BOOKS. THEY MAKE GREAT MOVIES.
This sign for Roku, which data-streaming device Shine Box regularly uses to view motion picture, is down the block from the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, which 1941 building was built in the shape of an open book.
Jujube Manifesto
Jared Diamond, the biogeographer and psychologist of evolution, wrote in The New York Review of Books about a new book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.
In his review, Diamond discusses the different psychic effects of colonized societies. Countries with rich resources were "extractive economic institutions," where European forces could get away with exploitative abuses to "drain wealth" of the local people, like the diamond trade in Zimbabwe or former banana republic Guatemala. Otherwise:
"... in formerly poor countries with sparse native populations, such as Costa Rica and Australia, European settlers had to work themselves and developed institutional incentives rewarding work. When the former colonies achieved independence, they variously inherited either the extractive institutions that coerced the masses to produce wealth for dictators and the elite, or else institutions by which the government shared power and gave people incentives to pursue. The extractive institutions retarded economic development, but incentivizing institutions promoted it."
In Bambi v. Godzilla (2007) a book about Hollywood moviemaking, the playwright and belle lettres punchliner David Mamet applies a similar idea of "extractive" versus "incentivizing" to the moviegoing audience. Mamet says that people keep going to bad movies the way that Diamond suggests oppressed populations fell victim to the pillage of Western mercantilism:
"The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring, for they ratify for the viewer the presence of a repressive mechanism and offer momentary reprieve from anxiety with this thought: 'Enough money spent can cure anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody."
This might seem to evidence a habit of "retarded economic development." But instead, the "hour and a half of garbage" becomes the extractivist's incentivizer for moviegoers' to pay $13 to pursue the next Twilight movie, or new Johnny Depp vehicle, in which advanced critics say Depp delivers.
Our food ration is the $15 pulled from our wages for soda and popcorn.
In his review, Diamond discusses the different psychic effects of colonized societies. Countries with rich resources were "extractive economic institutions," where European forces could get away with exploitative abuses to "drain wealth" of the local people, like the diamond trade in Zimbabwe or former banana republic Guatemala. Otherwise:
"... in formerly poor countries with sparse native populations, such as Costa Rica and Australia, European settlers had to work themselves and developed institutional incentives rewarding work. When the former colonies achieved independence, they variously inherited either the extractive institutions that coerced the masses to produce wealth for dictators and the elite, or else institutions by which the government shared power and gave people incentives to pursue. The extractive institutions retarded economic development, but incentivizing institutions promoted it."
In Bambi v. Godzilla (2007) a book about Hollywood moviemaking, the playwright and belle lettres punchliner David Mamet applies a similar idea of "extractive" versus "incentivizing" to the moviegoing audience. Mamet says that people keep going to bad movies the way that Diamond suggests oppressed populations fell victim to the pillage of Western mercantilism:
"The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring, for they ratify for the viewer the presence of a repressive mechanism and offer momentary reprieve from anxiety with this thought: 'Enough money spent can cure anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody."
This might seem to evidence a habit of "retarded economic development." But instead, the "hour and a half of garbage" becomes the extractivist's incentivizer for moviegoers' to pay $13 to pursue the next Twilight movie, or new Johnny Depp vehicle, in which advanced critics say Depp delivers.
Our food ration is the $15 pulled from our wages for soda and popcorn.
Alps
(2011) Giorgos Lanthimos. Cinema Village.
The Shine Box went to see Alps the weekend that audiences flocked to The Dark Knight Rises, which smash opening was blighted by the Aurora mass killing spree. Alps might provide a corollary to the gruesome events.
In the movie, a group of disparate citizens form a secret group who impersonates dead strangers, in the effort of providing solace to the surviving family members who are not yet ready to accept the loss. The group is not made up of professional actors, but paramedics, gym teachers, and truck drivers. These amateurs reenact key episodes in the life of the deceased, with the participation of the mournful mothers and fathers and boyfriends. It may give a healing feel of eternity. The families pays for the charitable service after an initial four free sessions.
The premise of Alps seems to mimic the news coverage of the events in Colorado. Profiles of the innocents, the grieving reports of family and friends, the assemblage media narrative of biting and bittersweet memory. It is an imperfect reenactment which serves to dramatize the mystery behind the vicious happenstance of life.
The macabre acting troup calls themselves, “Alps,” after the Swiss mountain range. According to the head of the group, who goes by the codename “Mont Blanc,” the Alps are a symbol of nature too monumental to be replaced, but powerful enough to replace nature.
Don’t the movies act the same way?
The Shine Box went to see Alps the weekend that audiences flocked to The Dark Knight Rises, which smash opening was blighted by the Aurora mass killing spree. Alps might provide a corollary to the gruesome events.
