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Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
MS. MARVEL, #SMILEGATE AND THE GHETTOIZATION OF DISSENT
'I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW SICK I AM": 'BIG FAN'
"Big Fan" may well be the bleakest comedy I've ever seen.
Please note that I write "bleakest," not "blackest," though the movie—which stars comic actor Patton Oswalt and was written and directed by Robert Siegel, former editor-in-chief of the legendary humor magazine The Onion—is indeed quite black as well. But what resonates with the viewer after it is over isn't so much a sense of thematic darkness as a sheer, unshakeable conviction of hopelessness. You find yourself shaking your head sadly, as lingering chuckles catch in your throat.
Please note that I write "bleakest," not "blackest," though the movie—which stars comic actor Patton Oswalt and was written and directed by Robert Siegel, former editor-in-chief of the legendary humor magazine The Onion—is indeed quite black as well. But what resonates with the viewer after it is over isn't so much a sense of thematic darkness as a sheer, unshakeable conviction of hopelessness. You find yourself shaking your head sadly, as lingering chuckles catch in your throat.
'UNSANE'-LY APT CINEMA
There is a scene in Unsane, Steven Soderbergh’s riveting new paranoid thriller, that will likely imprint itself on my memory until my dying day.
In it, Sawyer Valentini (Clair Foy), a harried, tormented young woman, visits a mental health facility to see a therapist, who offers a welcome sympathetic ear, or so it would seem.
In it, Sawyer Valentini (Clair Foy), a harried, tormented young woman, visits a mental health facility to see a therapist, who offers a welcome sympathetic ear, or so it would seem.
AGENTS OF CINEMATIC DEGRADATION: THE 80S 'TEEN SEX COMEDY'
This passage is taken from Andy Nowicki's newly-published Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 3: On Being Unwanted, now available on Kindle and in paperback)
What we must understand, again, is the degree to which efforts
are being made to pervert and undermine us, to turn us against our very own
souls, to convince us happily to consume one poison pill after another.
SPANK IT BLACK!: CRITICS CREAM THEMSELVES OVER 'BLACK PANTHER'
Like dutiful Politburo members standing and clapping with one accord for Premier Stalin—and nobody daring to be the first to let up on the applause—the critical establishment is effusively pouring forth copious streams of gushing affection for Black Panther, an upcoming Marvel movie featuring a black superhero and set in an Afrocentric futuristic Utopia called "Wakanda."
'FORGET THE CHILDREN!' ABORTION HORROR MOVIES
by Andy Nowicki
In the latter years of the "oughts," many film critics noted the sudden glut of movies about young women facing crisis pregnancies. No fewer than four such movies were released in 2007, all achieving moderate to considerable financial success: the estrogen-soaked chick flick "Waitress," the raunchy gross-out comedy "Knocked Up," the low-budget New York multiculturally flavored "Bella," and the hip, indie gabfest "Juno."
CHURCHILL, 'DUNKIRK,' AND 'DARKEST HOUR' (VIDEO MOVIE REVIEW)
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| Gary Oldman as a cigar-chomping, scenery-chewing Churchill in "Darkest Hour" |
The recently-released Churchill biopic "Darkest Hour" and last year's war "Dunkirk" both depict the same set of historical events.... yet the two couldn't be more different films when it comes to focus, style, and finally, message.
IDEOLOGIZED SMUT AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
The following passage is taken from Andy Nowicki's as yet unpublished collection of essays, Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 3. Volume 1 and Volume 2 are currently available for purchase.
by Andy Nowicki
Why did the sexual revolution take place? How did traditional notions of wedlock first get undermined? Who sought to effect this massive change, and to what end?
These questions are aptly investigated elsewhere, and are beyond the scope of my inquiry, which is composed for an altogether different purpose. That said, I think it must be acknowledged that these “changes and rearranges” didn’t just happen by accident. These trends were, to a greater or lesser degree, shoved upon us by those who have the power and resources to engage in effective trend-setting and opinion-shaping.
