Sunday 30 June 2013

Fantasia

(1940)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:Cinema

Disney’s folly

Movie that reverses the cinema norm that music accompany images and, because of its oddness, revealing just why this is the norm.

The fact is you could never find pictures good enough to accompany some of the Western world’s greatest classical music - such pictures could only ever exist in the mind of the individual listener. Yet the fact that the music and images can never really fit one another, considered separately, both are equally excellent. The animation is technically superb and often amusing, frightening & moving; veering from the sublime to the ridiculous - and back - with well-studied alacrity.

Yet, a film like Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers arranged the marriage of sound and picture with far greater artistry; indeed, all of the movies Russell made about classical composers did this sort of thing so much better than here.

Ultimately, the ending is rather weak since it makes use of Ave Maria and, unlike Aria, this film takes itself a little too seriously for its own good: Absurd, but 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.

Saturday 29 June 2013

Animal Factory
(2000)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD

Although this is probably the most realistic depiction of prison life ever filmed, it is strangely devoid of a unifying theme; save hints that jail makes more criminals rather than simply punishing them.

Wider society is presented here in macrocosm as rough justice is meted out to those who do not follow the unwritten rules of gaol conduct; which are rational yet collectivist. And collectivist loyalties are most often the cause of criminality, in the first place. Individualists are usually murdered.

The unsensational treatment allows the actors (all of whom are excellent) to develop their parts and, although we do not know what most are in prison for, we do see a humanity that has gone seriously wrong.

Overall, Animal Factory seems more to have been made as a calling card to add to the résumé of the director than a movie in its own right.


Friday 28 June 2013

War of the Worlds
(2005)


RATING:20%
FORMAT:DVD


With infinite complacency, men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

H G Wells (1866–1946), British author. The War of the Worlds, chapter one (1895).

Spielberg is now Officially Crap

A film so ridiculous that one finds difficulty finding the words to express one’s state of extreme flabbergastedness as to its sheer silliness.

Herbert George Wells’ original novel never made much sense. Any sufficiently advanced, technological civilisation would never travel to another planet to colonise it without first determining that the atmosphere of that planet was not a threat to the very survival of the colonisers. And yet that’s exactly what transpires here. They’d wear spacesuits first, for Christ’s sake; wouldn’t they?

This was just an ending the author came up with in the absence of anything better. It perfunctorily ended a story that appeared to be very much the tragedy for the human race that any domestic contact with a malevolent civilisation would be given that our puny weapons could never possibly defeat them. It was always a copout.

The original, 1953 version of this same story got around this plot problem by focussing on a love story that would involve the audience and get us wanting a happy ending no matter what. That is what Hollywood is good at, after all; which is why it’s such a wealthy and successful industry. It also gave us just an enough of the religious trappings to make us believe that this human salvation was truly divine intervention. It just goes to show how much bullshit can make good, effective drama.

Instead of this, what we have here is lukewarm soap opera where Mr Spielberg employs a recalcitrant teenager with whom Tom CRUISE doesn’t get on very well with. But, a mother who, although divorced from Mr CRUISE, has a good relationship with her son. The son disappears halfway through the film only to turn up at the ending in a mawkishly-sentimental denouement. This sends us away from the cinema feeling good but offers us no real insights into the nature of father/son relationships.

The unspectacular special effects are the main characters here and they merely create a sense of the awesome destructiveness of advanced technology rather than of Man battling against larger forces. These effects do not re-create, since the events depicted have never happened, so we have no way of knowing how good they are because we have nothing to compare them with - from our own experience. In the George Pal version, the special effects never overwhelmed the rather delightful love story between the two leads – a romance necessary to draw us along through the plot, without which it would have been an empty spectacle.

The other problem with the story is that it ridiculously claims that an advanced race would use humans as slaves for fertilising a new earth. Why would such a civilisation do this when it can use its advanced technology to do this?

Slavery in the West, for example, was not abolished because Whites suddenly moved from being misanthropes to being philanthropists. It was abolished because using slaves is more expensive than using machines – the ultimate material product of all advanced civilisations known. If you can plough a field with a single machine rather than a hundred slaves and you were a true blue capitalist, then why on earth (or on any other planet) would you not do so?

Are aliens exempt from such rational considerations? Are aliens mentally ill? How can mentally ill people build and pilot spacecraft across the vast, ego crushing distances of space? And if they could, then how on earth did they get to be so advanced?

