Saturday 28 August 2010

Big
(1988)

RATING:100%
FORMAT:DVD

WEBSITE: Big...


Clever and funny be-careful-what-you-wish-for comedy that is either about grown men retaining their boyish immaturity or a boy wishing he were older who finally gets his wish. Its success all depends whether you see it feministically or as a wishful-thinking desire for adulthood without experience.

Tom HANKS is excellent as the kid in an adult male body. The female authors of this movie are clearly enjoying parodying the child in the men they know so well - as well as the child remaining in us all until the day we die. The real cleverness here lies also in the expression of a female longing for men to be more emotionally open and ethically honest - like children.

The plot is implausible, but that only matters if you are suffering a severe sense of humor failure. Like the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday, the sexual implications of having reached physical maturity without passing through puberty are exploited without descending to the level of grossness so common in contemporary cinema. The fundamental irony here is that the central character is, in many ways, more grownup than the adults surrounding him are.

One of the funniest films ever made.


Copyright © 2010 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Sunday 22 August 2010

300
(2007)



WEBSITE: 300...

Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.

Everything you would expect from Caucasian cinema: Homophobia, Racism & self-delusion

The West has still never forgiven Xerxes’ invasion of Classical Greece.

Oddly homoerotic and moronically-bombastic tale of masculinity & mayhem told in a highly-stylized manner - the style being far more important than the content. As a race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth it serves to underline White culture’s need of wars to undergird its economies and keep its populations under fascistic control by presenting other ethnicities in purely stereotypical terms: As existential threats to be shielded against.

Freedom of thought, action and speech are inherently-laden with the responsibility of wielding these for good, while propaganda like this enables Whites to evade the responsibility of being civilized, in favor of self-indulgence and self-pity that the losing of the War on Terror creates. The post-traumatic stress disorder of Whites still pointlessly-grieving over 9/11 induces them to ahistorically posit Whites as democrats and everyone else as non-democratic threats to inherently-civilized White values.

This War-on-Terror analogue (Persians standing-in for militant Muslims) tacitly admits wars against ideas are unwinnable, yet we are presented with a heroically-doomed struggle wherein Whites indulge their romantic fantasies of racial superiority and sexual normalcy. (This was also true of the previous American film of the same battle, albeit a Cold War analogue.)

Inevitably, given the movie’s provenance, the darker-skinned characters are uncivilized while the lighter Greeks - strangely rendered as a single country rather than a collection of warring city states - are the fons et origo of modern Western culture despite their warlike ways - effectively traducing the Achaemenid Empire by portraying the hundred nations of the Persians as uncivilized monsters. Like Gladiator claiming that ancient Rome was the light.

As with Caucasian representations of The Christ, this movie is part of concerted effort on the part of Whites to Nordify Ancient Greece - as if it literally were located in Northern Europe - so that actual Greek actors do not have to be employed to play actual Greeks. All the while, the Caucasian Persians are portrayed by Black actors, as part of an undifferentiated mass of genetically-inferior humanity - monsters, troglodytes, degenerates & demons for the purposes of entertainment; rendering this movie a textbook example of the psychological despair inherent in hate speech as well as of the White inferiority complex. Even though this is partly-inevitable, given that the story is derived solely from the fact that most sources from the period are of Greek origin, it is shoddy research not to include other sources.

What this film fails to address is the inherent injustice of claiming to be more concerned for justice than others – without evidence. And thus to be the sole purveyors of that justice and to have no reason to listen to others’ pleas for objective justice. Moreover, Sparta is a culture-less culture by this telling, since it is not clear what is being defended and why it should be necessary to brutalize Spartan children to harden them to combat.

One senses, throughout, the immature needs of a teenage Western boy who wants to become a man by cheating and posing in battle dress to impress the girls he always feels unworthy of. The Spartans, of course, are more manly here (ie, more homophobic) because they do not canoodle with young boys - like the Athenians do. Ahistorical machismo that, like all machismo, is little more than the worship of Death - not the worship of justice, reason or women.

A fuller analysis of the necessarily-difficult compromise between living in peace and planning for war would have made for a far more compelling drama. Moreover, the would-be poetry of the dialog requires the kind of screenwriter that this film sorely lacks. Still, the cast is first-rate and, to that extent, they paper over the wide cracks in the dramaturgy. Unlike First Blood, say, we really do not care why the carnage takes place - only that it does.

The well-known homosexuality of Greek culture is never mentioned, in the same way that mainstream Ancient Greek studies have historically-omitted references to the widespread practice of homosexuality; that is, until K J Dover’s 1978 book Greek Homosexuality. This film presents Spartans as not at all like pederasty of the Athenians or the effeminate and genetically-inferior Persians (who can only win by dint of sheer number, not by any inherent bravery or skill) in order to appear to be faithful to the Spartans’ martial code. Unusually for a film from a sexist culture, it emphasizes the key role played by women in supporting this male code of heroic honor - while projecting and displacing White misogyny onto Persians. All this to idealize modern-day Caucasian codes of mindless violence, White supremacy and homophobia.

