CINEMATIC SINS: DEAD POETS SOCIETY AND "ASSUMING THE POSITION"

Ethan Hawke as prettyboy prep school crybaby

The following is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's upcoming publication, tentatively titled Demon in the Rough

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Film is like music in its ability to transfix and captivate its audience. Both the visual and the aural are mediums through which a hypnotic effect can take hold, causing the participant in the medium to “lose himself” temporarily and engage entirely with that which what spills into his ears and assails his eyes.

THE TOP FIVE MOST MEMORABLE ROMAN EMPERORS IN FILM

by Empire & Revolution

Sword and sandal epics have long been a staple of the movie business. Rome, with its air of decadence and brutality, is a subject of endless fascination for filmmakers, playing fast and loose with historical truth. Among the most fascinating figures in any Roman epic is the emperor, usually but not always depicted as an incarnation of supreme power and total licence, often with endearing personal quirks. Here is a list of five of the most memorable of the emperors from cinematic history and the actors who portrayed them—in reverse order.

"SHADOW RECRUIT": HOLLYWOOD'S REVAMPED RUSSOPHOBIA

This article was originally posted in February 2014; it is republished here in light of the recent alarming ramp-up of tensions between the United States and Russia (with a Western media largely complicit in a poisonous revamped Russophobia), and the possibility of a proxy war, or worse, breaking out in Syria should Hillary Clinton become president.

by Andy Nowicki

Kenneth Branagh’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is not a great or even a good movie, but the fact of its very dubious celluloid existence attests to a very real social phenomenon: the attempted ginning up, by certain powerful and influential American lobby groups, of a new Cold War with Russia.

EYE FROM THE RIGHT: 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE

Contemporary Media seen from the Right

by Richard Wolstencroft

Summary: Although his Star Wars has warmed on me slightly after initial shattering disappointment, this is another terrible exercise in cinematic excrement from JJ Abrams, this time as producer.  

I'm sure, like me, you have all been waiting your whole lives for the John Goodman rape dungeon movie. Correct? Well folks, guess what? Wait NO more! The Goodman rape dungeon pic for all the family is now here via your purveyor of high brown cinematic culture and content – Hollywood’s new "Mr. Wunderkunt" – JJ Abrams. Yes, John Goodman is in full Joseph Fritzl mode, building himself a nice little family life down in the depths of his bomb shelter somewhere in the rural Mid West.

EYE FROM THE RIGHT: "HAIL, CAESAR!" BY THE COEN BROTHERS

Contemporary Media seen from the Right

by Richard Wolstencroft

The short version: This is a hateful piece of crap from the Coen Brothers, riffing on old Hollywood.

The soulless cinematic siblings make three kinds of films: crime (which they do rather well), comedy (which they do rather poorly), and religious/metaphysical musings (which vary from so-so to poor). This, their latest effort, is a combination  of the latter two categories – a weak comedy with a bit off metaphysical nonsense thrown in. That's what you're in for with Hail, Caesar!

EYE FROM THE RIGHT: DEADPOOL

Contemporary Media seen from the Right

by Richard Wolstencroft

This movie was total bullshit. First off – it's a spin-off of a spin-off of the awful, stupid X-Men movies. If I had known that I would NEVER have bothered to see it. So now you know.

And, yes, it’s another f**king comic book – they are a curse on modern cinema. GROW the hell up, people, and read some literature. I detest most comic books – outside a few adult orientated ones with high intelligence. I much prefer books because books make great films.

HEIDEGGERIAN CINEMA AT THE EDGES OF THE WASTELAND: "KNIGHT OF CUPS" BY TERENCE MALICK

by Richard Wolstencroft

Knight of Cups is a superb new film from Terrence Malick, the thinker, philosopher, poet, and – LOL – former hair stylist, who is busy reinventing contemporary cinema. In this, his latest opus, Mr Malick basically examines similar territory to The Beautiful and Damned (the F.Scott Fitzgerald novel), namely life lived in the fast lane – the constant parties, the booze, the excess, and the women – albeit skewed in a Hollywood fashion. That is the mise en scène of the piece.

Christian Bale plays the main character, Rick – or, ahem, Richard – who is reaching an aporia in his life of excess in the film industry. Sounds right up my street!