In the movie, a group of disparate citizens form a secret group who impersonates dead strangers, in the effort of providing solace to the surviving family members who are not yet ready to accept the loss. The group is not made up of professional actors, but paramedics, gym teachers, and truck drivers. These amateurs reenact key episodes in the life of the deceased, with the participation of the mournful mothers and fathers and boyfriends. It may give a healing feel of eternity. The families pays for the charitable service after an initial four free sessions.
 |
| Monte Rosa dances for father. Alps (2011). |
The premise of Alps seems to mimic the news coverage of the events in Colorado. Profiles of the innocents, the grieving reports of family and friends, the assemblage media narrative of biting and bittersweet memory. It is an imperfect reenactment which serves to dramatize the mystery behind the vicious happenstance of life.
The macabre acting troup calls themselves, “Alps,” after the Swiss mountain range. According to the head of the group, who goes by the codename “Mont Blanc,” the Alps are a symbol of nature too monumental to be replaced, but powerful enough to replace nature.
Don’t the movies act the same way?
Colorado and Camden
Among other civic horror shows, Camden, NJ was once the site of an unprecedented mass murder akin to the shootings in Aurora, CO last weekend.
In 1949, a gun freak and loser shut-in open fired on a series of innocent people whom he believed were persecuting him. Read about the details here.
Like the Colorado sicko, the Camden shooter did not off himself at the end of his spree and was taken into custody. He lived into his eighties and died in an insane asylum, though continually insisted he was not an irrational actor.
This weekend's headline killings involve the pop situationalism of the movies. According to the 2009 obituary of the Camden killer, "he later told police that he had spent the previous evening sitting through three showings of a double feature and had thought that actress Barbara Stanwyck was one of his hated neighbors."
None of this proves any influence of the movies on madness, but might demonstrate a singular disgusting aberration in the impressionability of the mass mind.
In 1949, a gun freak and loser shut-in open fired on a series of innocent people whom he believed were persecuting him. Read about the details here.
Like the Colorado sicko, the Camden shooter did not off himself at the end of his spree and was taken into custody. He lived into his eighties and died in an insane asylum, though continually insisted he was not an irrational actor.
This weekend's headline killings involve the pop situationalism of the movies. According to the 2009 obituary of the Camden killer, "he later told police that he had spent the previous evening sitting through three showings of a double feature and had thought that actress Barbara Stanwyck was one of his hated neighbors."
None of this proves any influence of the movies on madness, but might demonstrate a singular disgusting aberration in the impressionability of the mass mind.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
(2012) Timur Bekmambetov, Regal Battery Park.
A gimmicky concept played for no laughs and too much CGI action, with in-jokes lost in the algorithmic mess like the one about Stephen Douglas courting a young Mary Todd before Lincoln would both steal Mary away and historically debate the Illinois Senator over sundry issues like the economy of slaves.
Abe Lincoln is a blur of impulse and his team of freedman, store clerk and good dracula are given little expressive huddle. Mary Todd Winstead provides an actorly highlight, as does as the aging makeup for Benjamin Walker as he transforms into fiftysomething President Lincoln, if only because the makeup is much much better than that applied to Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar, an American historical figure who also hunted rebel vampires.
The movie bleaches out the historiological
premise that seems might be a crux in the book, but focus-grouped out of the
adaptation, that the antebellum South is a vampire haven and the slave trade
exists to provide the undead a source of food. The Civil War is thus fought to
destroy this bloodsucking empire.
The premise, like the action sequences, is glossed over without much gloss, other than a thin matricide-revenge plot we have all seen before. As a result, it is probable that the movie has alienated many movie audiences, including Southerners, blacks, history buffs, and teenagers seeking cool special effects.
Hollywood has become effectual at providing movies that are everything but. Looks like a movie, sounds like a movie, but by the time you have eaten all your popcorn and slurped your soda, doesn’t taste like a movie.
In the mid-1960s, Allan Katzman, founder of The East Village Other, a radical biweekly newspaper, described mainstream news as a similar fake:
“The papers of pseudo events, news leaks and press releases, offend no one; they take no moral stand. They are just... neutral. They furnish our boring and repetitive lives with boring and repetitive 'news.’"
Substitute “news” for “movies” and the predicament of the Hollywood multiplex is answered.
Playwright and moviemaker David Mamet, in his book Bambi v. Godzilla, uses the metaphor of politics to explicate the con game of Hollywood movies. The government makes “periodic declarations” which “assuage fully half of the populace absent any correspondence between that verbiage and the government’s actions or, indeed, between them and the plausible. The administration, like the sitcom of old, has discovered that, given an immobilized audience, a presentation of the form is sufficient entertainment.”
