Sunday 27 December 2015

Gauntlet
(1977)

60%

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Rather self indulgent Clint Eastwood movie in which the director and star both take potshots at their own onscreen tough guy persona. This is a tale of redemption and political corruption about a slow witted Arizona cop told with great wit in a carefully written screenplay that wants to entertain as well as inform.

The set pieces are well done but over the top but Eastwood is making ironic commentary on the violence of White America, the violence of American Cinema and of his own previous portrayal of Dirty Harry. So long as you take it in the spirit intended, this is good fun, especially as Sondra Locke makes their onscreen relationship work by imbuing it with a secret sense of what their offscreen relationship was like.

Solid political and sexual satire that refuses to take itself too seriously.

Sunday 20 December 2015

Vampyres


Summary: Girl‑power as revenge.

Drained of spunk, blood & money by feminists‑as‑vampires out for revenge on behalf of all women against all men - for being killed by a man. White men are shown here as gluttons for punishment and as being easily‑controlled by women, sexually - not by White women who refuse sexual intercourse, but by those who offer it willingly; hence, the gilded erotic cage into which all men here fall - eventually.

This male sexual passivity is the product of White male sexual insecurities in the face of female sexual voraciousness. These help women sensually‑entrap men with the sex the men so desperately want in their loneliness and alienation from their own feelings. The downside is that like the male Black Widow spider, there is the ever‑present fear of being consumed by the female’s lust or, at the very least, having to pay the price of contracting some kind of venereal disease. That so much here appears to be a dream suggests that the civilizing tendencies of White culture lead to the horrifying nightmares of the emotionally‑repressed: Everything that the horror genre is really all about.

This movie works well as a pure cinema spectacle since it has little dialog, rhyme nor reason. The horror comes from the fact that it all makes so little literal sense; while, emotionally, it makes all the sense in the world. The caravanning couple are a dramatically‑useful and sexually‑normative contrast to the weird sisters (well‑played, with great gusto & personal chemistry, by DZIUBINSKA & MORRIS) because the latter can only entice single, lonely men, rather than experience fulfilling and healthy sexual relations with them. Yet, their very normality is upset because embedded within it is a sexual boredom that makes the lesbianism and vampirism on show here seem much more interesting than healthy sex - as well as their naive world‑view that could just get them killed.

This movie is up there with Near Dark and Let the Right One In as an exploration of revenge and need - regardless of who is actually to blame. This, despite the rather odd fact that we never discover why the two women were murdered in the first place - nor why they should return as vampires, rather than just as ghosts.

Ken Russell, Jean Rollin or Jess Franco would, undoubtedly, have been proud of this movie - if any one of them had directed it - as it proudly‑visualizes the inner emotional world of its tormented characters. This is further exemplified in the use of Oakley Court as the perfect location for this gothic horror; especially given the large number of Hammer horror movies once shot there.

Sunday 13 December 2015

Between the World and Me


Summary: How Black people live in White cultures.

Excellent, if overly-wordy (a fault shared with the equally-excellent James Baldwin), book about White people which understands that Whites use euphemisms and half-truths in order to live with their guilt feelings about the White supremacist nature of their cultures.

When Whites say People, they only mean White people; when they say Race, they claim something science has demonstrated as fact - despite the utter absence of any tangible evidence.

These White delusions spring from the belief that a) nature, itself, is racist; b) that Whites are the only ethnic group able to know this for sure; & c) that the White god has decreed, in advance, who is to be honored and who is to be tortured. Yet, it is recently-invented racism that produces Race - not the other way around; resulting in a superficial people who think of themselves as White - above any other consideration; leaving Whites with no more solid basis for their cultural myths than self-delusion and wishful-thinking.

Black people have never had the luxury of denying White reality by believing in American exceptionalism because they were meant to suffer as scapegoats for the inability of White Americans to achieve the exceptional - and suffering is always self-evident and undeniable. Moreover, Whites decreed that People Of Color existed solely as the basis of White wealth - a wealth Whites pretend came from their hard work when it really came from the hard work of those Whites deem to be untermenschen. For Black people to do otherwise than face reality can only result in the same personally-irresponsible, life-threatening & dream-like schizophrenia Whites wallow in every day of their lives. Thus, White police officers are merely correctly-interpreting the actual legacy and heritage of White supremacy in their openly-racist, Caucasian-accepted & genocidal behavior towards Black people.

