Entourage (2004-2011) / Entourage 2015

I spent the last week bingewatching the 8 seasons of the Entourage TV series to review the movie. Why? The film bombed and the show is regarded as totally offensive & stupid entertainment for aging conservative hipsters. I needed to finally watch this to understand the mindset of Republicans, especially Hollywood Republicans and to try and empathize and sympathize with them.

I enjoyed the first 5 seasons as naive Bush Era comfort food for a post-9/11 generation who needed to drown out the horror and heavy concepts with crunk music, softcore TV porn and lots of mean-spirited humor. The Middle Eastern war is hardly referenced but it dictates the tone of the entire run. We're following a group of low class "street kids" from Queens, NYC who slowly reach the top of Hollywood. It happens slowly and for the most part realistically as they face setbacks of capitalist social climbing. The "epic" arc of this show is a bare-bones how-to guide from Mark Walhberg on the characters, methods, stories, lingo, dangers and rewards of becoming a Hollywood actor. But it only concentrates on the school of acting, directing, producing, writing and craftsmanship of moviemaking for white republican Gen Xers; and pretty much only the males.

See we follow the targeted circle of shady business from ethnic corporate characters who never question their servitude to such a corrupt system of exploitative globalized local ideology. No one questions the negative effect of their actions on anyone, not even their closest allies, family and friends. Except the protagonist, "E", who is the straight-and-narrow Catholic white kid who can hang with "the wiggers" and keep them on track to reaching bourgeois means of living. But he never becomes accepted by the rich and he, his actor best friend and their posse of social connections, business partners and soft muscle keep their gainful employment growing more and more amoral. I do not condone that kind of living nor that kind of writing unless its satirical and headed for a climax that is pro-democracy, pro-equality, socially moral and self-improving FOR those who need the instructions: kids, invalids, oppressed, depressed, vegetated and not pro-active. For all its warts, Entourage does inspire the watcher to act in both senses. To carve out a stake in life to live good later, to build a next egg. But the characters never make the world a better place. They simply play a part in a chaotic "God plot " that mirrors society only in that its based on the propaganda that supports it. Entourage ("E") starts as a hard-edge camp nostalgia piece that serves as nostalgia for those who lived it and ultimately fizzles, underperforms when it ends as a darkly crazed Ayn Rand piece of absurd rightwing revisionist history and a kind of Satanic bible on ruining your life. The Hollywood Ending of the show is a total cop-out. Was this intentional?

By the time the film was made, the cast seem totally checked out and repulsed by their characters. The show promotes a kind of Hollywood that is toxic for most people and is secretive in its real crimes and existential horrors. But now America and the world is rebelling to this cheap puppetshow Illuminati social rigging. It attaches itself to any majorly successful young show or star. Walhberg is like a soldier preaching his abusive "neoliberal" conservative government monopoly. The negative turn the show takes in Season 6 is quite gross and deadening. As the country shifts from the culture of George W Bush to the culture of Obama, things get much darker, Satanic and passive aggressively conservative. There's a short pointless subplot where E learns to dishonestly claim racism to land an actor job for his untalented young black male friend and first official client. Its such an awful display of white nationalist Neo-Nazi genetic hierarchy programming, which is the most extreme and horrific display of mental illness, economic oppression and sadomasochistic indirect torturing of the bullying bourgeois to the trusting, naive, left-in-the-dark minorities who don't fit the pyramidal ideology for 1% of the population. Corporate Hollywood's entire purpose is to put people to sleep so they make the rich richer and forget their own socio-economical struggles. The show flirts with subverting this but ultimately accepts "the way things are".

Whats tragic is that the show builds progressiveness, democracy, economy, wit and a unique passion initially in those special first 5 seasons and its powerful because of its dude-bro trappings. The show is supremely bro-mantic, almost to a homoerotic level. It starts as a queasy and then tranquil even blissful pill to make you love these characters despite their deep failures as young men. They play realistically and beautifully in a decent Scorsese style of comedic drama and dramatic comedy... "dramedy". What might account for the switch in creative tone is the gradual HBO franchising that happens with every decent show HBO picks up. I thought Entourage worked best as a tone poem on the loneliness of Mark Wahlberg's search for identity and struggle to grow up. But the showrunner, who eventually directs the movie and writes most of the last seasons, gives into to being a total network shill who spoils all of the tender interplay, loses the transgressive even radically leftist elements to make a repetitive "cast of writers"dark sitcom fusion of The OC, The Simpsons, Sex & the City, The Sopranos and whatever still had ratings at the time. This works well as the "comeback season" Season 7 feels as experimental, respectful, engaged and electrified as the writing ever was. The Story Editors weave the plots well and the directing is quite brisk. But more and more the show becomes a soapbox for a Judeo-Christian egomania of judgment, violence, chauvinism and eventual White Boy self-worship. It provides a unique example of the failure of self-awareness. If the show made fun of itself more, became genuinely inclusive or changed the face of TV in any way, I would consider it a classic show. Its not.