These questions are aptly investigated elsewhere, and are beyond the scope of my inquiry, which is composed for an altogether different purpose. That said, I think it must be acknowledged that these “changes and rearranges” didn’t just happen by accident. These trends were, to a greater or lesser degree, shoved upon us by those who have the power and resources to engage in effective trend-setting and opinion-shaping.
'THE LAST JEDI' AND THE DISNEY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Andy Nowicki is astonished and dismayed by the 93% "fresh" rating that "The Last Jedi" has received from film critics, as collated on the Rotten Tomatoes site.
FRIDAY, BLOODY FRIDAY: GIBSON'S "PASSION"
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| "By his stripes we are healed": Jim Caviezel as Jesus Christ in Gibson's gory "Passion" play. |
by Andy Nowicki
Twelve years ago, at the inception of the 2004 Lenten season, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released into theaters worldwide. Passion had already attained notoriety due to a concerted media campaign—led by the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman as well as other assorted “usual suspects”—to condemn the violent, gory New Testament drama as “anti-Semitic.”
Passion’s overwhelming success at the box office provoked hand-wringing aplenty, as well as some brow-furrowing puzzlement, from the chattering classes. Judging from its content, one never would have thought that the film would hold such mass appeal. Nevertheless, anomalous circumstances predominated, leaving cultural critics scratching their heads, befuddled by what would prove to be the cinematic sensation of the "oughts" decade.
Passion’s overwhelming success at the box office provoked hand-wringing aplenty, as well as some brow-furrowing puzzlement, from the chattering classes. Judging from its content, one never would have thought that the film would hold such mass appeal. Nevertheless, anomalous circumstances predominated, leaving cultural critics scratching their heads, befuddled by what would prove to be the cinematic sensation of the "oughts" decade.
SCI-FI CINEMATIC CHRISTMAS: AFFIRMATIONS OF INCARNATION
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| Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell in "Moon" |
by Andy Nowicki
In many ways Christmas is a highly cinematic season. The feelings that surround the holiday are finally ineffable, better expressed in images than words. Language, wonderful tool of communication though it is, sometimes fails us when it comes to conveying the glory and beauty of truly profound occasions.
That is why, when pondering the "meaning of Christmas," one often thinks of movies: Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, the many and varied cinematic incarnations of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and so forth. Highly as I regard these and other explicitly Christmas-themed films, however, they were not the formative movies of my youth. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and from an early age imbibed and internalized the science-fiction ethos of that time. The original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies thus appeal to me with more immediacy than countless, no doubt superior films from previous eras and separate genres.
That is why, when pondering the "meaning of Christmas," one often thinks of movies: Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, the many and varied cinematic incarnations of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and so forth. Highly as I regard these and other explicitly Christmas-themed films, however, they were not the formative movies of my youth. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and from an early age imbibed and internalized the science-fiction ethos of that time. The original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies thus appeal to me with more immediacy than countless, no doubt superior films from previous eras and separate genres.
'CORIOLANUS': MAN AGAINST THE MOB
by Andy Nowicki
Many of those of a contemporary “alternative Right” orientation blame Christianity for bequeathing the dogma of egalitarianism to the modern world. Such people claim that the attempted abolition of natural hierarchies and the destructively “leveling” momentum of democracy and campaigns of enforced “equality” derive from the Christian doctrine that all human souls are equal before God, a notion which finds its most famous formulation in the words of St. Paul from his New Testament epistle to the Galatians: “In Christ, there is neither slave nor free, Gentile nor Jew, male nor female.”
I have written elsewhere on this subject; here it will suffice to observe that in the two millennia since Jesus Christ walked the earth, social, gender, and racial hierarchies have, prior to the cultural revolutions of the last few decades, generally remained untouched.
