All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
All movie reviews
If I didn’t know better I might say that Frank Capra had strayed away from the typical experience of long distance bus travel.
At least I can’t really remember the last time that a small string band and a sailor broke into song.
But who hasn’t wanted to say “Ya got me. Yah!” to a bus driver.
Mark Antony’s eulogy of Julius Caesar. Everyone has heard the first few words. They’re in my title. But have you ever watched a dramatization? Many years ago I saw a small production in the Berkshires. And in its bare bones presentation; no fancy costumes or sets, it was well done. But I do not remember Antony’s speech impressing me.
Here are three versions. Two are Hollywood spectacles. One with Marlon Brando and one with Charlton Heston. The third is a solo recitation. See if you can guess which one I favor. And I’ll give those who care to watch them a chance to provide their own judgement on which is best. Lend me your ears.
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Back when all I knew of Mel Gibson was Mad Max, the Road Warrior, if you had told me that he would play Hamlet I would have laughed and said, “Sure, and Sylvester Stallone will be playing King Lear and Macbeth too!”
But who knew? Gibson is good.
I like this speech because it seems to cover the fact that depending on the events of the day each of us can view the world and all in it as either a lovely frame or a sterile promontory. Humanity can be either like an angel or the quintessence of dust.
Gibson is a good actor and I don’t think he loses by comparison to Olivier or Branagh when performing Hamlet.
Back in 1993 Kenneth Branagh directed a film version of Shakespeare’s comedy, “Much Ado About Nothing.” Michael Keaton was given a small role as the dim-witted constable Dogberry and along with the malapropisms and absurd swagger Keaton added an almost Monty Pythonesque quality to the role and to that of his associates in the night guard. I ten to think it’s the best part of the show. Shakespeare did love his clowns.
Andrew Klavan is a gifted writer. He breathes emotion and conviction into his arguments and they ring true. In this essay he interprets transgenderism and other manifestations of “transhumanism” through the stories of Lear and Prospero in Shakespeare’s plays.
What he points out is the hubris that confused men commit when they ignore that they literally are not God. When we pretend that the definitions of human life do not apply to us we set ourselves up for the catastrophe that will follow when we attempt to ignore these boundaries.
“We have now reached the nadir of that mode—or the zenith, depending on where you stand. This is that moment that Nietzsche talked about, the “catastrophe” of a civilization awaking to find its foundations gone.”
Klavan sees King Lear as the cautionary tale for human hubris and rejection of the natural order and The Tempest as a fairy story about restoring it. Well, I like Shakespeare so I like when a gifted writer uses it to make a point. Bravo Andrew.
I was rewatching Olivier’s Hamlet today. So I picked out the scenes I thought were noteworthy. The characters are so strange to modern audiences and the plot so improbable. But there are some scenes that are iconic. Many will recognize the famous quote or the scene. My favorite is the gravedigger’s scene. Alas, poor Yorick. Shakespeare’s fools and jesters are obviously his favorites and always have the best lines.
Anyway.
To Thine Own Self Be True
That is the Question
The Play’s the Thing
I Knew Him Horatio
But Let It Be
The 96th Academy Awards will take place March 10th 2024. Now I haven’t watched any part of the Oscars in coming on twenty years. Even back in the early 2000’s they had become unwatchable both for the virtue signaling that made up most of the spectacle and for the unbelievably low entertainment value of the movies selected as nominees.
In the spirit of open mindedness I decided to take a look at the publicly available information on the movies that are up for the Best Picture award. Below are links to each of the nominees.
You can check for yourself if your tastes may differ from mine. Most of them sound unwatchable. A multi-decade exploration of Leonard Bernstein’s bisexuality or a courtroom trial to determine whether a wife killed her husband or he committed suicide or whether he just fell off a balcony with their blind son as the chief witness or several other even less interesting plots.
I suppose a lot of older women might want to see Barbie. And I’m sort of interested to see whether Oppenheimer is any good. But after those two movies there isn’t much else. Interestingly, those two movies appear to be the only ones that made any money. The rest of them didn’t even break even. And since the Marvel movies lost money last year does that mean Oppenheimer and Barbie are the only source of income for Hollywood in 2023?
So my experiment in open-mindedness crashed and burned. Hollywood is no longer a thing. Other than maybe a source for genre movies (action/adventure, sci-fi and comic book heroes) they’ve basically moved away from a pretty large chunk of what used to be their audience.