An excellent book for Black people to share with one another and to bequeath to their children (like the similarly-themed works of the late James Baldwin) that clearly expresses the reasons for White mediocrity and the social parasitism inherent in a White supremacy based on genocide, looting and rape that benefits all White males, regardless of social class - all because they would much rather exist trapped in the gilded cage of Whiteness than live free as grown men.

Sunday 6 December 2015

ANCHORMAN 2: The Legend Continues


Summary: Amusingly-bland comedy with no real soul.

An enjoyable but mediocre parody of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and the need of 24-hour tv news shows for a constant diet of news - no matter how trivial - to fill the 24 hours; explaining the necessary lowering of journalistic standards to fill this essential need.

The usual White fear of Black people - particularly being uncomfortable in their presence - is well-presented, along with the commonplace Caucasian sexual dreads. But more than this, American Exceptionalism, the news & prolefeed have become synonymous in a vain White attempt to conceal corporate propaganda behind a veneer of unquestioning patriotism. Yet, the inevitable White descent into Nazism that this represents is never meaningfully-explored, since this movie is a product of the same corporate mindset. That the powerful and the rich now openly-control the mainstream-media message means that they no longer need to shoot the messenger.

Not nearly as politically-astute as Network, because it does not really understand why White news is now more about entertaining than it is about informing; focusing, instead, upon jokes about the Americans’ traditionally-poor understanding of geography and the White delusion of the self-made man.

Too long and self-indulgent for its own good; breaking the old rule that brevity is the soul of wit; this is an unfocused parody with too many thinly-drawn characters for any audience to really care about; undercutting its essential message that news should only tell the truth.

Sunday 29 November 2015

Monuments Men


Summary: Whites trying to prove their art is best and that they saved Europe from itself.

A movie having a hard time justifying its existence, since no-one can fight a war within their own geographic location without doing a great deal of damage to their own cultural artifacts. (One is reminded here of the necessity to break eggs in order to make omelets.)

In addition to this shaky premise, if Whites really were serious about protecting the glories of their culture, would they not seek to avoid war, in the first place - at all costs; thereby avoiding the destruction-problem right from the get-go? The attempt is made here to redeem the inherent internecine violence of the various White cultures by claiming that Whites saving art from other bestial Whites somehow redeems Whites, as a whole and as a culture - without ever actually saying how. Would Jews, for example, rejoice at prioritizing the saving of art over the saving of Jewish lives from the Holocaust through such a phony redemption?

This Curative, better-late-than-never approach to White problems is a sure-fire way to ensure the failure of any such attempt to prevent such cultural calamities from ever occurring, at all, since the more useful Preventive measures are not thought about nor provided-for to begin with. In any case, as with birthrates after wars (usually rising), that which has been damaged is more easily-replaceable by deciding not to start such destructive wars in future and by creating a culture that can re-produce such works through a focus on excellence over preservation-obsessed nostalgia.

The morally-reprehensible claim that human lives are less important than art implies that the creators are less important than that which they create. Such a world-view would willingly sacrifice six-million Jews for a single Michelangelo; the presentation of the culture - through its artifacts - being said to be more important than the ideas that gave them birth; even though ideas can just as easily be transmitted by the written - duplicated word - as by individual works of art. The truth carefully-obscured here is that the White man’s greatest achievements actually lie in the art of warfare.

The self-indulgent megalomania with which this movie is imbued (mirroring that of the Nazis they are ostensibly fighting) is ultimately a reflection of the White belief in their own superiority and that the greatest achievements of mankind were those of Caucasians. This is partly-offset by the fact that many of the leading characters get killed, off one-by-one, so that the reality of the war is not entirely elided; giving the audience the illusion that this is, in fact, the kind of generic war movie that it, actually, is not.

Well-mounted, with fine performers, this under-written comedy fails to convince as drama, as history or as the philosophy of culture. The fact that the characters are so flat makes this a poor exploration of the sense of personal identity and self-worth that any culture should provide. Obviously White culture does not provide these things; leaving Whites only with a retarded sense of their own vainglory. Thus, the film successfully negates its own premise by never successfully exploring it; replacing it, instead, with some pretty irrelevant humor and the usual America-saved-Western-culture gobshite.

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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.