By evading central issues, (including the contradiction of the democratic Greeks being slave-owners & their predilection for murdering the deformed at birth) this movie compromises what could have been a useful lesson and analogue from history by being complicated by 21st-century Western sexual standards and the desire to make what happened fit the current paradigm of White supremacy. It resolutely fails the test that if you ignore historical facts, you then need to replace them with something more interesting. Here, however, the glory that was once Greece is exploited to reinforce negative-but-core Western values through propaganda rather than constructively-challenging them in interesting and dramatically-arresting ways. Herein lies a useful example of the cultural poverty that is White culture; taking from dead cultures only that which makes Whites look superior; evading everything that does not.

Thursday 19 August 2010

Social Mobility Myths
(2010)

40%




The basic argument here is that lower-class people are less intelligent than the middle-class and, so, less motivated to succeed; hence, their relative failure. However, this argument is based purely on IQ tests that also - apparently - prove that Blacks are less intelligent than Whites.

Despite the author’s championing of motivation as being very important to one’s life chances, he does not factor this into the results of IQ tests, purely in order to make it appear that success in life is entirely genetic. Somehow he believes that motivation - or lack of thereof - has no effect on IQ test scores and that such scores prove the correlation that the higher the social class one is born into the higher the IQ. This is like saying that Blacks score less than Whites in IQ tests because they are Black and that White supremacism – specifically designed to be a demotivator - has nothing to do with it. Or that lie detector tests reveal truth no matter the mental state of the person questioned.

This pseudo-science desperately tries to turn a soft science like sociology into a hard one. This acultural and acontextual drivel is just the sort of stuff designed to create social policy that fossilises culture to such an extent that help for the poor to succeed is never given - since the poor can do nothing about their allegedly-inherited birth circumstances. It is a brazen attempt by the middle-class to retain the unearned cultural privileges that centuries of social snobbery have given them.

The problem with any attempt to divorce statistics from human nature is that sociology then loses sight of the very humanity it tries to describe and explain. It is not statistics that can be made to tell lies, it is statisticians who can lie.


Copyright © 2010 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Monday 16 August 2010

RESIDENT EVIL:
Degeneration
(2008)

60%

WEBSITE: RESIDENT EVIL - Degeneration...


Like "watching" a radio play, this suffers from the dialogue being more necessary than usual and much more so than the visuals because subtlety of facial expression is so far not possible with current (2008) CGI technology. This makes facial close-ups rather pointless and so we have no recourse but to focus on the zombie horror plot regarding the source of the causative infection: Terrorism or deliberate US government biological-weapons' policy - or both. Inevitably, the technological lack also means that characterization is limited and the story and plotting somewhat trite - despite the implied-yet-unexplored incest theme.

Nevertheless, this is handsomely mounted and good violent fun - even for those uninterested in the computer games' origins of the work. Despite the marionettes-without-strings visual appearance, the Japanese have used their anime expertise to fashion an enjoyably lightweight entertainment.


Copyright © 2010 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

REPUBLICAN GOMORRAH:
Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party
(2010)

60%

WEBSITE: REPUBLICAN GOMORRAH - Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party...

Caucasian Inconsistency

Interesting, if repetitive, book on the recent (2008) collapse of the US Republican party at the ballot box; suggesting it has been hijacked by Christian fundamentalists. Such people swap reality for self-righteous ideology and act accordingly. This book points out that this is primarily because of the abusive childhood's that many suffered, in which suffering was equated with purification. Regular beatings helped instil the view that doing the same to others was right and necessary; explaining why they continue to do it to their children. It also explains why they preach and practice political violence from murdering abortionists to invading Iraq and why regular sexual scandals erupt into public view when such people are discovered purchasing the services of the very people they condemn: Eg, prostitutes, pornographers & homosexuals.

The failure of the Right to be consistent helps explain its losses at the polls as well as its inherent sadomasochism. The great sadness revealed by this book is that so many people like this - seeking the fulfillment of unfulfilled childhood longings - so permeate public life in the West.

Indeed, since these groups are almost exclusively White' their White supremacism is as self-evident as the desire of their individual members to elevate their personal traumas into the political sphere. This is particularly true sexually, where the tendency of Christians to try and repress their sexuality is matched by their equal and opposite tendency to become inevitably fixated on the very thing they claim as the source of all evil. All the while hiding behind protestations of defending family values.


Copyright © 2010 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

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Science:



No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.



Jacob Bronowski… (1908 - 74), British scientist, author. Encounter (London, July 1971).


Sleep of Reason:



The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.



Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes… (1746-1828), Spanish painter. Caption to Caprichos, number 43, a series of eighty etchings completed in 1798, satirical and grotesque in form.


Humans & Aliens:



I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.



Terence… (circa 190-159 BC), Roman dramatist. Chremes, in The Self-Tormentor [Heauton Timorumenos], act 1, scene 1.


Führerprinzip:



One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves… There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus - in other words, the party - which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress. In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.