Jeffrey Wells It’s obviously tragic when a person has slipped into such a dark and seemingly irredeemable place that he/she feels that suicide is the only option. Alas, that’s an old-hat approach. The 21st Century has introduced a new concept — “I’ll be taking several innocent people with me as I leave this mortal coil” — that turns tragedy into something evil.
Friendo:
I was going to avoid the nausea and the spiritual depletion of sitting through the nearly three-hour John Wick: Chapter 4. I can sense what’s waiting for me, and I hate the mere idea of submitting to this shite. I “know” (i.e., am strongly suspecting) that my reaction will more or less align with David Poland’s 3.24 review.
But too many fools and knaves are kowtowing, and so I’ve accepted the unfortunate burden of having to sit through the damn thing (allegedly a Gray Man-ish pummeling) sometime this afternoon. Talk about a ghastly prospect…
Manhattan was affordable back then, not just for moderate income types but hand-to-mouthers. It was partially affordable in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Things started to get tough in the ‘90s, and rents have become more and more ridiculous over the last 20-plus years. Now when you read about the rents that 20somethings are paying, you can’t help but think “they’re kidding, right?” I’ll never live there again. Too many one-percenters, not enough soul.
Imagine if someone was dumb and impolitic enough to launch a site that highlights and occasionally even celebrates the writing (books and short stories but especially screenplays) by members of a certain ethnic group that is arguably (a) the most actively despised online and (b) in some instances and sectors is constantly discriminated against across the board — straight white older males. Imagine if someone was stupid enough to do this.
If you calculate that the glory days of the ‘70s actually began with Bonnie and Clyde (fall of ‘67) and ended with Star Wars (May ‘77), it followed that the fallow, high-concept period of the early to mid ‘80s which included the tits & zits films (and which produced one unchallengeable classic — Risky Business) and the Simpson-Bruckheimer formula films (Flashdance, Top Gun), you can understand and sympathize with the July ‘86 cover-story freak-out by New York critic David Denby.
The indie-driven ‘90s provided what felt like an exciting reprieve, and there were certainly many distinguished films that came out in the early aughts before the superhero death virus that began to permeate in the early 2010s. This led to Denby’s “Do Movies Have A Future?”, which was published in 2012. But it wasn’t quite as bad as all that…okay, maybe it was.
The later Obama years nonetheless allowed for cinematic highlights (The Wolf of Wall Street, A Separation, 12 Years A Slave, Zero Dark Thirty, The Social Network, Call Me By Your Name, Moneyball, Son of Saul), but then the scolding, pearl-clutching wokesters muscled their way into the remaining nooks and crannies of Hollywood consciousness in 2017-18, and a huge wave of fear, intimidation and conservatism flooded in, and right now many of us are still gasping for breath.
