Monday 31 January 2011

Looking for Richard
(1996)

RATING: 80%



Al PACINO tries to bring William Shakespeare's plays to the masses and inevitably fails. As one would expect, his take on Richard 3 is exceptionally good and successfully breathes life into a character who can so easily degenerate into a third-rate Laurence Olivier impersonation.

However, the answer to the question of why so few love Shakespeare with the passion shown here, by an excellent cast, is never given nor explored. This is a far too cliquey world where performance is more important than meaning so, inevitably, Shakespeare touches few ordinary people. The actors are more concerned to show their actorial prowess than to communicate Shakespeare's meaning; meaning which they only half-grasp themselves.

On hand are British actors to show the Yanks how it should be done. Yet their over-reverence for the text - as against communicating meaning - also inhibits Shakespeare's accessibility; that and their quintessential snobbery.

One has to wonder what has happened in 400 years to make such a once-popular playwright into a niche entertainer: When he was alive, his genius did not preclude him from being enjoyed by the then ryot, but it does today.

Shakespeare's ghost makes a brief appearance shaking his head at the entire proceedings – an admission on the part of the director (PACINO) that he may not fully comprehend the great writer's nuance and subtlety.


Copyright © 2011 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 30 January 2011

Blood Diamond
(2006)

RATING: 80%

white-Man’s Graveyard

Rather simplistic Western account of the 1999 Civil War in Sierra Leone hampered by a quintessentially-White and so inevitably-blinkered perspective on African events. It presents Whites as rapacious colonial exploiters unable to form empathic relations with self and others while simultaneously claiming not all Whites are like that: Blacks are family-oriented while Whites are money fixated. Trying to have it both ways like this makes for guilt-ridden drama and those reporting on Africa's problems are shown as no better than any other exploitive mercantilist: A reality the film never fully grasps - despite trying hard to.

The excessive violence also attests to the ulterior motive for making such a movie - the Western desire for Bread and Circuses spectacle as entertainment. As Africa has for many centuries been the White man's playground, it remains so in the minds of Hollywood moguls intent on making characterless movies like this.

Yet, despite everything - politically - this films ends up packing a powerful emotional punch, and so saves itself from being just another formulaic action movie. And the point about diamond smuggling being for the benefit of Western Whites and their obsession with betokening their marriages with diamond rings is well made, as is the implication that Africa is the White man's graveyard from which their attempt to extricate themselves, with their stolen wealth intact, only makes it worse for everyone.

The movie does feature a surprisingly-good performance from the usually lackluster Leonardo DiCAPRIO - a brave choice for him since he plays someone unsympathetic. Unsurprisingly, the photography and the script favor him more than any of the Black characters, even though there is no sexual chemistry between his character and his love interest. The ever-reliable Djimon HOUNSOU offers self-assured introspection that speaks volumes for the suffering his character experiences without the need for Method mannerisms.

Somewhat better than the The Wild Geese, but Hotel Rwanda and The Defiant Ones are much better movies.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Knight & Day
(2010)

RATING: 40%

Brazenly-amusing attempt to present a parody of the Jason Bourne and 007 movies that is a little ahead of its time because the public has yet to tire of such films. Because of this, the film has little to actually parody and so ends up looking more like what it attempts to parody than a parody, since it lacks any genuine retrospective insight, a la Blazing Saddles or Austin Powers.

The other major problem with this movie is that it lacks any real sense of comedy or timing - and the chemistry between the two leads is as weak as their scripted characterization. The sort of fun that the best of Jackie Chan's output contains is seriously lacking here - and it shows. Films like this are starting to look like Hollywood making the kind of movies that non-Americans would make if they were trying to make a Hollywood-style movie: Hollywood trying to outdo itself by mimicking itself!

There are no themes to speak of and the plot lacks credibility and this film is only saved from complete perfidy by its reasonable sense of fun.