EYE FROM THE RIGHT: "THE HATEFUL EIGHT"

Contemporary Media seen from the Right

by Richard Wolstencroft

I hate to say this about The Hateful Eight, but my initial response to Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering is that it's just OK. I should say upfront that I am usually a fan and supporter of QT’s work. Maybe it's his weakest film, barring the self acknowledged failure of Death Proof.

JEWISH RACIALISM AND JEWISH CAPITALISM: "BARTON FINK"

by Andy Nowicki

The Coen brothers, a directing/producing brotherly duo, are perhaps the boldest and most creative auteurs of modern-day American cinema. Their work varies wildly; it is “all over the map,” thematically-speaking, yet always distinctively itself. Some Coen brothers’ films are bizarre and phantasmagorical; others are zanily comedic, and still others can best be described as brutally horrifying. Barton Fink is a unique combination of all three of these types, and something else besides: it is a savage satire of a Jewish-run film industry, as well as being an unflinching examination of brazen hypocrisies often seen in Jewish-led political radicalism. Joel and Ethan Coen are, of course, Jews themselves, which is perhaps why they were able to get away with such a jarringly “Semitically-incorrect” depiction in the first place. (See also Kevin MacDonald’s review of their A Serious Man.)

"IT FOLLOWS": MONSTERS FROM THE ID

by Andy Nowicki

It Follows, a brilliant new horror film by director David Robert Mitchell, has a curious distinction: it may be the most “sex-negative” movie ever made.

Self-aware yet irony-free, bathed in atmospheric dread, It Follows treads a careful course between the “slasher” films of the 70s and 80s, its most superficially obvious forebears, and the distancing, overtly “post-modern” spoofy self-referentialism embraced by Wes Craven’s Scream series. In the final analysis, however, It Follows belongs with a more elegant breed of cinematic pedigree, deserving to be considered among classics like Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, eerie films in which the source of the terror is never finally understood in an intellectual sense, but is rendered so primordially palpable on an emotional level that it haunts the viewer for days afterwards.

AMERICAN SNIPER: SHEEP, WOLVES, & SHEEPDOGS

The great Neo-Con Wars of the early 21st century.

by Greg Allmain

A lot of hype has surrounded Clint Eastwood’s cinematic version of American Sniper, the story of the most prolific sniper in American military history, Chris Kyle, accredited with 160 confirmed kills out of 255 probable kills, clocked up over four tours of duty in Iraq.

Much of the hype surrounding the movie has centered around Bradley Cooper’s performance, and Cooper certainly deserves the credit. While watching the movie, it’s difficult to remember that Cooper largely made his big time breakthrough with the buddy comedy The Hangover, and at least from a cinematic point of view, one can certainly say Cooper carries the film, which is, in some respects, a bit disjointed. Regardless, Eastwood and Cooper combine to give an accurate portrayal of the West’s modern day warriors, something that, not surprisingly, the professional Left throughout the world has found deeply troubling.

THE GAPS BETWEEN THE STARS: THE SEMANTICS OF "INTERSTELLAR"

The ever-popular astronaut and bookcase theme.

by Colin Liddell

By now most of you will have seen Christopher Nolan's latest movie Interstellar, or decided not to bother, so spoiler alerts are no longer an issue. It is fairly well-written, ably-acted, and stylishly executed. There is plenty of interest and much provocation of thought, so I don't regret the money I spent to go and watch it.

But what is the message?

Is it, as some claim, a great invocation of the fucked-up Faustian spirit of European man? Is it a Nietzschen opus of man slaying his Last Man avatar and becoming his own Prometheus? Or is it simply "damn it all" escapism from the complex and daunting challenges we face here on Earth?

UNBROKEN: A WHITE CHRISTMAS ARRIVES

by Andy Nowicki

When I first saw the preview for Unbroken a few months ago, I was intrigued and a bit mystified, as I reported in an earlier piece. Having now seen the movie, I am still intrigued, and remain mystified. With the Christmas day release of this film, I am convinced that something must be afoot; I just can’t quite figure out what.

INTERSTELLAR: PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

by Richard Wolstencroft

The good news is that Interstellar – the latest film by Hollywood wunderkind Christopher Nolan – is an intelligent science fiction film in the 70’s meta-cinema mold. It asks big, eugenic, and vaguely fascistic questions about humanity’s future, and posits big answers, too, in a way that is refreshingly daring and original for a mainstream film made in this day and age.