Mamet argues that “big and bad films, summer films, blockbusters have similarly become the laugh track to our national experiment... we are reassured by their presence rather than their content or operations.”
As a result, the moviegoer buys a ticket, and then might as well go home to watch TV.
A gimmicky concept played for no laughs and too much CGI action, with in-jokes lost in the algorithmic mess like the one about Stephen Douglas courting a young Mary Todd before Lincoln would both steal Mary away and historically debate the Illinois Senator over sundry issues like the economy of slaves.
Abe Lincoln is a blur of impulse and his team of freedman, store clerk and good dracula are given little expressive huddle. Mary Todd Winstead provides an actorly highlight, as does as the aging makeup for Benjamin Walker as he transforms into fiftysomething President Lincoln, if only because the makeup is much much better than that applied to Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar, an American historical figure who also hunted rebel vampires.
The premise, like the action sequences, is glossed over without much gloss, other than a thin matricide-revenge plot we have all seen before. As a result, it is probable that the movie has alienated many movie audiences, including Southerners, blacks, history buffs, and teenagers seeking cool special effects.
Hollywood has become effectual at providing movies that are everything but. Looks like a movie, sounds like a movie, but by the time you have eaten all your popcorn and slurped your soda, doesn’t taste like a movie.
In the mid-1960s, Allan Katzman, founder of The East Village Other, a radical biweekly newspaper, described mainstream news as a similar fake:
“The papers of pseudo events, news leaks and press releases, offend no one; they take no moral stand. They are just... neutral. They furnish our boring and repetitive lives with boring and repetitive 'news.’"
Substitute “news” for “movies” and the predicament of the Hollywood multiplex is answered.
Playwright and moviemaker David Mamet, in his book Bambi v. Godzilla, uses the metaphor of politics to explicate the con game of Hollywood movies. The government makes “periodic declarations” which “assuage fully half of the populace absent any correspondence between that verbiage and the government’s actions or, indeed, between them and the plausible. The administration, like the sitcom of old, has discovered that, given an immobilized audience, a presentation of the form is sufficient entertainment.”
Mamet argues that “big and bad films, summer films, blockbusters have similarly become the laugh track to our national experiment... we are reassured by their presence rather than their content or operations.”
As a result, the moviegoer buys a ticket, and then might as well go home to watch TV.
Commando
(1985) Mark L. Lester. Tribeca Y, June 22, 2012.
The Shine Box likes to veer from use of the superlative statement. But Commando may be the best action movie ever made. The acting, writing and directing never flinch. A soundtrack of 80s steel drum and horns, lots of bare muscle Arnold, setpieces of supremely staged ass-kicking, and skanky macho dialogue by highly individuated scumbag psycho bad guys.
Shine Box saw the movie at a recent screening in the Basic Cable Classics series at Tribeca Y. Director Mark L. Lester appeared after the screening for an interview and Q&A.
L. Lester said the movie was rushed into release after the shoot and cobbled together in just four days by a crackerjack team of editors. These proved to be perfect working conditions. The final showdown between former black-ops buddies Matrix and Bennett was supposed to take place after a boat chase, but because of the budget, they improv’d the engine room and pipe impalement. “Let off some steam, Bennett.”
John Matrix demonstrates the one-man army which the American military has made of him, and is later pulled out of retirement to take care of the blowback. Matrix is from East Germany, where the Family was the State, and rock and roll was subversive. Matrix reads Creem magazine. “Maybe they were right.”
When Bennett steals his daughter, Jenny, Matrix disregards all loyalty to law and order to get her back. He uses a bulldozer to break into a weapons supply store, beats up cops, and kidnaps a woman, Rae Dawn Chong, who is tough and pretty with spry comic timing.
The fight scenes are sugared with taunting between the trained killers – “I eat Green Berets for breakfast, and right now I am very hungry...” All scenes in Commando end with a punchline, whether a quip, a maiming of multiple assailants, or Arnold’s hulking bicep as he carries a giant log and chainsaw down the mountain. “You think I could smell them coming?” asks the wounded soldier. Says Matrix, “I did.”
The Shine Box likes to veer from use of the superlative statement. But Commando may be the best action movie ever made. The acting, writing and directing never flinch. A soundtrack of 80s steel drum and horns, lots of bare muscle Arnold, setpieces of supremely staged ass-kicking, and skanky macho dialogue by highly individuated scumbag psycho bad guys.
Shine Box saw the movie at a recent screening in the Basic Cable Classics series at Tribeca Y. Director Mark L. Lester appeared after the screening for an interview and Q&A.