Romeo Must Die
(2000)

RATING: 60%

Entertaining-enough movie that does not make the best use of Jet LI's charm and martial arts' skills. His love interest, Aaliyah is beautiful enough to distract the sternest fighter from taking his revenge against those who killed his brother, but the chemistry between the pair is never given a chance by the script to go beyond the superficial.

In keeping with the endemic White supremacism of Hollywood, there is no sex scene between the two that one would normally expect - as a writers' cheating way of dramatically cementing their relationship - that could conceivably have engaged our empathy and fleshed-out the characters somewhat more than here. This rather contradicts the reference to Romeo and Juliet in the title of the movie; rendering it a redundant label without a dramatic referent, since the story of "star-crossed lovers" is never present - as if the political status quo that such a story critiques were the best form of social organization. (American Whites have an odd complex about sexual intercourse between people from different parts of the world despite the fact that the US comprises precisely such people - almost as if it is believed that miscegenation would mark the beginning of the end of Western culture. In a democracy, the fear is that the dark-skinned would soon outnumber the light and assume greater political power over Whites.)

The fights, however, are imaginatively staged but over-edited, in the Western manner - as if LI's considerable martial skills need help from a tame editor. The more fluent style of Chinese action movies allows the audience to fully appreciate the physical abilities of the performer; while forcing us to accept that it is actually them doing these death-defying stunts. Like the money shot in hard-core pornography, this is a very important consideration in fight movies that this film partially elides - to its own disbenefit.

The cultural preoccupation with family is well presented and fully justifies Jet LI being parodied in The Expendables as doing what he does for his family. The filmmakers here have enough respect for this convention of Chinese movies to allow LI to perform these scenes in Chinese; making them that much more emotionally effective. Yet this is no Fist of Legend and, in an American context, probably never could be.

Thursday 27 January 2011

Salt
(2010)

RATING: 60%

No Pepper

Cheerless rip-off of the Bourne franchise with a female in the lead role that also betrays the influence of the Manchurian Candidate and No Way Out.

It is fun and the action is frenetic, frantic and fast to conceal the lack of any real content. It is insistently-paced and the desperate Cold War-era plotting; revealing the dearth of imagination among far too many contemporary screenwriters - as if there were not enough newspaper stories that can be profitably exploited for dramatic purposes. There are far too many, in fact, just not enough good dramatists who know how to create convincing stories, plots and characters.

Something could surely have been made more of a classic 007-style plot that strangely re-imagines the assassination of JFK as a Soviet plot. The themes that could have made this more compelling are simply lacking.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Spaceballs
(1987)

RATING:40%
FORMAT:DVD

Flat-Footed Parody

Intermittently-funny spoof of Star Wars (Planet of the Apes & Alien) which is just an excuse for a succession of weak gags betraying no real love for what is being parodied.

The reason Mel BROOKS’ earlier films Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were as good as they were was because they were informed by a deep-seated affection for what they were parodying. Here, instead, we get a would-be vicious satire on the profitability obsessions of Hollywood producers not only intent on making movies like the ones parodied here, but making money from the merchandising most big budget films need to engage in to defray their enormous production costs. However, the presence in the movie itself of said merchandise merely serves as a repeated gag that reveals a once-great comic imagination sadly run out of steam. References to other works are not, in themselves, funny and can never be the sole basis for parody.

This should have been the Jews in Space promised at the end of History of the World Part 1, but it never comes anywhere near the deft cleverness of Galaxy Quest - which at least had believable characters. Fortunately, SPACEBALLS II: The Search for More Money was never made.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

Partir
(2009)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD

[Leaving]

Disturbing look at middle-class ennui and its often tragic circumstances. Here, the wife of an unmanly bourgeois goes off with the handyman not so much to find herself as a woman as to get away from her dull married existence. That she finds love for the first time in her life there can be no doubt, but her reckless middle-aged pursuit of it calls her sanity into question at the same time as you admire her for the consistency of that pursuit.

