Few films have given me the intense sadness that this film gives. As I grew bored watching it, I researched the troubled production and failed release. Its the perfect example of how not to make a film. But almost all tentpole Hollywood spectacles are reminiscent of this film. This bad movie might be superior to the 2014 reboot simply because its not as boring.
Thats not to say its not bland and boring in its own right. We have a bloated, past his prime Matthew Broderick surrounded by more C-list actors re-enacting scenes from Jaws, Independence Day and Jurassic Park. Its done in a heavy camp tone courtesy of openly gay German director Roland Emmerich, who sneaks in a lot of subversive images and ideas such as Godzilla being a pregnant male victim this time around and the many baby Godzilla's taking the place of black men in a large basketball stadium. Gay Nazi humor? I dunno. The film is a sick joke on immigration and a huge critique of American nationalism with a very communist slant.
You can argue "Zilla"is some kind of Luciferian metaphor as its a hermaphroditic animal god bent on depopulation. Emmerich's films are obsessed with normalizing depopulation: Independence Day, 2012, Day After Tomorrow. This film is maybe one of the earliest examples of an openly pro-NWO Hollywood blockbuster. Its offensive propaganda that will be a curio someday soon.
The film starts with a lot of good moments. The film looks good and Emmerich actually tells the story visually with a few memorable setpieces and action scenarios. Some moments are extremely disturbing in psycho-sexual ways. But we don't care about any of the annoying cartooned humans, the broad humor is very flat and Godzilla himself seems like an afterthought.
I recommend it as evidence of Hollywood's sick leftist capitalist agenda, depressed Y2K aestheticism and a sometimes amusing slice of poorly rendered schlock.
Monday, August 13, 2018
Sunday, June 10, 2018
Jerry Lewis
Rewatching old Jerry Lewis films after recently rereading his book The Total Filmmaker.
The films have aged well, but more so the films he didn't direct.
I was blown away by Frank Tashlin's Who's Minding The Store? He brought a humanity, romance, sexiness and refinement to Jerry's screen persona.
Jerry's own directing is a mutation of Tashlin's, more bizarre but more sloppy, amateur and rushed. Lewis experimented more as he was less focused on plot, character, emotionality or personal statement. It feels like he's assuming what audiences like rather than giving us what he likes, which is why his films are more difficult, not very funny and often boring.
But Lewis was definitely a more economical and lowbrow director. His directorial debut "The Bellboy" is among his best not because of plot or even cleverness of the comedy. The production aesthetic is minimized because of cost and schedule so he's making what was then a postmodern silent film. Lewis could throw a film together out of nothing and it would be mostly filler but always have a few moments of gold.
He would remake Bellboy into better films like The Patsy, The Errand Boy and The Ladies Man until making his zenith The Nutty Professor thanks to a growing stable of great repertoire writers, actors, designers and a fine budget and premise. Later films like The Family Jewels and The Big Mouth are almost painfully bland, forced, thin, repetitive and unoriginal. Lewis was always more of a performer than an artist and too much of a capitalist lapdog cut off from real social experience. His films often reek of insecurity, depression, sexual confusion and a violent madness, especially as he aged and his star fell.
Tashlin was the real genius who made solo Jerry as well as Martin & Lewis bankable. Lewis developed his style from the colorful and gag heavy Tashlin form. But Tashlin always tempered it with just enough plot, antagonism, protagonism and (imagine it) well thought out jokes. Lewis would depend of improv and putting himself center stage. Tashlin storyboarded, had excess material, surrounded Jerry with amazing supportive players and always respected the audience. He controlled the anarchistic Jerry ego and made it something universal and appealing.
Jerry scored a late stage masterpiece with Cracking Up. I've reviewed it on this blog because it is Jerry at his most focused, experimental, mature, dark and professional.
Lewis maybe wasn't a genius as a director but he was an important and decent comedy director and probably a genius actor when he was coached properly. One of the most tired jokes is that the French are crazy for thinking Lewis was a genius, let alone funny. He was both when he wanted to be.