It never touches The Larry Sanders Show in fusing comedy and drama and it never reaches that show's poignancy or hilarious wit. It wants to be a tell-all about show business and the struggle to make art commercially, but the humor of the show becomes a sad self-criticism of the bleak separation of lowly TV actors and the Hollywood puppeteers they serve. The show loses its credibility as working class blues and becomes an ugly mirror to the silent abuses that we are supposed to enjoy seeing played through these stifled talents to sell a dollar. This show, like the film version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, is the high level of farce that is not even aware of how farcical, phony and unflattering it is. They cannot let go of George W Bush's Republican lies or correctly process or politely react to the liberalism of Obama's American values. You see the redeeming human qualities dirtied by an intense racist rejection of each other. By the show's end, it becomes the dated, pathetic exploitation of dried up actors that it hoped to lampoon, help and prevent. Its a real anticlimax that I do not enjoy after a few days of investment. If the show painted filmmaking as a quest for quality and not a hunt for money, maybe it would've ended in a grand way.

The show had its strengths in the acting (at least early on), some of the directing and the growth of the character Ari Gold. See, the show starts as a character study of E and eventually includes his Italian-American sidekicks... and their sidekicks. But Jeremy Piven is electric as one of a few stars who is an HBO veteran and a modest name. The show starts as a far right expensive sitcom for white and black yokels in the American South but, thanks to the creative control Piven puts into his award-winning performance, the show gets some class and the actors up their game and the writers have something to write for. He also includes as much camp gay-friendly content in the intense gay-bashing as he can and tries to add an arc to the overall characterization. I think his direct say in the A plot's direction was nil, but they certainly bounced off of him as much as he bounced off of them. Its a case of the actor becoming the auteur but not given the total control he needed and deserved. Because the only boss in Hollywood is the head of execs, as the show obsessively writes into the show causing almost ALL of the show's decline. In fact, the show's A plot becomes the humbling and defanging of Ari Gold's Jewishness to the corporate capitalism of Aryan people. Thats what ruins the show: so much transcendant positive change in the reflection of leadership gets highjacked and replaced with in-your-face propaganda for capitalist White Pride, White Nationalism, rightwing-ism, republicanism and ultimately the creation of a NeoNazi elite class that presides over a distinctly whites-only utopian communism. Its bourgeois anti-art. Propaganda.

Yet I do not regret watching it through at least once to have some knowledge of what the world is up against and how the modern media sees itself. Its a history lesson for future generations not to repeat and to rebel against. Very much, this is the new type of modernism that artists now must deconstruct and post-modernize. I prefer totally new content if its good, but this type of bad art can be used to subvert its own prejudices. Unfortunately there is a massive bulk of cinema that is more Triumph of the Will than The Great Dictator. Is there goodness in badness? Is their badness in goodness? Is everything really gray? Is the brightness of childhood a fleeting illusion only sustained by physical youth? Or is it simply a projection of one's own sense of legend and experienced illusion?

Is Entourage a good show? If you view it in a Twin Peaks way where each run of the series is its own series. This is the typical style of global television. TV originally was closer to the diverse microcosm of anthology than the macro world-building of novels and epic films. Entourage works in the first 5 seasons as a comic book manchild fantasy that is almost essential to modern spectatorship's disintegration of white rightwing chauvinist patriarchy. Its the monkey minded-ness of the social group who are most anti-monkey mindness. We all are experiencing the group's exorcism of bigotry and hate in its most bigoted and hated minority. The sad truth is that the white man has made himself the most targeted minority and the most outwardly violent group because of their own competitive spirit against themselves. Thats what is bred from any social hierarchy's "winner of the lotto".

