The Last Picture Show (post-’71 he never delivered another poignant scene that touched bottom and emotionally penetrated like “Sam the Lion at the swimming hole”). Three, he concurrently began to over-invest in the mythology of nostalgia and old-time Hollywood — the result was a one-two-three punch (Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, Nickelodeon) that totally took the wind out of his sails.

Saint Jack, They All Laughed and Mask (a director-for-hire gig) restored some of the lustre, but the magic dust had evaporated.

If Bogdanovich had decided to switch horses right after Paper Moon and directed a couple of films that delivered reality currents (some kind of divorce drama or a paranoid political thriller or maybe a Rainman-type family thing) that were tethered not to the ’30s but the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s, things might have turned out differently.

Plus for all his acumen as a director-writer and film historian, Bogdanovich’s social-political instincts were not brilliant.

…and walking out of a film can be beautiful. For there is nothing like the feeling of wonderful, ecstatic liberation when you do this. Fuckthatmovie fuckthatmovie fuckthatmovie…freedom!

“For years I’ve been getting roasted in this space for my occasional walkouts. ‘How dare you?,’ ‘You call yourself a critic?,’ ‘You have to see the whole thing!,’ etc. But everyone does it from time to time, and there’s nothing dicey about saying ‘I saw this much of a given film and then I bailed, but here’s what I thought about the portion that I saw.’ In my own small way perhaps I’ve helped to make the world a bit safer for those who wish to write this.” — posted on 5.22.14.

I didn’t just walk out of Roger Kumble‘s The Sweetest Thing — I did so at the six-minute mark. I could see in a flash it was a reprehensible confection.

Hollywoodandfine‘s Marshall Fine has written the following: “I seldom walk out on movies, [but] I ankled after a half-hour of The Secret of Kells. It looked like a ’70s throwback, with limited animation, ersatz psychedelia and an earnest story about early Christians furthering the written tradition. They do it in the face of invading heathen Viking hordes and with the assistance of the spirits of nature and the creatures of the forest (or so I’m guessing, based on what I saw).

“What I saw was so lifeless and flat that I fled into the winter afternoon, invoking the life-is-too-short-for-this-shit clause in my contract. It’s something I really ought to do more often.”

Piss-sprayer to HE: “Your inability/refusal to sit through an entire film at a film festival is why I think your term “l’movie Catholic’ is so appropriate. Like any Catholic, your ‘religion’ is only sacred when it suits you.”

HE to piss-sprayer: I honestly don’t think that’s it. I honestly feel that life is too short and precious to sit through shit.

Piss spray cousin: “If you want to approach movies with a true religious fervor, the absolute baseline for any level of devotion to movies is realizing it’s not just you and your precious time, and the movie you’re seeing deserves consideration from the first to last frame, not just the sections you deem worthy of your attention. And when you don’t give a movie that consideration, then your opinion on it is no better than the guy in the front row who was tweeting during the middle of it.”

Krazyeyes: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with walking out of a crappy movie that is severely not working for you at a film festival. There’s just too many other good things you could be doing with your time. I’m fine with Jeff in this regard. He’s always struck me as a straight-shooter.”

Posted on 9.4.08: I just stumbled out of a screening of Rian Johnson‘s The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 12.19), a sumptuous but impossibly silly and logic-free jape in the vein of…frankly, the movie it most reminded me of was the 1967 Casino Royale, which still reigns as one of the emptiest wank-off movies of the mid to late ’60s.

It’s an elaborate, European-set con-artist movie that imparts none of the fun or the thrill of the game. I didn’t know what was going on half the time, and I stopped caring around the 45-minute mark. Rachel Weisz, as a rich mark named Penelope, is lovely and delightful to hang with — I’ll give her (and the movie) that. But Adrien Brody, as the conscience-wracked half of The Brothers Bloom (sick of being a con man, wants a real life, etc.), is glum and doleful and enervated, and infuriating for that.

Brody’s character’s last name is Bloom, as is his brother Stephen, who’s played by Mark Ruffalo…and yet Brody is repeatedly addressed as “Bloom” and Ruffalo is called “Stephen.” I fell in hate with the movie over this point alone.

I hated the relentlessly sullen poseur crap delivered by Rinko Kikuchi, who plays an appendage named “Bang Bang.” I wanted to see her knifed or shot or pushed into the ocean. All I could think when I watched Robbie Coltrane, who plays “the curator,” was “my God, the man has to lose some weight!” He’s really gone past the tipping point in terms of excess tonnage.

I lasted a little less than an hour, and I was reeling from the preciousness, the overdone continental cutesiness, the feeling of being simultaneously mauled, tickled, fucked with and drugged by the impossibly faux-Wes Anderson style of the damn thing.

Rian obviously wants to be Wes, but this movie makes The Life Aquatic look like Yasujiro Ozu‘s Floating Weeds.

Some will say that The Brothers Bloom is lush and stylistically mesmerizing and beautiful to bathe in, in the empty sense of that term. But this is the kind of movie that appeals to 30-something Entertainment Weekly or New York magazine feature writers who have no taste to speak of.

It’s ravishingly composed and oh-so-poised with a sense of old-world European train-car romance (as it once existed 50 or 60 years ago) , and yet so stuck on its cleverness that I wanted to reach out and strangle the movie — pull it right off the screen, leap on top of it like a 350-pound wrestler and choke the life out of the damn thing.

I counted at least 22 walkouts before I finally gave up. When I left two volunteers said to me, “Is it over? There are so many people leaving!” We all had a good laugh.