William Shakespeare, Christendom’s greatest playwright, lived at a time of great intellectual ferment and cultural tumult, yet even in his time both Protestant and Catholic alike affirmed the prudence of continued social stratification. If all men were equal before God, this in no sense mandated any presumption of equality of title or status between individuals, cultures, races, or sexes. If the serious Christian of the Reformation era took seriously Paul’s declaration regarding the absence of distinctions between different groups of humanity, he also acknowledged the divine origin of Biblical passages commanding slaves to obey their masters and instructing wives to be subservient to their husbands.
I have written elsewhere on this subject; here it will suffice to observe that in the two millennia since Jesus Christ walked the earth, social, gender, and racial hierarchies have, prior to the cultural revolutions of the last few decades, generally remained untouched.
William Shakespeare, Christendom’s greatest playwright, lived at a time of great intellectual ferment and cultural tumult, yet even in his time both Protestant and Catholic alike affirmed the prudence of continued social stratification. If all men were equal before God, this in no sense mandated any presumption of equality of title or status between individuals, cultures, races, or sexes. If the serious Christian of the Reformation era took seriously Paul’s declaration regarding the absence of distinctions between different groups of humanity, he also acknowledged the divine origin of Biblical passages commanding slaves to obey their masters and instructing wives to be subservient to their husbands.
ARONOFSKY'S TWIN TRAGEDIES
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| Natalie Portman in Black Swan (2010) |
by Andy Nowicki
Darren Aronofsky's remarkable 2010 movie Black Swan functions as an aesthetic companion piece to his equally striking 2008 offering, The Wrestler. The two films take place in settings that could not possibly be more different, yet each tells essentially the same story, a story that is undeniably relevant to our age and culture.
LEFTY FILMIC SELF-CRITICISM: "THE IDES OF MARCH"
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| George Clooney bewares "The Ides of March" |
The Ides of March is a haunting and prescient 2011 film that chronicles the rise of Pennsylvanian Governor Mike Morris, played by George Clooney, as he makes his way through the Democratic primaries. Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, Morris’s junior campaign manager. Early in the film, during an informal get together with his fellow campaigners and members of the press Meyers admits his personal conviction in support of Morris’s policies, and more significantly, in Morris himself as a genuine avatar of these views.
THE DISCRETE WIT OF WHIT STILLMAN
This article was originally published at Counter-Currents in October 2012. It is republished here to serve as an introduction to Andy Nowicki's upcoming review of Stillman's latest film, Love and Friendship.
by Andy Nowicki
In a previous life, before I pledged fealty to the art of the written word – a pursuit for which I have subsequently won fame, fortune, and unbounded acclaim – a different calling beckoned for a time.
I enjoyed reading as a kid, but I also loved the cinema, while at the same time generally detesting everything savoring of "Hollywood" glitz, glamour, and celebrity; by my late-teen years, I'd found a number of films with which I felt I could identify, which spoke in a unique way to my restless young heart.
I enjoyed reading as a kid, but I also loved the cinema, while at the same time generally detesting everything savoring of "Hollywood" glitz, glamour, and celebrity; by my late-teen years, I'd found a number of films with which I felt I could identify, which spoke in a unique way to my restless young heart.
SEEKING A NEW BEGINNING: MEL GIBSON'S "APOCALYPTO"
The following is a film review and analysis I composed for The Last Ditch in 2007. I am reposting it here to set the stage for my upcoming reconsideration of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, to be published during Holy Week.
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| Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw in Gibson's "Apocalypto" |
by Andy Nowicki
Mel Gibson's latest movie, Apocalypto, is at the end of its run in theaters. Opening in early December, the film achieved a modest success, raking in nothing close to what The Passion of the Christ made, but still earning somewhere close to Braveheart's overall gross.What makes that modest success extraordinary is the fact that Gibson has essentially become a persona non grata in the film industry since his run-in with a Jewish policeman who arrested him for drunken driving in August 2006. If Passion didn't alienate Gibson from Hollywood's largely Jewish movers and shakers, including the distributors — the men who made Gibson rich and famous, and are now eager to unmake him — then his drunken anti-Semitic tirade on the occasion of his arrest, widely broadcast across the nation afterwards, surely did.