Monday, May 28, 2018
Made 2001 / Astronaut's Daughter 1999 / The Ninth Gate 1999 / Waking Life 2001
Made is the first film directed by Jon Favreau, the longtime character actor who became an indie darling when he wrote and starred in Swingers. While it becomes obvious the directing of Swingers by Doug Liman was possibly the real reason Swingers worked, Favreau and his Swingers co-star Vince Vaughn recapture some of the old magic. Vaughn deserves most of the credit with his self-deprecating comedic improvising and Favreau gets credit for knowing how to support his star and humanize the rather plotless, pointless story. Its all saved with some smooth cinematography and a sincere working class sentimental gritty romanticism. Its a bit of a waste of some veteran & future acting stars, but its a very enjoyable directorial debut if still a disappointing sophomore script.
Astronaut's Daughter is a bad mega budget high concept ripoff of Rosemary's Baby and Hitchcock's Suspicion. Pre-fame Charlize Theron carries the evil baby of peak-fame Johnny Depp's alien-possessed astronaut. Its full of genre cliches, Depp's horrid fake Southern accent and stylized but braindead commercial directing. I still think its a high kitsch affair that is enjoyable. The DP and Production Designer are the true stars and the whole affair is a great mirror of moody Y2K shallowness and pop culture nostalgia. Also, given recent allegations of Depp's domestic abuse and his all-but-confirmed Luciferian status, this has a few moments of convincing menace. I actually think Depp should switch to playing villains now that his youth and sex appeal is long gone.
Released the same fucking year as Astronaut's Daughter, Ninth Gate is Roman Polanski's return to Hollywood filmmaking and another Johnny Depp vehicle based on Satanism. Thankfully its a much better film. Polanski paints a dark camp hybrid of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, his two biggest 70s successes. Its a brilliant way to tie the films together and reveal the shared subtexts. Its wonderfully directed, shot, plotted and Polanski pulls one of the best performances from the wooden Depp (who is doing a rather lazy impression of Jack Nicholson throughout). Whereas Astronaut's is a lukewarm Hollywood meditation on Freemason subversion, Gate is a fearless celebration of mythic Satan worship in cinema as well as a aggressively respectful examination of real world Luciferianism as a philosophy. It can't be as shocking or clever as Polanski's early horror films, but its anti-Christian themes are even more pronounced and playful.
Waking Life is a wonderful, overwhelming and life-affirming celebration of pop existentialism from Richard Linklater, Generation X's cinematic hippie philosopher extraordinaire. Feeling like a Brechtian documentary or simply a psychedelic dream, Linklater keeps it accessible, warm, fun and constantly enlightening. The film features a totally new form of storytelling with diverse influences with heavy subject matter but retains a quality of unpretentiousness. The best film on this short list.
Astronaut's Daughter is a bad mega budget high concept ripoff of Rosemary's Baby and Hitchcock's Suspicion. Pre-fame Charlize Theron carries the evil baby of peak-fame Johnny Depp's alien-possessed astronaut. Its full of genre cliches, Depp's horrid fake Southern accent and stylized but braindead commercial directing. I still think its a high kitsch affair that is enjoyable. The DP and Production Designer are the true stars and the whole affair is a great mirror of moody Y2K shallowness and pop culture nostalgia. Also, given recent allegations of Depp's domestic abuse and his all-but-confirmed Luciferian status, this has a few moments of convincing menace. I actually think Depp should switch to playing villains now that his youth and sex appeal is long gone.
Released the same fucking year as Astronaut's Daughter, Ninth Gate is Roman Polanski's return to Hollywood filmmaking and another Johnny Depp vehicle based on Satanism. Thankfully its a much better film. Polanski paints a dark camp hybrid of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, his two biggest 70s successes. Its a brilliant way to tie the films together and reveal the shared subtexts. Its wonderfully directed, shot, plotted and Polanski pulls one of the best performances from the wooden Depp (who is doing a rather lazy impression of Jack Nicholson throughout). Whereas Astronaut's is a lukewarm Hollywood meditation on Freemason subversion, Gate is a fearless celebration of mythic Satan worship in cinema as well as a aggressively respectful examination of real world Luciferianism as a philosophy. It can't be as shocking or clever as Polanski's early horror films, but its anti-Christian themes are even more pronounced and playful.