This torrid melodrama features that force of nature Kristin Scott THOMAS who makes the whole thing compelling and worthwhile. The male characters are a bit thin and archetypal but this is a film from a woman's perspective and so this problem can be somewhat overlooked.

What really makes this film scary is that the White bourgeoisie are so emotionally-repressed in their desire to seem more worthwhile as humans than the poor that they can effectively forget to grow up, so rabid is the social snobbery that it eventually becomes a substitute for maturity. This desire on the wife's part for a bit of rough is really a desire for genuine human contact denied her by her middle-class husband and by her own hang-ups. This is particularly telling in the sex scenes where one feels the wife is experiencing her body fully for the first time in her life. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the bourgeois are so violent in their desire to judge others by birth circumstances since they then do not have to judge or see themselves as they really are - missing a vital human part. The anger, childishness and frustration here makes you wonder if the affluent could ever be trusted as childminders if you ever had them as neighbors.

This is a marriage from which the wife cannot escape because the husband wants an emotionally empty show-business relationship to impress his friends. His desperate attempts to imprison his wife prove he has no love for her and so we are left wondering what the true basis for the relationship was to begin with. This explains the high rates of divorce and adultery in the West but offers no solution to it.

Like Diary of a Mad Housewife, this movie offers little hope of escape from the gilded cage that is Western culture - except, as here, crime. That we all need one moment of amour fou in our lives to help us to grow up is well made here and helps account for our enjoyment of this drama.


Tuesday 25 January 2011

No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
(2008)

RATING: 80%

Caucasian World-View

Engaging drama that uses well worn detective conceits to both parody detective fiction and to breathe some new life into it, by placing the action in (for wet-weather Brits, at least) an exotic location and having female detectives. This last fact is fully exploited in the stories since the proprietrix uses her intuition and empathy to get to the bottom of most cases rather than relying only on a hard-headed reliance on facts - a la the more masculine Sherlock Holmes.

An independent woman not needing to rely on men is the basic theme here. The actresses convey their roles well and, as the series progresses, we come to know them and to realize that they are usually right - even when they are stretching things too far, ethically.

After the first few episodes, the too prefect diction in which Tswanas appear to speak English and the Runyonesque lack of contractions begins to grate on ones nerves - despite their comic effect - and some leavening of foreign accents might have helped here.

The other problem with the series is that because it is a male creation, the condescending author's Western male view of women is always lurking under the surface. This leads to a greater focus on cases that reflect so called women's issues; there being little serious crime here. A related issue is one of a warm, vibrant culture; lending itself to being essentially a foreigner's investigation of a quintessentially-foreign (to the author, anyway) culture - favorably compared to the crime-ridden West. This is not so much about Botswana but more about a White man's fascination for it - albeit written with some wit and not a little insight.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Illusionniste
(2010)

RATING:100%
FORMAT:DVD

[Illusionist]

Cleverly-assembled homage both to Jacques Tati, in particular, and daughters, in general. The father here adopts many of the physical mannerisms of Tati while the young girl is animated in a far more fluid and graceful manner than any of the other characters. This is an oblique look at life that veers between realism and poetry as if to prove Forster's dictum: Only Connect!

The aching nostalgia of a past about to end, the decline of the music hall in Britain circa 1959, is carefully-balanced with the acceptance of this fact in order to successfully-avoid sentimentality. When the girl realizes that the eponymous illusionist is not capable of real magic she soon grows up into a pubescent young woman; engaging in a romance with a Sean Connery lookalike on the street of Edinburgh. Simultaneously, the father-figure realizes that he is no longer the most important male in her life: Both grow and mature.

There is nothing to dislike here and the movie wrings a genuine, unforced tear from the eye with simple effects and appropriately-slow pacing. Like Toy Story 3, this film concerns itself with true human relationships, not simply interactions – with pointed and deft characterization.