"THE BIG SHORT": REVELATION OF THE METHOD?
The Big Short is a clever, engaging, and enraging movie about the predations and depredations of a criminal ruling class.
Like 2014's Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short is based on a best-selling non-fiction novel detailing Wall Street high-stakes sleaze and fraudulence. This time, however, instead of being an autobiographical account of one man's life of unrelenting sociopathic greed, the tale is told from the collective point of view of a gang of both insiders and relative outsiders to the New York financial establishment.
Like 2014's Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short is based on a best-selling non-fiction novel detailing Wall Street high-stakes sleaze and fraudulence. This time, however, instead of being an autobiographical account of one man's life of unrelenting sociopathic greed, the tale is told from the collective point of view of a gang of both insiders and relative outsiders to the New York financial establishment.
SCI-FI CINEMATIC CHRISTMAS: AFFIRMATIONS OF INCARNATION
 |
| Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell in "Moon" |
by Andy Nowicki
In many ways Christmas is a highly cinematic season. The feelings that surround the holiday are finally ineffable, better expressed in images than words. Language, wonderful tool of communication though it is, sometimes fails us when it comes to conveying the glory and beauty of truly profound occasions.
That is why, when pondering the "meaning of Christmas," one often thinks of movies: Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, the many and varied cinematic incarnations of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and so forth. Highly as I regard these and other explicitly Christmas-themed films, however, they were not the formative movies of my youth. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and from an early age imbibed and internalized the science-fiction ethos of that time. The original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies thus appeal to me with more immediacy than countless, no doubt superior films from previous eras and separate genres.
That is why, when pondering the "meaning of Christmas," one often thinks of movies: Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, the many and varied cinematic incarnations of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and so forth. Highly as I regard these and other explicitly Christmas-themed films, however, they were not the formative movies of my youth. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and from an early age imbibed and internalized the science-fiction ethos of that time. The original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies thus appeal to me with more immediacy than countless, no doubt superior films from previous eras and separate genres.
STAR WARS: THE DIVERSITY AWAKENS
Much has been said about the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. In Alt-Right circles this has tended to focus on a kind of unholy trinity of:
- The malevolent Jewishness of J.J. Abrams
- The malevolent casting of a Black actor in one of the two lead roles
- The malevolent casting of a "kick-ass," "empowered" woman in the other lead
AUTHORITY AND "COMPLIANCE"
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| "The experiment requires that you continue." |
by Andy Nowicki
Compliance, a barely-known and rarely-discussed 2012 film written and directed by Craig Zobel, features a thoroughly unglamorous, no-name cast and is set almost entirely in the most familiar and ubiquitous of establishments: a fast-food restaurant somewhere in the heart of the large swath of country known as "Middle America." Yet this thoroughly unnerving film manages to create an atmosphere of unbearable suspense and creeping horror without introducing any blood, violence, or pyrotechnics whatsoever.
The central premise of Compliance is indeed more disquieting than any "torture porn": the movie suggests that people generally would rather obey authority, even at the expense of their own moral beliefs, than challenge or resist a supposed "man in charge." Instead of fighting, they would sooner meekly allow themselves to be degraded, molested, and violated; worse, they are at least as likely to become equally hapless instruments of degradation, molestation, and violation against others, all to avoid being a bother to someone who claims the power to demand compliance from them.
The central premise of Compliance is indeed more disquieting than any "torture porn": the movie suggests that people generally would rather obey authority, even at the expense of their own moral beliefs, than challenge or resist a supposed "man in charge." Instead of fighting, they would sooner meekly allow themselves to be degraded, molested, and violated; worse, they are at least as likely to become equally hapless instruments of degradation, molestation, and violation against others, all to avoid being a bother to someone who claims the power to demand compliance from them.
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