But remember that this show failed, is regarded shitty by the new press and Hollywood is determined to clean up its messes. Its sad that many names associated with the show have fallen into terrible career failure. Some have been accused of the sexual harassment that is even previously written into the show. By the final stretch the cameos in the show are simply favors for Wahlberg and the usual Hollywood republicans who need work: David Spade, James Woods, Andrew Dice Clay, Dennis Hopper, James Cameron. They are the real "entourage" who look out for each other. The entire show is a metaphor for Republican exclusiveness, The Elite. Its damning evidence of its own collective crimes. Is this intentional? Was a Marxist steering this asinine celebration of excess and materialism? To make it a lucrative but essential demystification and anti-propaganda to sabotage capitalism? Nah, I think its just a bad show. But its a bad show people still love. But we don't need anymore bad shows like Entourage.

You can sum up the emotional resonance of the show in the bromantic sadness of the phrase "later, bro" as you part from someone you really can't get along with but you're related by blood. Thats how the world sees America now.

The story ends with a shallow triumph that isn't really earned just to satisfy fans if the show never returns for a proper finale. The movie is a reboot for a 9th season that erases the mistakes of the 8th season. That I appreciate and see as a brilliant David Lynch level power play by Doug Ellin, the showrunner, writer and director, AND Mark Wahlberg who seems to be the major producer and free from network control. The show had an overly Romantic, sell out ending, akin to Objectivist standards. But the film, if its not a true ending, sets up another quest for a mature, darker, wiser story where the Entourage actually learn to be humans again. Could it ever become the progressive, leftist documentary of changing attitudes it aspired to be? Maybe. It is unfinished and left in a gray middle that is neither the show's highs or its lows. A sad ending if final but a good cliffhanger too. And thats sort of the most common type of ending in life. Maybe not the most preferred or important, but its the popular measure of mediocrity.

The show is a crystallization of white male egomania, the desperate urge to stay young and cool forever to fuck younger, cooler girls. Thats what Hollywood star system is filled with and motivated by and catering to. Its not a cancer of human thought but a symptom of a worse mental illness, the rejection of God and the quest to become AntiChrist, the superego, the man-god so separate bu equal to Creation that it is above all other living things. Its a collective oneness except exclusive for this genetic breed. As much as I liked some seasons more than others, I think the entire show is basically white supremacy porn, totally in service to fascism and oppression of laborers. And shows like this shouldn't be made the way this is ultimately executed. Its a shame, because its a decent show idea but its not popular except to the rich white audience who make it and the poor whites who want to buy into it. How sick is the American dream? You can watch Citizen Kane reject it or Entourage worship it. I think the choice of superiority is evident.

Alien vs Predator 2004 / Liebestraum 1991 / The World's Greatest Sinner 1962 / Ichi The Killer - The Animation 2002

Alien Vs Predator impressed me. I expected something way more militaristic, rightwing, white sausage fest, but actually got a thoughtful, shadowy, ambitious and well-integrated adaptation of a classic cross-franchise comic book. It also succeeds as semi-sequels to both of the franchises' films which is transcendent. Seriously, the entire film is luxuriously paced, intricately lit and directed with some real modesty and sweetness. So much of this is the perfect casting of Sanaa Lathan who while representing a new kind of racial representation in not just this genre but ALL GENRES, she fits the type expertly. She merges the dainty heroine presence of the 1950s actresses with a broader command of herself. The film has a few unintentional laughs (and many intentional ones) and I thought it was perhaps too much fluffy spectacle and not enough character, but this didn't receive the major push and care that Prometheus or even Alien Resurrection did. Yet... I think AVP is better than both of those sequels and I'm sure it trumps the new Predator movies.

The actual message of the film is hazy and so my opinion on it is still out. The film's mythology casts the warring alien races as related to South American & African tribal cultures. In ass backwards fashion, AVP tries to sell some kind of apology or meditation on the savagery of slavery and the monstrosity of the slavemasters... by letting the slavemasters win and driving home the perceived beast nature of the "lower" alien race. Its offensive to me as a black person, as an animal lover and as a universal consciousness. The film is written by the director Paul W.S. Anderson who brings his usual Gothic visual panache & by the original Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (an early collaborator with Carpenter and directed Return of the Living Dead). This lends the film a detailed sci-fi logic and all of the popcorn cues desired and it is progressive and enlightened in many ways, but it is also a bit meat-headed, warped and a tad trashy. Sanaa Lathan is the best part and gets decent support and I will definitely watch this again, but its not a great movie. But still important to analyze and refer to.

Liebestraum came out in 1991 - the height of David Lynch mania - and you can tell. Its made in the mode of Twin Peaks meets 1989's Sex Lies and Videotape. Its a jazz meets industrial erotic thriller in a film noir vein (or "vain").