Police Squad!
(1982)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD

Stupidly Funny

Part of the pleasure of watching this marvelous US tv comedy show is that there is no laughter track: Those with a sense-of-humor know where to laugh.

The other great pleasure springs from seeing all of those crappy clichés you quickly got bored with then a child - from US tv cop shows of the 50s, 60s & 70s - being mercilessly lampooned.

The visual subtlety of the show explains why it only lasted six episodes: You have to devote your full attention since the gags come thick and fast: Blink and you will miss them.

It is all rubbish really, and you will certainly groan at the awful puns, but you cannot help laughing.


Copyright © 2011 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 24 January 2011

KRZYSTOF PENDERECKI:
Utrenja
(2009)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:CD

Indicative of the intellectual solipsism and emotional narcissism of 20th-century classical music. A pack of rats is slowly tortured to death while, off in the distance, a dying cow moans. Good avant-garde music for a Stanley Kubrick movie but hard to listen to otherwise.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Five Minutes of Heaven
(2009)

RATING: 80%

Truth & Reconciliation

Interesting film about the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland centering on the affects of a single traumatic event in the past of the two central characters.

Their guilt is exacerbated by the perverse desire of Christians to blame a living scapegoat rather than face the grief in a grown-up way. The impossibility of Truth & Reconciliation and the general popularity of revenge is, perhaps, the most painful path for anyone to follow but there is no other path that leads to anywhere of any real value; the future being impossible to live in when one cannot bear one's past.

Essentially a two-hander between the superb performers Liam NEESON and James NESBITT, this is a clever satire on the pathology of victimhood - on both sides - and the struggle to escape it that is the only true salvation possible. The comedic centrality of the narrative helps make a very difficult subject bearable to watch. Indeed, it gives the drama depth and resonance along with the satire of the media's need to present audiences with emotional immaturity rather than grownupness: Like dissecting a frog without anesthetic to understand how it lives. Redemption was never so troubling to watch.

Masculinity here is defined as a reductive and self-destructive need for back-slapping from males who believe violence is the only answer in politics. And amidst all the inevitable self-pity there is a sense that a life has to mean something else what is it all for? Senseless killing here not only destroyed the lives of their victims but their own lives. But the reasons for this violence in this movie are taken for granted when they should be more fully explained. This is an outsiders' view of the need to put the past into the past and so does not explore its own issues as fully as it might since the message of the film somewhat conflicts with the reality on the ground in Northern Ireland.


Copyright © 2011 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 23 January 2011

Once Upon a Time in China
(1991)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD

British Empire was a Racket

A fine showcase for Jet LI’s impressive martial skills but rather a feeble, elliptical and impressionistic drama that fails to engage the emotions as it should because of weak characterization. The implicit romance, especially, never really goes anywhere much and the rather broad and unsophisticated humor is not successfully integrated into the drama as a whole.

What is far more expressive is the argument against the foreign colonialism of China in the nineteenth-century by both England and the United States. The Mafia-rackets’ mentality of such colonists is usefully compared with the local Triad criminal gangs whose goals and aims are identical with that of the foreigners: Wealth creation without too much effort. This extends to the cultural colonialism of Chinese people speaking English and wearing Western-style clothes, along with the resultant fear that not only are ones physical resources being stolen but ones very culture.

Not as good as Jing wu ying xiong (Fist of Legend).


Good Father
(1986)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD



Uneven and archetypally characterized, yet ultimately rewarding look at vicarious revenge through an acquaintance’s custody battle over their child. Including a standout performance from Anthony HOPKINS, in a highly-realistic depiction of a man who cannot love himself so cannot love anyone else.

This movie pulls no punches and we soon begin to wonder who, if anyone, to root for in a contest that children can never win.

In the end, this film is about parenting and being a complete person before marriage, because seeking completion as a person after marriage can never work. Unlike Kramer vs. Kramer, this is the real world of lived experience that anyone in similar circumstances can easily relate to.