UNBROKEN: A WHITE CHRISTMAS

by Andy Nowicki

The arts and entertainment staff of Alternative Right would like to solicit our readership's take on a question that is currently vexing us.

Posted above is a preview for Unbroken, a new movie being released on Christmas Day. The film tells the inspirational true story of Louis Zamperini, an American Olympic athlete who served America as an airman in the Pacific during WWII and eventually became a Japanese prisoner of war, enduring severe abuse, but emerging unbroken. (Hence, presumably, the title.)

DEVIL: DARK NIGHT

by Andy Nowicki

The credit sequence at the start of the 2010 film Devil is conceptually uncomplicated, yet breathtakingly powerful in impact. Its genius lies in the way it takes a standard, even clichéd, series of images, and quite literally ... inverts them.

As Fernando Velazquez's ominous, Bernard Herrmannesque score plays over the soundtrack, we are taken for a virtual ride across the heights of a skyscraper-filled cityscape — a point of view we've witnessed in perhaps hundreds of movies before, one that would be completely unremarkable except for the fact that in this case, everything we see is upside-down.

”EDGE OF TOMORROW” AND THE ETERNAL RETURN

by Daniel Spaulding

"My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it." ～ Friedrich Nietzsche

One cannot be faulted for suspecting that Hollywood has of late been exhausted of its creativity when it comes to science fiction films. We have been subjected to an endless stream of remakes and reboots, with little in the way of compelling or original stories. It is perhaps for this reason that Hollywood has turned to Japan to bring us the science fiction film Edge of Tomorrow (based on the light novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka).

WHITE IS THE NEW BLACK

by Andy Nowicki

(Note: the following article was first published at The Last Ditch in December of 2009, but I think readers will agree that the phenomenon it describes still predominates.... only the names have changed.)

I see a lot of movies, but not as many as I used to see. With age has come discernment. I'm able to tell a lot of things from previews, and thus save myself the trouble of wasting two hours of my life on something that looks dull, unappealing, or annoying.

Previews rarely lie, at least not in one sense. If a preview for a movie looks bad, the movie itself is almost certainly bad too. (The rule doesn't always work in reverse, however; I have seen many previews that prove to be much more entertaining than the movies they're promoting.)

One thing easy to glean from a preview is whether a movie is formulaic. Clichéd plots or story arcs are commonly decried by professional and amateur movie critics: "Oh, another buddy movie; another chick flick; another historical costume epic ..." However, certain narrative clichés are rarely noticed, much less discussed, because we take them to be lively and profound truths instead of tired and superficial formulae. We don't recognize them as propaganda because we've internalized their messages to such a degree that they seem to us self-evident. To understand them objectively would require deprogramming; we would almost need to have a certain computer chip removed from our brains to see things properly. But that chip is wedged in tight; removing it would be painful. Moreover, if we go through with the surgery, and it's taken out, we realize that the brainwashed zombies who still have chips in their heads are going to castigate us as the true freaks.

FACING FEARFUL ODDS: "OBLIVION," AN ANTI-FEMINIST SCI-FI FABLE

by Andy Nowicki

With its depiction of clones, drones, and environmental exploitation, Oblivion, a 2013 sci-fi movie starring everyone's favorite Scientologist, represents an intriguing product of the contemporary Zeitgeist of the imagination. 

ANTEDILUVIAN FANCIES: DARREN ARONOFSKY'S "NOAH"

"It's gonna rain..." Noah (Russell Crowe) guards the Ark against raiders.

by Andy Nowicki

As audacious, ambitious, heterodoxically-conceived Biblical epics go, Darren Aronofsky’s new movie Noah somewhat recalls The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese’s 1988 adaptation of the controversial Nikos Kazantzakis novel.

Both films were subjected to a pre-release drubbing by conservative Christian groups, who in each case complained of disrespect for Scripture and overall theological untenability (though the deluge of condemnation rained down upon Temptation—which featured a doubt-plagued and carnally-tormented Jesus—easily drowns out the contemporary Noah imbroglio, a fact which I daresay ought to demonstrate to right-wing pagan critics that Christianity, far from being a radically “egalitarian” monstrosity, is hardly without its hierarchy of heroes).