Waking Life is a wonderful, overwhelming and life-affirming celebration of pop existentialism from Richard Linklater, Generation X's cinematic hippie philosopher extraordinaire. Feeling like a Brechtian documentary or simply a psychedelic dream, Linklater keeps it accessible, warm, fun and constantly enlightening. The film features a totally new form of storytelling with diverse influences with heavy subject matter but retains a quality of unpretentiousness. The best film on this short list.
Monday, May 21, 2018
So few films have any message besides propaganda to buy more and be sold by the status quo on government economics. Everything is a commercial for capitalism. Except socialist propaganda. But we don't need films that tell you they are propaganda. That would be more sincere and honest and wouldn't betray the expectations of the audience, but its only in true propaganda that you can free consumers from exploitation. The audience consuming the worst garbage must be told what they are consuming.
The system we pay into is a bloodthirsty, species-sacrificing, animal-slaughtering, child-raping, Devil-worshiping currency-holding game where you and millions like you start losing as soon as you're born. And your competition is born rich and powerful, already ahead of the game and soon plotting to cement rule over the collective body of our population. This is why any objectively good film must always be proletariat and not a work of self-serving Ego vanity that is anti-human or anti-group, prejudice or one-sided, censoring or censored.
This type of Pure Cinema is found on the fringes of what is accepted by corporatized business media. You must be extremely clever in climbing its own dangerous and destructive ranks of soul-crushing success or be as independent and obscure as possible to effect the most basic levels of the proletariat struggle. As influence spreads, you remain unknown to enemies and championed by the most legitimized revolutionaries of the struggle against tyranny.
The system we pay into is a bloodthirsty, species-sacrificing, animal-slaughtering, child-raping, Devil-worshiping currency-holding game where you and millions like you start losing as soon as you're born. And your competition is born rich and powerful, already ahead of the game and soon plotting to cement rule over the collective body of our population. This is why any objectively good film must always be proletariat and not a work of self-serving Ego vanity that is anti-human or anti-group, prejudice or one-sided, censoring or censored.
This type of Pure Cinema is found on the fringes of what is accepted by corporatized business media. You must be extremely clever in climbing its own dangerous and destructive ranks of soul-crushing success or be as independent and obscure as possible to effect the most basic levels of the proletariat struggle. As influence spreads, you remain unknown to enemies and championed by the most legitimized revolutionaries of the struggle against tyranny.
Alien Covenant 2017 2ND REVIW
This film may not have the entertainment and thrill of Alien 2 & 3, but it its so much more satisfying as a sequel (prequel really). The theme of a Luciferian intelligence lurking in technology ties back to the original Alien and also the original Blade Runner. I would argue AC and Prometheus are essentially bridging the worlds of both Ridley Scott franchises in structure, style and continuity. And why not, when the other Alien films (and especially Alien vs Predator films) really play a loose fanboy level of shared history, thats past, presents and future.
Now is the film about real world unsubstantiated conspiratorial possibilities? We don't know and thats where the fear as an audience becomes overwhelming in a pronounced EXISTENTIALLY human way. Juggling the metaphysics of the white man-created mythology is heavy, confusing, sometimes taxing but Ridley Scott is putting on a master teaching class about our shared human experience. He's educating you on the past. Why? Not to welcome you into an elitist club of intellectuals who worship ego and reject utopian progress, but to speak against abuses of any form of collective human power on Earth or in any kind of Heaven, God or man-made.
And yet there's a grim sadness. A depressed bleakness that highlight's a fragile Romantic soul that bleeds its heart for the suffering of others, rather than let them burn in the ravaging stages of any Late Capitalism.
Dullness & pain is felt in the muted aesthetics of Ridley's interpretation of not only the abstract themes of Survivalism, Cave Art, Primitivism, Tribalism, Sexism, Racism, War, Murder, Genocide, Apocalypse, Hell, Extinction, Limbo, Eternity, Nothingness, Nihilism, Horror, Fantasy, Mythology, Romanticism, Occult, Speculative, Science, Fiction, Media, Art, Capitalism, Socialism, Satanism, Christianity, Deitism, Dualism, Dialectic, Neutrality, Monism, Pluralism, Mathematics, Economics, Materialism, Idealism, Marxism, Postmodernism itself and etc.