Copyright © 2011 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.

SULTANS OF SWING:
The Very Best of Dire Straits
(2004)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:CD

Technically-proficient but emotionally-sterile music that rarely touches the affections. The kind of popular-style music for people who do not like popular-style music: Faux popular in every sense.

Many of the tracks (not really songs) are over-produced to perfection, with any and all human warmth squeezed from them - if any passion ever existed there to begin with.

Like White-men’s blues, this music lacks direction or purpose and comes not from lived experience so much as from a desire to ape, and yet supersede, their musical betters.

Like The Rolling Stones (a Blues tribute band), Dire Straits is a tribute band that represses its own instincts and praises those of better men instead - through music that is inevitably little more than form-over-content. Appropriating other cultures and styles (in this case, US Country & Western) is the lot of those who have nothing to offer of themselves.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Saturday 22 January 2011

Tinker Bell
(2008)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD

Aside from the usual reactionary Disney nonsense about being born to fulfill certain social roles, this is a fairly charming fairy tale about a feisty fairy who would much rather have been born a different kind of fairy.

The characterization is a little thin but an audience of prepubescent young girls is probably the intended audience - so, perhaps, this is hardly all that important. This is not a patch on Peter Pan and the animation is a little weak, technically.

In the end, however, this movie fails to understand the true nature of talent and the training necessary to hone any ability into something worthwhile, so is doomed to perpetuate the culture-destroying myth of innate genetic abilities based on inter-(rather than intra-) specific variation.


Copyright © 2011 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. Frank TALKER is also the author of Sweaty Socks: A Treatise on the Inevitability of Toe Jam in Hot Weather (East Cheam Press: Groper Books, 1997) and is University of Bullshit Professor Emeritus of Madeupology.

Friday 21 January 2011

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue
(2010)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD



A very definite improvement on Tinker Bell in being funnier, more profound and involving humans: The whole point of fairy folklore. Of course, if you do not believe in fairies, then this one is a miss. And much of the story in this one is about prosaic adults and their belief that they have transcended animism in favor of a rational science that details the how and not the why: The very reason for the persistence of such folk tales, in the first place; the inability of science to explain so much of lived experience.

The standard problems with contemporary (2011) CGI is the odd combination of attempting to model reality scrupulously while telling tall, fantastical tales. This reflects a lack of confidence in the technology that reveals the sense that its practitioners still feel they have something to prove - esthetically. This partly explains the weakness of the characterization as opposed to the high quality of the ideas.

This is a good and charming adventure story with decent songs and a super-polite English girl who wins your affections immediately in her motherless condition and her father's inability to find the time to pay attention to her. There is also an amusing fat pet cat that would love to sink its teeth into the heroines. In the end, the scientistic world-view is comprehensively critiqued as accepting as empirical only that which it can destroy - in the form of butterflies pinned in glass cases rather than flying free. To reductively apprehend reality by only seeing the parts and never the whole. Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing - at least in this movie.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Thursday 20 January 2011

Affliction
(1997)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD



Clever film about White masculine violence resulting from the violent nature of Western culture. Not only those who are raised in such a culture, not only those who are raised in more overtly physically or emotionally violent families than others but also the external victims of such cowardly aggression - here women and children - can also choose to be crippled by its negative affects.

The road to redemption is long and arduous and most often leads down dead ends like (born-again) Christianity and choosing not to bring children into the world in case they are similarly afflicted with the inability to share fulfilling relationships with others. Such people are always detached from living and so die without ever having really lived, in the first place.

Despite offering no real explanations for the origins of the emotional and physical violence shown, this is a genuinely scary movie about real-life monsters; featuring star turns from Nick NOLTE and James COBURN, albeit that they tend to overshadow the somewhat under-written female characters who become simply the wash in their wake. In this regard, the movie comes across as an example of the very thing it critiques: Gynophobic. Nevertheless, it is strongly reminiscent of The Killer Inside Me in its depiction and dissection of inappropriate male aggression and its inevitable consequences, if left - like a toothache - un-medicated.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Under Milk Wood
(1971)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD



A self-contradiction, of course, to present a radio play as a movie - but this is fun.