L. Lester said the movie was rushed into release after the shoot and cobbled together in just four days by a crackerjack team of editors. These proved to be perfect working conditions. The final showdown between former black-ops buddies Matrix and Bennett was supposed to take place after a boat chase, but because of the budget, they improv’d the engine room and pipe impalement. “Let off some steam, Bennett.”
John Matrix demonstrates the one-man army which the American military has made of him, and is later pulled out of retirement to take care of the blowback. Matrix is from East Germany, where the Family was the State, and rock and roll was subversive. Matrix reads Creem magazine. “Maybe they were right.”
When Bennett steals his daughter, Jenny, Matrix disregards all loyalty to law and order to get her back. He uses a bulldozer to break into a weapons supply store, beats up cops, and kidnaps a woman, Rae Dawn Chong, who is tough and pretty with spry comic timing.
The fight scenes are sugared with taunting between the trained killers – “I eat Green Berets for breakfast, and right now I am very hungry...” All scenes in Commando end with a punchline, whether a quip, a maiming of multiple assailants, or Arnold’s hulking bicep as he carries a giant log and chainsaw down the mountain. “You think I could smell them coming?” asks the wounded soldier. Says Matrix, “I did.”
Terror in A Texas Town
(1958) Joseph E. Lewis.
A Swedish immigrant defends the Texas territory that is rightly his from a Long Horn Boss Tweed. It may seem unlikely territory for a Scandinavian whaler, but America is both welcoming and prejudiced to everybody. The paradox is clear at the final showdown, where justice is served by the thrust of a harpoon over the draw of a sixshooter.
A Swedish immigrant defends the Texas territory that is rightly his from a Long Horn Boss Tweed. It may seem unlikely territory for a Scandinavian whaler, but America is both welcoming and prejudiced to everybody. The paradox is clear at the final showdown, where justice is served by the thrust of a harpoon over the draw of a sixshooter.
With no gun and no attitude, George Hansen
(Sterling Hayden) is first introduced as a bit of a simp. George's father Sven Hansen has retired from the high
seas to the deserts of Texas,
where he has been murdered and robbed of his land.
Actor Sterling Hayden wrote a late-career
sailor adventure novel called Voyager
(1976), and the salt and madness of the sea inform the character of young
Hansen, who is the sort of
troubled big man which Sterling Hayden has played in movies with such ironic
brawn, like the the impotent General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove (1968), the bigot NYC cop executed by the mob in a
Bronx pasta joint in The Godfather
(1972), and the whiny tankard-swigging beach house writer Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye (1974).
In this Texas town, the saloon is empty and without
bluster. The exchange of dialogue is slow and pauses are like winds in the
arroyo. The town sheriff is a flunky and argues that the town is civilized and
upholds the law, yet disregards George Hansen’s proof of probate records and
urges him to get a lawyer to defend his claims.
“You’re not in some foreign country now where a man has no rights at
all…. You’ve got a right to justice.” But justice slings guns in the court room. It is the sort of gringo jingo not so
long ago jabbered by a migrant Texan in the Oval Office. Founding fathers argued likewise at their
both best and worst to manipulate concepts in favor of greed and power.
Yet rancho ward boss Ed McNeil is not so
powerful. He is obese, smarmy, corrupt, rapacious, and disregards the sacred unwritten law of the South against burning a man's barn and killing his livestock.
His victims are honest farmers who do not want to disobey the law when baited to by the brigandage of McNeil, but who also do not want to give up without a fight. McNeil ties up the idea of justice like the tails of a rat king. He hires an aging gunfighter to do the
dirty work of clearing people off his stolen property. The assassin, who wears all black from hat to
boots, is eager to stay in the game.
Johnny Crale has lost the use of his shooting hand but has since relearned to blast with
accuracy using his left, and can draw on five chandelier candles with exact
precision. But his marksmanship is naught because he is only a killer of unarmed men. Johnny preys on the weak so is drawn to the life of the
freebooter. There is money to be made
for a hopeless cripple with a good trigger finger and cold conscience.
 |
| Like a WPA photo, farmers look on as their property is burned up by badmen. |
The true advance of civilization is upon
the frontier, and a new era makes way where the law of the gun loses to the law
of the speculator. New immigrant settlements, “popping up like jackrabbits,” must
be taught eradication. The Swede George
Hansen befriends Mexican sharecropper Jose Mirada, whose family is expecting a third
child and victimized by Boss McNeil. Terror
is played out as the political act of violence against innocent civilians in
the interest of acquiring property. It is no surprise that the script is credited on IMDB as written by blacklisted scribe Dalton Trumbo. The
man in black, a villainous icon of dime westerns, is a terrorist. George Hansen shoulders the brutality of
civil liberties as he does his father’s harpoon, with the whole town in tow
eager for the spectacle of blood.
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