I found the film to be quite a relaxing and pleasant experience. Its engaging intellectually as a demonstration of Freudian constructs of sex, neurosis & dreams, totally in keeping with Lynch and Hitchcock. Director Mike Figgis even casts Kim Novak as the archetypal mother. The acting is measured and textured, the naturalistic lighting is fresh and the subtexts are emotional and important enough. Except for a few brief glimpses, the film doesn't bowl you over. I mean once the mystery is unraveled, will you rewatch it for the aesthetics and will the themes ring louder? Doubtful.

The film practices the Early Remodernism I think Amos Poe originally intended. Its beholden to pre-postmodernism, the art and social ideals of pre-WW2 western thought. Its embracing enough of black music and highly critical of capitalism, yet still annoyingly, dogmatically conservative and its "retro" is an overwhelmingly artificial stylistic choice that undercuts the drama, not building it. Modern American cinema is steeped in this kind of indie filmmaking - sexually frustrated, European cinema-mimicking, nostalgic infantilized ego trips. Hitchcock, De Palma and David Lynch have sort of mastered this ethos and deconstructed it, so the remaining films in this genre are really just boring and predictable now, but Liebestraum does deserve a concentrated watch for unconscious reasons.

Why you should really watch the film is the curious amount of ideas borrowed by Lynch in subsequent films. The look, the sound design, the cast, even direct story arcs are taken. Lynch has used Alicia Witt, would cast Pamela Gidley in FWWM and Bill Pullman in the almost-remake Lost Highway. It demystifies and lowers Lynch in my eyes as he goes out of his way to rarely reveal influences and I didn't know he was copying contemporaries. Lost Highway is Lynchian and a more powerful experience, but essentially its the same script and production design as Liebestraum. Noticeably its the most hip and unusual style Lynch has attempted and you have to now give that credit to Liebestraum.

Besides that historical revelation, it is a competent low budget art film for its time and it holds up extremely well to today's predictable and even more gratuitously derivative crime/pulp/thriller/mysteries on TV and in theaters. Again, its a little too impersonal, leisurely and basic (which Lost Highway improves on), but maybe more authentic because of these limitations. Its not regressive but definitely old fashioned.

Its been over-exaggerated by a tiny minority of film fans, but The World's Greatest Sinner is a unique and bold touchstone in the history of early American indie filmmaking. It was directed, produced and written by the eternally struggling brute-characterized actor Timothy Carey as a kind of angry, perverted, manic, egotistical study of itself.

Carey plays an insurance agent who drops out of society, forms an atheist rock band, renames himself "God", runs for office and then has a moral breakdown about his own Atheism and quest to free mankind from God. Its a blunter version of Kane's study of populists, fascists, egoists and Western society's tools to produce them. But this is a much more cartoon and ignorant version. It still holds up as a mirror to people like Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler, but this was designed to bash Jerry Lee Lewis and Hollywood hipsters and not reveal the artist's own apparent shortcomings.

Like Welles, Carey wanted to prove that he was more than the big dumb oafs he played. Now the film is not great technically or morally. Its flatly a conservative Christian "scare film" that is anti-black music, anti-communist, anti-atheist, anti-Satan and anti-JFK. Carey comes off like the 60s' Alex Jones: paranoid, ignorant, childish and really disturbed in his self-worship. So its poetic that that is what he's showcasing. In many ways you can compare it to the self-destructive ego on display in Citizen Kane, The Room or Dennis Hopper's films. These guys made personally revealing, audacious "art films" but ruined their careers in the process. Carey is on the bottom of the list but he's still an early example.

Ichi The Killer - The Animation Ep.0 was the best watch of the night. It breaks from the original film's medium, tone, structure and messages, yet it achieves the same effect by building subtext for the first story.
Now the original film is a darkly funny study of the psychotic, sadomasochistic relationship Japanese men have to white supremacy and thus to each other. This is the underlying point that is really only revealed in the climax and lightly woven between key instances of each scene of a massive, campy pulp plot. With that revelation already in the Japanese fans' minds, the anime focuses on a harder boiled story with an even more surrealistic "ordinary" reality within the original manga universe that inspired the films. And it can also shave off the ornament, the aesthetic and the censored.

This film is allowed to explore the more extreme and horrific suggestions made by the original Ichi.
And at the same time, because it is done in a vibrantly expressionistic "limited animation" style (almost the virtual experience of reading a manga), this film is allowed to work on a deeper dream level. Its so unreal that it can say scarier things about reality or "realism".