The Soviet Union collapsed because it turned its people into physical and mental slaves; and a mind enslaved cannot create the labour saving devices to make slavery redundant and unnecessary. All creation and advancement in life requires a free mind – neither can flourish without it. The people who made this cinematic dreck presumably have free minds and yet they’re unable to harness them to create cultural artefacts expressing the typical creations of a free mind. They posit slavery within the context of a high technology that they constantly bombard us with in large scale special effects. Only a “highly paid slave” would produce rubbish like this on this scale. No wonder interviews with film stars and filmmakers are often embarrassing when you quickly come to realise that these very wealthy people are actually mostly quite stupid!

Wasn’t the tv series and subsequent films of Star Trek saddled with this risible notion in the creation of the Klingons? A race of crypto-Communists who – like our earth-bound Soviets vis-à-vis the United States - never developed a technology sufficient to challenge the United Federation of Planets. This is why the Soviets lost the race to walk first on the moon, after all. Only in the movie Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country is this idiocy faced when the Klingon Empire collapses, through implosion, as the Soviet Union did.

Even so, the technology of this supposedly advanced race is under realised in that humans are picked up one by one by the Martian tripods; instead of using some kind of net to pick them up wholesale. Imagine how long it would take to herd the entire human race with such devices? Advanced technology? Laughable!

Our hero takes his family onto a ferry only to have said ferry overturned. It should have become obvious by that time that the Martians are moving against population concentrations and that these are, therefore, the most dangerous places for any survival minded human beings to be. But no, that would scupper the chance to add the spectacular capsizing of said boat. Dramatic but not drama because the characters we’re supposed to be relating to do incredibly silly things.

To make the War of the Worlds more palatable to a modern audience, terrorism has been shoehorned unsuccessfully into the plot. This works very well when Tom CRUISE is covered with dust from head to foot; representing the remains of those who’ve died around him as he successfully evades the Martian death rays. This replicates the many New Yorkers similarly covered in dust after the Twin Towers fell on the morning of 11 September 2001. Yet, this idea – being the only one the filmmakers have in their arsenal of vain hopes that special effects will tell the story on their own – is trashed to death. Mr CRUISE steps out from his ex wife’s home to find a civilian airliner crashed on his front lawn without leaving a scratch on his four-by four! I know these vehicles are well built and everything, but that’s simply absurd.

With the earlier Hollywood version of this story, the cold war analogy worked just fine and made that film all the more terrifying. But, considering that terrorism is largely the creation of Whites, this film comes across as paranoid and as desperate as the so called war on terror is.

Although Tom CRUISE’s daughter, Dakota FANNING, is excellent – as always – her relationship with him never comes across as at all believable. It’s possible that, unlike Mr Spielberg, Mr CRUISE doesn’t know how to play against children; and is competing with her rather than acting off of her.

A movie whose poverty of imagination isn’t compensated for by the large amount of money spent making it. Mr Spielberg obviously directed the film as a favour for a friend or, worse, he’s simply run out of things to say. In which case he should give up film directing for producing and nurturing the directorial talent of the future.

Clearly, Mr Spielberg doesn’t really believe in malevolent aliens for the reason that it’s hard to imagine any advanced society surviving and transcending a tendency to self destruction that such malevolence always breeds. Saying that this is not life as we know it isn’t enough since ALL drama is about us – whom we know - not about them, whom we cannot know. Any lower animal that could speak English would be unintelligible to us because we could not understand the experience behind the statements that it would make. If we learn nothing about ourselves from he experience, then we’ve learned nothing save the conjecture that it’s possible to be bad and survive; even though there’s no evidence from our own experience to validate this. This movie just doesn’t understand the human purpose of drama nor human nature.

(Gene BARRY and Ann ROBINSON make an all too brief appearance in a film that is never as good as the version in which they starred: War of the Worlds.)

Thursday 27 June 2013

Casino Royale

(2006)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:Cinema



Daniel CRAIG is very different in the role of James Bond from any of his predecessors; lacking the suave sophistication of the latter. This is acknowledged in the scripting and acting. The fact that this Bond has come from poor roots, wears off-the-peg suits and is most definitely not a scion of Eton - as the novel’s original was. And yet the plot of this book is adhered to with remarkable fidelity – a good thing since it is one of the best of Ian Fleming’s 007 potboilers.

The small plot concerning a card game was a major set piece. No nuclear weapons poised to strike at the London or Washington unless a significant ransom is paid? No underground criminal lairs blown up at the end? Moreover, someone else eventually kills the villain!

A movie set very much in the down-to-earth world of real human emotions, sensations and thoughts – especially regarding what to do about terrorism. There is no reliance whatsoever on gadgets or even guns! Just plain, old common physical skills. This is a rough ‘n’ ready Bond who makes silly mistakes, gets into trouble with his boss and loses his temper when he should keep his cool.