Its a leisurely film, the kind old directors often make. But it still has enough emotional intensity, mental clarity and visual splendor to satisfy any audience I think. Its very tame in some respects. Subtle rather than outspoken or garish. I haven't always agreed with Scott's outlook on life and society, but I think he has grown as a thinker and artist and watching his descent & ascent commercially and politically has helped an entire generation mature through the shared film-going experience. And for that I am personally grateful to his work.
I think the film, most essentially, sets up a clever and radically original direction for the series. Whether that is retained as this Fox buyout plays on. I don't think Disney can survive this type of inflation so fast. The bubble has to burst. And when it does, the assets of Fox will go to someone who has more buying power than a cost-cutting Disney. I would love if Scott Free could buy Alien or Blade Runner just so Scott's vision can be preserved not in a capitalist sense of corporatizing with monopolists who cheat the market. But actually belong to the workers, unlike the exploited victims in Scott's films.
Walt Disney left an uber-moral, somewhat Stalinist version of rightwing Devil-worshipping brand of communist Christianity built on fleecing Believers for their money a(donations) and silencing their economic opposition as the true Devils. The Devil is a lie in the sense that to believe the character is to believe in the character. What I mean is that Christianity teaches to hate an entire group (Jews) while Satanism teaches to love a non-existent collective animal urge to murder and rape out of some primordial slime DNA's quest for fungal infection in order to reproduce. This scientific revelation has combined with a previous form of Atheism that now sees all religion as a shared fictionalized subjectivity but unconsciously leaving an objective record of human shared self-awareness. We have a hivemind built of psychic energy that seems to exceed time and space. Thats a very rewarding reality but brutal at times when too much order leads to spontaneous anarchy.
Scott's films vs the predominant American moralism in Hollywood. Scott is English so he gets it as much as any European director can probably get it. He follows Kubrick, Franco, Welles and Ridley's brother Tony. Admittedly Ridley Scott's work often feels too willing to comply with corporate interest and obscuring oblique censorship, but he retains a fiery voice that is Pro-Independence always. He's really the last mainstream director to still work freelance as a prolific commercial level. That may turn many off from the sincerity of what he's selling. But I think he's doing as much as he is allowed so he can help the widest audience while hopefully not fleecing too many idiots who don't get the knowledge.
So is Ridley Scott saying anything valuable in his message lately? Has he ever changed his message to sell out? Remember that he entered the film world as a director of big budget commercials and TV. So if anything he's probably started from the right and swung left as he's aged and seen exploitation and the ravages of modernism first hand. And he's still making the most elegant, technological, daunting and challenging films in the business and only getting sharper. Scott is one of filmmaking's masters and has he become one of its biggest "anti-heroic heroes"? Is he simply an Anti-Hero? Is he too a Villain to the complexion of the changing, conglomerized Hollywood product? I think so.
With Alien Covenant, Scott shows us that we create our own demons. To not believe in God is to believe in Self alone. As this robot sets out to prove he is God and greater than his own Creation, he never learns that he is merely a cheap imitation of his Creator's own faulted Will. Many of Scott's films focus on the blinded quest of Aryan supremacy, the fall of Western civilization in a perverse self-love that pits Self against The Other. Man no longer can love brother or sister, love or relation, counterpart or Self. The story of David the android is similar to Roy Batty or Pinocchio or Frankenstein's Monster or Lucifer, the original Anti-Hero. He wants to know what love is because his father gave him none. The search for "Love" as an abstract intellectual goal and not a natural, chemical, sensual experience is why David feels he must create a demonized, hybridized, most primitive and most deadly expression of his own lonely "superiority" complex. What starts in a factory traverses through space travel, global genocide and finally lab-created colonization of the universe. Scott paints a striking metaphor - a moving mirror painted in pulp fiction signs - to reflect the misguided and totally self-satisfied destructive impulses of White Man's fall from grace of God. His failure to become God.