It gets the sense of Dylan Thomas's poetry and libidinous sensibility rather well - all the girls come across better than the men, despite the archetypal characterization. Thomas was never a great poet by any means because he lacks profundity and often indulges in purple verse - but he is amusing and this is the uncut version of his play for radio.

A better poetry movie is Mirror, but this compares quite well.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Hard Way
(1991)

RATING: 80%



Clever, self-reflexive policier that scores its points by being the very thing it parodies - yet it gets away with it. The usual odd-couple buddy movie cliches are rolled out while simultaneously being satirized. One actor pretends to be a cop while the other pretends to be an actor trying to learn from the former about how to portray a cop on screen. A brilliantly-acted movie that is also very funny because, rather than being half as funny, it is twice as funny as it hints at what really goes on in the minds of Method actors as they try to convince the public that they are what they are not.

Eventually the simulated reality of this movie comes to resemble the films the actor here regularly appears in; while realizing that reality is tougher than the silver screen. Here, comedy replaces suspense because we have seen this all before - and it works.

The romantic side of the movie is less than convincing and films about films are usually self-indulgent attempts evade the fact that a particular format or genre is tired out, but this is a helluva lot of fun.


Copyright © 2011 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.

Wild Target
(2009)

RATING: 60%

Unnecessary remake of a better film (Cible émouvante) that is still good fun.

Emily BLUNT steals the show as the eccentric target of a lonely assassin, who comes to find love late in life. Her timing is spot-on and her sexuality understated - but both very real for all that.

Where the film falls flat lies in its being decidedly under-written. BLUNT's character never really makes much sense psychologically and her apparent Electra complex - her motivational mainspring - springs from no clearly-definable source. Her would-be assassin is much more clearly-delineated as epicene with potentially-homosexual tendencies. This inevitably lessens the sexual tension and chemistry between the two leads that would have catapulted this amusing crime caper into classic romantic-comedy territory. This thin psychological sketching-in of the characters also partly invalidates the theme of Nature versus Nurture that the film darkly hints is responsible for much of the on-screen shenanigans.


Expendables
(2010)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD

"Rage against the dying of the light"

Reflecting the usual American obsession with solving political problems through the use of violence, that only serves to create more problems, this one serves up its thrills with some humor, a little irony and a morsel of wit - to compensate for the clichéd characterization and under-written roles. Additionally, the movie criticizes US foreign policy - especially the unethical nature of killing only for money - while indulging in the more violent aspects of same.

It is a great pleasure to see ones favorite actors try to send themselves up but, some of the violence is gratuitously-macho, and one senses that old-timers like Sylvester STALLONE do not wish to "go gentle into that good night". The violence is toned-down from the pointlessly-excessive Rambo and a plot device from King Lear added - which is all to the good.


Tuesday 18 January 2011

Corporation
(2003)

RATING: 60%



It's not the corporation that's unsustainable, but communistic, totalitarian environmentalism.


Copyright © 2011 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.

HABITS OF WHITENESS:
A Pragmatist Reconstruction
(2009)

RATING: 40%



One starts to wonder if these books are being written for their White author to get on the good side of Blacks in case the racewar does not go the way Whites would prefer. the naivety of such texts makes one believe the White authors are hedging their bets against being killed by vindictive Blacks as a cynic would profess belief in God not out if faith but just in case. for to fully understand White supremacism always leads to Whites accepting the existence of Black anger, resentment and rage at the centuries of Christian-led injustice heaped upon their heads for the sin of being a son of Ham. These thoughts have Whites quaking in their boots and produces mediocre work such as this in ineffectual response. Trying to appease and placate Blacks in this way is just more of the same White supremacist condescension that the book pretends to be against.