What we have here is something of a love story about a man who cannot trust anyone – especially women. Who resigns from the Secret Intelligence Service to find himself, only to discover that the world actually is a place where trust and genuine friendship is in very short supply. The very realizations producing the very qualities that make him the best secret agent the world has ever – or will ever – know.

Bond’s financier, Eva GREEN is hot stuff. And she plays her role of the ultimate treacherous femme fatale very well.

Whatever the copyright and contractual difficulties of finally filming an official version of the first James Bond novel were, it was a delight to see Ian Fleming’s name on a Bond film: Something we have not seen since Octopussy in 1983. Bond’s going back to his roots and this is matched by the fact that the script development clock has been set back to zero in this particular movie. We see 007 meet his only friend, Felix Leiter, for the first time – when his CIA counterpart has been a recurring character since the first film (Dr No) in 1962 (played by Jack Lord). (Even the famous old Monty Norman jazz theme make a welcome reappearance along with a featured part for a certain 1963 Aston Martin DB5 - which is always going to win against the later Martin models.)

The producers have clearly decided that Mr Craig is their new James Bond and have successfully built the film around him: His mannerisms, look and his style. Deciding that the changes to the character are necessary for a little reinvention for a new generation of Bond aficionados. In this it is reminiscent of the alterations recently made to British television’s Doctor Who that have fruitfully reinvigorated a series and a formula that was dead on its feet a decade ago. It is this willingness to risk change that's made the Bond films the most successful movie series in history because of its ultimate refusal to become stale and trite. Otherwise, Casino Royale would have been little better than Dr No XXI.

This is Bond gold. Not only one of the very best Bond films but perhaps the very best.


Copyright © 2006 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.

Departed
(2006)


RATING: 20%
FORMAT:Cinema

Honor Among Thieves

Tale of loyalty among thieves that shows the police working so closely with criminals – especially undercover – that the difference between the two is successfully blurred. Both feed off each other to maintain an essentially corrupt polity; the only integrity left to each is a trust that doesn’t and cannot exist in such a social setup.

No one’s hands are left unclean in this search for identity as cops pretend to be criminals and criminals inform for the cops. All are morally crippled by a culture that creates the crime it feeds upon in a universe made paranoid by its lack of real values

The characterization is weak, as are the performances. Jack NICHOLSON is little more than a self parody while Leonardo DiCAPRIO simply cannot act to save his life.

The plotting is overly and lazily coincidental and the themes undeveloped in an excellent example of where the critical reputation of a film director (or so-called auteur) is greater than the merits of their latest work. The film is so absurdly violent and over-the-top it could have been made by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It fails to understand the difference between the merely dramatic (the killings) and drama (the relationships between the characters and themselves); all to emotionally-nullifying effect.

NICHOLSON hasn’t given a decent performance for years and is merely hamming-it-up for the cameras. And Leonardo DI CAPRIO is merely trying very hard to be taken seriously as an actor by doing an impersonation of Robert De Niro (from the period when Mr De Niro used to appear in films worth watching).

Truly terrible.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST:
Fifty Years of Economic Folly -
And the Stark Choices Ahead
(2011)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:Book

Poorly-written and muddled exposé of White culture’s failings in the economic sphere since the end of the Second World War.

This author clearly knows a lot of economist jargon, but is unable to get across her ideas through the metaphor and analogy so beloved of, and required by, the lay reader. Such an inability clearly indicates a tendency towards propaganda rather than a cool-headed assessment of facts.

The author has clearly spent far too much time with Whites, since her arguments match theirs; while missing-out on making all-important points about why White culture is dying, economically, in the first place. (It is also decidedly-odd to read a Black arguing in favor of White global dominance.)

She claims that the United States was, at some point in its history, a fully-fledged capitalist nation when it has always, in reality, been a mercantilist one. The rest of the Western world has been the same; explaining the West’s ongoing love affair with the military occupation of oil-rich countries and the lack of focus on innovation in non-military fields of human endeavor.

She also posits the fallacy that if one changes one’s mindset, one’s behavior will automatically change. There is little evidence for this in psychology - the opposite is far more likely to be the case - which is why econometrics is always going to be a pseudo-science because it always treats people as the rational actors they so often are not.

Worst sin of all, this author does not explain why the West is worth saving and, by implication, why the terrorists who rightfully-hate the West should not win.

The confusion in this propaganda piece lies, as usual, in the conflation of the Personal with the Political.


Copyright © 2013 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.