Now is the film about real world unsubstantiated conspiratorial possibilities? We don't know and thats where the fear as an audience becomes overwhelming in a pronounced EXISTENTIALLY human way. Juggling the metaphysics of the white man-created mythology is heavy, confusing, sometimes taxing but Ridley Scott is putting on a master teaching class about our shared human experience. He's educating you on the past. Why? Not to welcome you into an elitist club of intellectuals who worship ego and reject utopian progress, but to speak against abuses of any form of collective human power on Earth or in any kind of Heaven, God or man-made.
And yet there's a grim sadness. A depressed bleakness that highlight's a fragile Romantic soul that bleeds its heart for the suffering of others, rather than let them burn in the ravaging stages of any Late Capitalism.
Dullness & pain is felt in the muted aesthetics of Ridley's interpretation of not only the abstract themes of Survivalism, Cave Art, Primitivism, Tribalism, Sexism, Racism, War, Murder, Genocide, Apocalypse, Hell, Extinction, Limbo, Eternity, Nothingness, Nihilism, Horror, Fantasy, Mythology, Romanticism, Occult, Speculative, Science, Fiction, Media, Art, Capitalism, Socialism, Satanism, Christianity, Deitism, Dualism, Dialectic, Neutrality, Monism, Pluralism, Mathematics, Economics, Materialism, Idealism, Marxism, Postmodernism itself and etc.
Its a leisurely film, the kind old directors often make. But it still has enough emotional intensity, mental clarity and visual splendor to satisfy any audience I think. Its very tame in some respects. Subtle rather than outspoken or garish. I haven't always agreed with Scott's outlook on life and society, but I think he has grown as a thinker and artist and watching his descent & ascent commercially and politically has helped an entire generation mature through the shared film-going experience. And for that I am personally grateful to his work.
I think the film, most essentially, sets up a clever and radically original direction for the series. Whether that is retained as this Fox buyout plays on. I don't think Disney can survive this type of inflation so fast. The bubble has to burst. And when it does, the assets of Fox will go to someone who has more buying power than a cost-cutting Disney. I would love if Scott Free could buy Alien or Blade Runner just so Scott's vision can be preserved not in a capitalist sense of corporatizing with monopolists who cheat the market. But actually belong to the workers, unlike the exploited victims in Scott's films.
Walt Disney left an uber-moral, somewhat Stalinist version of rightwing Devil-worshipping brand of communist Christianity built on fleecing Believers for their money a(donations) and silencing their economic opposition as the true Devils. The Devil is a lie in the sense that to believe the character is to believe in the character. What I mean is that Christianity teaches to hate an entire group (Jews) while Satanism teaches to love a non-existent collective animal urge to murder and rape out of some primordial slime DNA's quest for fungal infection in order to reproduce. This scientific revelation has combined with a previous form of Atheism that now sees all religion as a shared fictionalized subjectivity but unconsciously leaving an objective record of human shared self-awareness. We have a hivemind built of psychic energy that seems to exceed time and space. Thats a very rewarding reality but brutal at times when too much order leads to spontaneous anarchy.
Scott's films vs the predominant American moralism in Hollywood. Scott is English so he gets it as much as any European director can probably get it. He follows Kubrick, Franco, Welles and Ridley's brother Tony. Admittedly Ridley Scott's work often feels too willing to comply with corporate interest and obscuring oblique censorship, but he retains a fiery voice that is Pro-Independence always. He's really the last mainstream director to still work freelance as a prolific commercial level. That may turn many off from the sincerity of what he's selling. But I think he's doing as much as he is allowed so he can help the widest audience while hopefully not fleecing too many idiots who don't get the knowledge.
So is Ridley Scott saying anything valuable in his message lately? Has he ever changed his message to sell out? Remember that he entered the film world as a director of big budget commercials and TV. So if anything he's probably started from the right and swung left as he's aged and seen exploitation and the ravages of modernism first hand. And he's still making the most elegant, technological, daunting and challenging films in the business and only getting sharper. Scott is one of filmmaking's masters and has he become one of its biggest "anti-heroic heroes"? Is he simply an Anti-Hero? Is he too a Villain to the complexion of the changing, conglomerized Hollywood product? I think so.