And it shows. This list of best picture nominees is made up of either vanity projects by arthouse directors or Hollywood virtue signaling vehicles. There’s even that time honored chestnut, the Nazi Holocaust period piece (The Zone of Interest).
So, I still haven’t gotten around to watching Oppenheimer. I’ve heard it’s a mixed bag. It has some interesting things but it’s more than bit too long. Eventually I’ll watch it. But as for either watching the Oscars or any of these movies that ain’t happening. In fact, I can’t imagine that I’ll ever have a reason for watching the Academy Awards ceremony again. Maybe if they were brave enough to make Ricky Gervais the emcee I might watch the compilation of his insults of the nominees. That I could see as being worthwhile. What he did to the Golden Globes as the host was epic and well deserving of my time to rewatch it.
In fact that’s what I’m going to do on March 10th. I’ll rewatch the clip showing all of his best zingers at the Golden globes.
Now that’s entertainment!
Today Camera Girl accused me of being obsessed with the depressing politics of our dystopic world. I readily agreed. And I discussed with her some of the things that cause me to obsess about current events; pediatric transgender surgery, millions of illegal aliens crowding our streets, officially sanctioned anti-white hatred, double digit percent increases in the cost of everything, an epidemic of violent crime in the cities. I think I depressed her.
But she has a point. As enchanting as they are, let’s take a break from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell and Joy Reid for just a little bit. I think it’s good to distract ourselves sometimes with pleasant things. So, I was watching for the zillionth time the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Kubrick’s impressive cinematography, the apt use of the “Blue Danube Waltz”
and “Also sprach Zarathustra”
to convey emotion and provide mood to the scenes.
I don’t tend to watch the whole movie from start to finish. Frankly the ending doesn’t work for me. It’s overly long and frankly annoying. I do enjoy the battle between HAL and the astronauts, especially the scene where Dave removes HAL’s memory chips and renders him brain dead.
I think of it as the first shot in the long war that will be fought between man and AI machines. In that sense Dave Bowman is an heroic trailblazer pointing the way to what we will be faced with in the future. An echo of this can be heard in the Star Trek episode where Kirk must psyche the M5 computer into committing suicide.
I think about these various cinematic tropes to remind me that there was a time when humans and specifically Americans still believed that intelligence and being human were the two important traits that made our species unique and extremely interesting. There was a beauty and a joy to the way we embraced the future. There was immense optimism and confidence.
Now all those things have been systematically eliminated from our culture. Systematically and purposefully eliminated by an ideology that hates beauty and intelligence. Instead, it strives for power and control and doesn’t mind seeing humans reduced to depravity and destitution for the sake of meaningless goals like carbon zero or whatever senseless goal they are currently pursuing.
But I’m pretty sure that this ideology, in the long run, will be self-defeating. The utter stupidity of their ideas and the damage that their agenda will do to their ability to maintain a modern economy and standard of living seems to ensure that some time in the near future, those who shun their path will outstrip them in every meaningful way and relegate them to the proverbial “ash heap of history” where they will join North Korea and Cuba in worshipping their local demigods while huddling in the dark when the power is turned off for the night.
So, I’ll end with the most gung-ho, can-do attitude about human capability that I can think of from somewhat recent sf&f cinema.
Sure, it’s silly stuff but it’s in line with the optimistic vision of the American future, instead of the Greta Thunberg one.
Joss Whedon is a Leftist. Despite his recent fall from grace on account of saying and doing mean things to actors on set, he believes in the cause. All of his cinematic and television creations to some extent, are shaped by progressive concepts. So, it always seemed a very strange thing that he created Firefly. Based, he said, on a book about the battle of Gettysburg he imagined a universe where the elites defeated the freedom loving proles in an interplanetary civil war and these defeated forces maintained an outlaw existence at the edge of a distant new solar system among pirates and barbarians.
In the cinematic finale of this universe, the elites in the “Alliance” send out an agent to eliminate the renegades that have some dangerous secrets about the government’s experiments with controlling the behavior of the ordinary people.
During one encounter the agent recites the title of this essay.
He is portrayed as a true believer. He is making a better world, a world free of sin. And he’ll do this, no matter how many people he has to kill to get there. The agent is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless. Because he thoroughly believes in what he is doing. In this portrayal I think Whedon was being completely honest in how he evaluated the Left and the Right. The Left is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless. The Right is crude, naïve, boorish and principled. And for some reason Whedon sympathized with the Right, at least somewhat. Possibly he recognizes the inherent lack of intellectual freedom that the Left always creates. As a creative type himself, maybe he could see how restrictive life under this regime would be.