The book analyzes the central conceit of contemporary White supremacism: That Whites are not racist while Blacks are simply paranoid. That this is a White supremacist thought allegedly evades notice of the White supremacists who make it explains why White supremacism is an intractable problem for Whites because their culture is based upon it and would thus collapse without it. The fear of this collapse and the White lack of a replacement only produces more overt White supremacism to shore-up the more covert supremacism.

The book correctly assesses Whites lack of a true community, genuine empathy and cultural fullness through a millennial policy of excluding most of homo sapiens from the concept human. the remaining self-styled humans must then live with the perpetual fear of being expelled from the false community of Whites supremacists for being race-traitors for speaking-out against this - like those in a declining industry anxious about who is the next to be down-sized. Whites see anti-racism as a loss for themselves and a breaking of the deal with the devil they have made that traded cultural richness for material comforts.

Books like this are designed to avoid open racewar and civil unrest but their naive assumptions make this impossible. making Whites see sense on t if these issues has never worked in the past and theory of the unconscious racist is a myth perpetuated by those seeking to evade moral responsibility for their own thoughts, words and deeds - like the rapist trying to plead insanity to avoid jail. in reality White supremacists are quite clear in their own minds about their fear of Blacks and their attempts to pretend otherwise are mere reflections of this fact; hence, the need for the pretense in the first place. No-one, after all, needs to pretend to be something they are not if they are not - it should be self-evident.

As Whites themselves say when confronted by leopards who claim to have changed their spots: "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Blacks clearly need to proceed with caution when Whites like the author of this book want a discussion on race for when Whites continue to say one thing while still doing the opposite there is still great danger there. Comparable experience with criminal recidivists in the Western world does not give great cause for hope. The issue here is deliberate self-deception which the utterly fails to address. This all comes across as just another new year's resolution that will soon be forgotten about and the old behavior patterns restored.

The essential point of this book is that White supremacism is the bloody product of the materialistic nature of White Christendom and is (& was) designed to line the pockets of Whites at the expense of non-Whites. It is purely historical since it lacks a biological referent. In western culture this began some 500 years ago and still continues today unabated because the coonceot inevitably forces White supremacists into an intellectual corner. It becomes necessary to create a cultural void resulting from the inevitable loss of any real sense of humanity that racism entails. The only means of filling such a void is with the very concept that created it: White supremacism. this explains the longevity of institutionalized racism and the attendant guilt and shame of White supremacists - as well as the sense of entitlement to unearned White privileges that all White supremacists have and that all Whites receive allied to the exculpatory belief that racism is no longer a problem that White need address. The book contains the bizarre idea that Whites are unaware of these supremacist privileges even though it admits that books such as the present one are angrily condemned by White supremacists. Yet if White privilege does not exist, then why do Whites respond so angrily to the claim that it does?


Copyright © 2011 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 17 January 2011

It Might Get Loud
(2008)

RATING: 40%



A documentary without any real theme and only mildly interesting subjects.

There is something ineffably sad in White musicians reveling in their mediocrity when they could never rival the originators of the music that they so casually replicate. The formalism of White popular music speaks volumes for its lack of emotional connection with lived experience - unlike Black music. The only joy here comes from a sheer display of technique and technology without exuberance. That the artists concerned display little emotion on their faces reveals the emptiness within. The suspicion with loud music created by Whites is that it is loud to distract attention from its musical and cultural vacuity. As superficially moving as a Rolling Stones CD.

The problem for Whites here is that you can copy Black music but you cannot be it - unless you are Black. Why is Black music always being appropriated after it has lost its currency among Blacks? The question here is why cannot Whites produce an authentic music that accurately reflects their own cultural experience - and what do they have to express that is honest? punk rock anyone? Not as interesting as Rock School.


Copyright © 2011 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.