With Alien Covenant, Scott shows us that we create our own demons. To not believe in God is to believe in Self alone. As this robot sets out to prove he is God and greater than his own Creation, he never learns that he is merely a cheap imitation of his Creator's own faulted Will. Many of Scott's films focus on the blinded quest of Aryan supremacy, the fall of Western civilization in a perverse self-love that pits Self against The Other. Man no longer can love brother or sister, love or relation, counterpart or Self. The story of David the android is similar to Roy Batty or Pinocchio or Frankenstein's Monster or Lucifer, the original Anti-Hero. He wants to know what love is because his father gave him none. The search for "Love" as an abstract intellectual goal and not a natural, chemical, sensual experience is why David feels he must create a demonized, hybridized, most primitive and most deadly expression of his own lonely "superiority" complex. What starts in a factory traverses through space travel, global genocide and finally lab-created colonization of the universe. Scott paints a striking metaphor - a moving mirror painted in pulp fiction signs - to reflect the misguided and totally self-satisfied destructive impulses of White Man's fall from grace of God. His failure to become God.
Saturday, April 28, 2018
The Running Man 1987
This film is still fresh in my mind. I'm a big fan of mid-career Arnold Swarzenegger but I'm just now delving into its deeper ideology. This film warns of a class-divided capitalist state that has wiped out all libertarianism, right or left.
Quite obviously, Arnold represents the white male rightwing anarchist hero, a total Ayn Rand ubermensch created in a lab somewhere, but he finds great allies in his leftwing anarchist buddies. Ok, they are useless, ineffective minorities who get brutalized masochistically, but then Arnold delivers swift, violent and witty justice to these state puppet capitalists. Its meathead entertainment but true to American conservative democracy. It even questions notions like capital punishment, collateral damage and media propaganda.
Its not as leftist as I would make it, but its a firm bit of ideological fluff from a less enlightened time. It also foreshadows Arnold's becoming a fairly likable republican ally to moderate leftists. Shit, I'd say films like this are extremely helpful to the far left in keeping the rightwing away from Nazism and aware of un-Marxist Communism. While the audience is meathead, Arnold was definitely a thinking, passionate actor with integrity, morally and artistically. If only he valued peace over the freedom to make money.
Quite obviously, Arnold represents the white male rightwing anarchist hero, a total Ayn Rand ubermensch created in a lab somewhere, but he finds great allies in his leftwing anarchist buddies. Ok, they are useless, ineffective minorities who get brutalized masochistically, but then Arnold delivers swift, violent and witty justice to these state puppet capitalists. Its meathead entertainment but true to American conservative democracy. It even questions notions like capital punishment, collateral damage and media propaganda.
Its not as leftist as I would make it, but its a firm bit of ideological fluff from a less enlightened time. It also foreshadows Arnold's becoming a fairly likable republican ally to moderate leftists. Shit, I'd say films like this are extremely helpful to the far left in keeping the rightwing away from Nazism and aware of un-Marxist Communism. While the audience is meathead, Arnold was definitely a thinking, passionate actor with integrity, morally and artistically. If only he valued peace over the freedom to make money.
Rampage 2018
Every film casting Dwayne Johnson has been a fairly unoriginal conservative family-friendly popcorn piece to keep audiences dully entertained while corporations rob them. "Rampage" is no exception. This film casts The Rock as the BFF of a lightskin gorilla that grows too big for its britches til the government decides to kill it. There's an intentionally hokey ending where King Kong isn't killed but joyously accepted as a Nazi "comrade" but the film doesn't trick us. Its pro-Trump anarcho-capitalism that serves to only send America into amoral servitude to enterprising pro-state corporate masters in Hollywood. Fucking terrible film. And thankfully the internet shit on it. Probably because the hypnosis of loving Obama has worn off and the cynical truthism is reactionary at this point in our deep dark night within the confusingly deceptive implosion of Western world bipartisan monopoly.
The film has its mild Romantic moments and it criticizes the government and corporate abuses with baby taps. Its your expected pandering to Leftism from insincere capitalists. But in subverting the crassness you get in other rightwing media, its stupidity hits even harder as bland false advertisement. This is truly a post-Obama, post-Trump American work but for all the wrong reasons. An unintentional documentary of Late Capitalism slave work.
