HE to Schrader: This was presumably triggered by that empty, dimension-less, Ruairí Robinson-produced duke-out video between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise…right?
AI robotic-digital diversion is a wide-open, free-flowing cesspool**, and so the Colisseum cheap-seat serfs will always have chuckles galore on their phone screens.
As long as there are well-educated, enterprising filmmakers with hungry hearts, aggressively curious minds and resonating, real-deal perceptions (capable of recognizing the eternal cosmic goods, panoramic window-pane soul vistas, the loneliness of the long-distance runner…all that endlessly engaging stuff) there will be stories and journeys that will intrigue and nourish within the usual 5% to 10% of the viewing public…the percentage that has always found the common gruel of mass entertainment boring, narcotizing, soul-numbing.
I for one live for the kinds of books, films, movies and plays that guys like Robinson will never be able to create. First and foremost because they don’t care to. They’re interested in (shocker!) delighting the Shallow Hal majority, just like the Roman Colisseum managers were a couple of thousand years ago.
All hail the proscenium-arch realms of Paul Schrader, Chloe Zhao, Sean Baker, Jonah Hill, Pawel Pawlikowski, pre-Barbie and definitely pre-Narnia Greta Gerwig, Luca Guadagnino, pre-Foxcatcher Bennett Miller, Josh Sadie, Timothee Chalamet, Alejandro G. Inarritu, pre-Detroit Kathryn Bigelow, pre-Odyssey Chris Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Celine Sciamma, Joachim Trier and…aww, hell, an entire parade of forthcoming filmmakers who will not only be capable of pissing off people like me but are probably, impishly eager to do so. Life is full of pain, irritation, and hair-trigger emotions that you need to quickly suppress.