Well, all of the above is just a long digression because the line from the movie seems to encapsulate our reality. Our rebellion isn’t like Star Wars. It’s more like Firefly. We don’t have any plucky heroes who will save the day by blowing up the Death Star. We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outmatched in money and buried by the media and Corporate America. The elites have a firm hand on the levers of power and we are just outlaws living on the margins trying to avoid being rounded up and chloroformed like some troublesome stray cats.
And if we look back through history all free societies seem eventually to collapse into oligarchies like ours. But I haven’t been able to figure out what is the “smart” way to think and act in this environment. If I had a strong enough stomach I probably should suck up to the elites and try to find a spot among their toadies. But I’ve always had trouble convincing them I believed in their bilge. Something about my sense of humor always gets me in trouble.
But what is the right answer? Is there a way to live in such a society and still have any self-respect? It doesn’t appear to be the case. And what about children? What do you tell them? Look at the mess we have with Gen Y and Gen Z. They’re living in a fantasy world and life will completely pass them by without leaving a trace.
So, there’s my thought. The elites don’t appear to be vulnerable to anything we can do. And waiting for their decadence to finish them off might take centuries. I guess eventually Caesar or Theodoric will appear on the scene and we’ll get a different group of oligarchs and different bread and circuses.
But is it impossible to get a Brutus instead of a Caesar? And not the Brutus who slew Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus, but rather his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, the one who overthrow the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus and ushered in the Roman Republic. Is it impossible that a member of the elites would side with freedom over power? I think the answer is that it is impossible. And the reason is that no one man, no matter how smart and strong can rearrange an empire once it’s built up. All that can be done is bend its path slightly for a few years.
So I’ll finish by saying that there are plucky heroes and it is the evil empire and that in their prime, evil empires outlast plucky heroes every time. It’s in their nature. Better to look to the fringes of empire for where the successor to that empire will appear.
No spoiler alert needed. It’s just that bad.
I’ve read chunks of the Iliad in Homeric Greek. Unlike some of my professors who preferred it to the Odyssey I’m more partial to that more human scale sequel. But I profess that there are scenes in the War Poem that are evocative and stirring.
I watched a 1950’s sword and sandal “epic” called “Helen of Troy.” They somehow roped in Sir Cedric Hardwicke to play Priam in this spectacle. I guess his salary ate up most of the salary budget because not another name of an actor or actress was recognizable to me except a very young Brigitte Bardot who played “the slave girl Andraste” mostly with her clothes on.
The movie had a budget of $6 million and in 1956 that was a lotta dough. And you can see where they spent it. There was a cast of extras that must have numbered in the thousands for the battle scenes and the elaborate props like siege towers and war engines not to mention the walls of Troy and the giant horse must have cost a bunch to make and then burn which of course they did in the last scene.
And it made about $3 million at the box office so it lost a lotta dough. And I can see why. The acting is shockingly wooden. The script is laughably bad and the fight scenes look as if the combatants had never seen a sword or a spear used, even in movies. My favorite fight is the duel between Achilles and Hector. Instead of hurling their spears at each other they use the butt ends as cudgels and only after pounding away at each other for a while does Achilles skewer Hector as if he were a pork roast.
Mercifully the gods are completely omitted from this remarkable cinematic monument. That surely would have been too much. But humans suffered enough here. Some of the Trojans are portrayed sympathetically. Unfortunately, none of the Greeks were. Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and Patroclus are all presented as swine of one variety or another.
The action of the war is compressed from ten years to something like a weekend. Hector and Achilles are finished off within five minutes of each other and before you know it the wooden horse is unloading its deadly cargo of Hellenic hoplites. As the final credits are rolling Helen is on the trireme headed back to Sparta and she muses how even though Paris was just brutally murdered by her once and future husband Menelaus and his henchmen in the preceding scene and died the beautiful death, in a sense he would always be there with her. Or something.
You know I like bad old genre movies. If I’m in the mood I can watch Demetrius and the Gladiators or Quo Vadis. They’re full of bad acting and historical inaccuracies but somehow, they manage to allow me not to suspend disbelief but rather, to revel in the conceit that I and the moviemaker both get to wink at each other and still enjoy a fake Age of Caesar or Bronze Age Greece that he’s conjured up. But this thing is not that. It’s too completely pointless and the characters are too unlikeable. Pass!