Overall, you will love this if you love the first Ichi film. Its a proper, respectful and separate part of the mythos that opens up the parameters of the original and cleverly opens up possibility of more parameters to seek and not just in cheap carbon copy sequels.

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology 2012, The Reality of the Virtual 2004

Two film lectures by Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Loved both of these.

In "Pervert's", Zizek uses many examples of popular & obscure cinema to explain the phenomenon of how our shared ideological values confine us from making connections and exposing the power struggles played out within and outside of them. His summary of The Dark Knight as a very pandering, manipulative and extremely conservative work is especially scolding in its accuracy. As a thinker and theorist, Zizek is so inarguable and well-read in the realms of philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis and movies. The guy would've made an excellent filmmaker.

With the less film-centered "Virtual", Slavoj focuses on perception again on the basis of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. For a foreign tongue with a lisp, he breaks down some very complex concepts very well, although I could use a second viewing. His insights are totally applicable to the film-watching experience and big cinephiles will take away a lot.

Highly recommended!

THX 1138 (Director's Cut) / Urban Cowboy / Night of the Demon

Watched the good part of THX 1138, the re-edited version from the 2000s. I didn't like my experience but I'm intrigued by the original 70s footage. I haven't seen the original film (but I do like the short film that inspired it), but this seems like a warped experience of a decent esoteric "futurist" film. A lot of it is lost with too much deleted footage of nothingness and pretty shiny objects. Very Kenneth Anger. Obviously very similar to Lucas' student films of cars driving. He's a technician who writes about technology so he can film technology. Thankfully he writes about the dangers to be avoided. He tries to make some political statement. Its topical, generational and not evergreen humor or referencing, but the rest of the film is so innovative and oddly moving, that I give it a pass. Hopefully the 70s cut is more watchable and less ridiculous and pretentious. Like WB took the film from Lucas when they saw how extreme & crazed his vision was. So this new version is the matured, successful, commercialized Lucas trying to correct his old mistakes or insert new theories. He's a fascinating director. As experimental as can be, yet as commercial as can be. I might re-review the Lucas remix after watching the original.

Urban Cowboy was a bore for me because it too predictable in its wholesomeness. And its wholesomeness seemed a bit cheated and dishonest. It tries to be Earthy and only erects a Broadway style of artificiality that is aesthetically tranquil but also lifeless dramatically. The plot is low on conflict and the resolution is ambiguous, tame and not even hopeful. The concept of the plot is good: two people marry quickly and then wonder if they should get divorced. They both find the ideal partner they've always lusted, but realize its better to settle for less because they belong together.

Both characters are written as dumb, impulsive, naive, selfish, incompetent and unaware of love's meaning. But they find love together. Thats a warm romantic type plot of the 1950s. But its dressed up in the culture of honky tonk big city cowboy culture. It paints a picture of accepted hopelessness and insulated ignorance. But its never satirical or cruel to them for being so imperfect. The kinds of films Robert Evans and other Hollywood filmmakers were starting to make after Coppola's Godfather were based on the realism and post-structuralism of the arthouse. But few grasped the original Neorealist movement and interpreted badly, Urban Cowboy being one.

Its glossy, crafted simply and somewhat true to its sources. But its not provoking thought, addressing issues or mining for truth outside of its inherited tropes & cliches. There are lots of films like this where Judy Garland & Mickey Rooney types, "All-American kids" triumph over the complex, damaged, truly vulnerable figures explored in foreign films. This is rightwing propaganda made in reaction to true art of radicals who were fighting oppression and economic ruin elsewhere. Hollywood films like this are sour and it highlights the drastic decline of quality after the 70s boom. Where everything became dumbed down beer for the masses to sleep easier. Lets study films like these but not give them too much credit beyond "pretty, watchable pap".

My horror pick was Night of the Demon (Curse of the Demon in America because they still missed using the N-word). I've watched this film a few times as I've aged and it only grows bigger and better. This is a very, very classy, thoughtful, open-minded, fair study of the power of dark occult knowledge. Unfortunately, it was sold as a money-making popcorn horror film and the producer inserted some gratuitous, extremely dating monster footage in what was a pretty undated work of cinema from Jacques Tournier of "Cat People" fame. This truncated version isn't at all bad because of it, but you thirst for the original vision, especially when the significant edge of the final scene is lost because of too many dollars thrown at the screen. Check it out the UK version first and then move on to the U.S., trust me!