For the record, there are films starring The Rock that I have enjoyed but they were random flukes handled by reasonably responsible directors: the Donnie Darko companion piece "Southland Tales", "Pain & Gain" and, I dunno, maybe a few parts of "GI Joe 2". He seems like a well-meaning meathead jock with a minor artistic sensitivity simply from being an oppressed minority. He's thoroughly indoctrinated Deep South dixiecrat neoliberal who has good ideas but only seems to work in the most regressive circles of media. I guess he's a Libertarian who hasn't embraced socialism yet. Johnson might win a popular election with that status but he won't make a good leader because he seems insulated by manipulative and greedy sycophants... in his own family it seems.
If The Rock made films that were more open-minded, less child-proofed and a lot more subtle, he would have work that equals his immense popularity and natural charisma. He does seem to be getting better and this way more watchable than Hercules or The Tooth Fairy. But, I'm always left disappointed by his starring vehicles. Maybe he is best as a supporting actor, co-billed or even as an antagonist. Something without his too broad "working class" hero cliches. But he is popular among all demographics because there is a democratic way in which he lowers himself.
This film casts man and ape as close relatives. It turns queasy following the heroic quest of 3 ethnic characters VS greedy white people, drawing what kind of a parallel? The races as a hierarchy of apes instead of subspecies of human. Its very racist but in the most covert and smiling way. There's no chance the actors know they are doing it unless the pay was greater than their integrity. But you have to know your history of racism in film, media and recorded history. A film made by white people with a black man telling whites that an ape is his family more than other people is offensive. Ok, maybe I can half-buy it as a tale of African descents protecting the animal kingdom from the disastrous effects of white colonialism. But that insincere reading is so obscured in CGI, bad dialogue, clumsy & timid racial commentary and a lot of pointlessness.
If there's anything redeeming in this movie it was too subtle for me. I doubt that in a video game turned film called "Rampage" that is a combination of like 10 equally bad films.
The film has its mild Romantic moments and it criticizes the government and corporate abuses with baby taps. Its your expected pandering to Leftism from insincere capitalists. But in subverting the crassness you get in other rightwing media, its stupidity hits even harder as bland false advertisement. This is truly a post-Obama, post-Trump American work but for all the wrong reasons. An unintentional documentary of Late Capitalism slave work.
For the record, there are films starring The Rock that I have enjoyed but they were random flukes handled by reasonably responsible directors: the Donnie Darko companion piece "Southland Tales", "Pain & Gain" and, I dunno, maybe a few parts of "GI Joe 2". He seems like a well-meaning meathead jock with a minor artistic sensitivity simply from being an oppressed minority. He's thoroughly indoctrinated Deep South dixiecrat neoliberal who has good ideas but only seems to work in the most regressive circles of media. I guess he's a Libertarian who hasn't embraced socialism yet. Johnson might win a popular election with that status but he won't make a good leader because he seems insulated by manipulative and greedy sycophants... in his own family it seems.
If The Rock made films that were more open-minded, less child-proofed and a lot more subtle, he would have work that equals his immense popularity and natural charisma. He does seem to be getting better and this way more watchable than Hercules or The Tooth Fairy. But, I'm always left disappointed by his starring vehicles. Maybe he is best as a supporting actor, co-billed or even as an antagonist. Something without his too broad "working class" hero cliches. But he is popular among all demographics because there is a democratic way in which he lowers himself.
This film casts man and ape as close relatives. It turns queasy following the heroic quest of 3 ethnic characters VS greedy white people, drawing what kind of a parallel? The races as a hierarchy of apes instead of subspecies of human. Its very racist but in the most covert and smiling way. There's no chance the actors know they are doing it unless the pay was greater than their integrity. But you have to know your history of racism in film, media and recorded history. A film made by white people with a black man telling whites that an ape is his family more than other people is offensive. Ok, maybe I can half-buy it as a tale of African descents protecting the animal kingdom from the disastrous effects of white colonialism. But that insincere reading is so obscured in CGI, bad dialogue, clumsy & timid racial commentary and a lot of pointlessness.
If there's anything redeeming in this movie it was too subtle for me. I doubt that in a video game turned film called "Rampage" that is a combination of like 10 equally bad films.
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