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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While "They Live" is a brilliant not-so-conservative rightwing call for anarchist revolution, John Carpenter's Escape from New York strikes me as pure idiotic ideology-driven "gun propaganda" drivel. Beware a black mayor of New York! Save British colonial idealism! It also promotes white male working class vigilantism and fear-based consumption to prevent urban decay. So nothing changes. It just keeps getting a new lacquered skin to sell the illusion of a democratic state working against classism and classicism.

But I believe Carpenter is a leftwing democrat. He's just being loyal to the pure roots of Western democracy, especially in America's not so young history. The rightwing has gone racist a lot in the last century. But only to match the violent racism that built the democratic parties in America, namely that of the British E.U..

So I'm not even picky for leftwing films or against rightwing films. But the left has always been too moderate and the right has always been too militant, clan-based, competitive, sexist & racist, dependent to capital and material possessions. Hollywood is steeped in a film language and cultural history that is so limited and censored in scope. Modernity and only the most compromised and consumerist (commercial) versions of postmodernist thought are allowed to be discussed socially by the design of a ruling class.

And there's no need to fear the competition of any corporation of private investors and legal or illegal funds to express monopoly on all industry. They may rule certain sectors at certain times, but unless they build their own private army or gain a permanent hold of government, these "deep state" conspirators can pull the wool over our eyes but can never out-gun the government or the people. Because SOME of the writers and signers of the Constitution were great and brilliant people. They devised parchment to prevent the destruction of the people, the state, their business and their privacy.

Now we're always under siege of a disastrous destruction of that safety, but that document provided enough laws to serve justice and protect peace. The world is facing an insurrection of powerful criminals who exist in shadows but they will always fall to America and the world because America puts God first, even if it was once based on a racist, sexist, mythological revisionist historian-perverted version of "God".

Should a small group of elitists run everything? Should democracy be kept a lie, a capitalist video game that only serves the leaders of state? Can they be trusted to be fair and right the wrongs of history's leaders? Who should run the next government? And how do we make sure they are not puppets of more powerful republicans who seek to destroy democracy?

WHAT ARE YOU CONSUMING?

I haven't watched much cinema lately. I'm tuned out of reviewing 2018 releases after the stream of trash in 2017 and I've burnt out on watching older films. I'm not even entertained by revisiting films, although I had a great time watching Batman, The Running Man, Commando and a few others.

I'm a bit jaded with film period after delving pretty deep into the cult of Jess Franco films. My opinion of him is more confusing than ever. Clearly, many of his films are glorified and over-analyzed. Many have little merit after a one or two time watch. But they all serve the impact of his great works, which are some of the most powerful films to come out of their genre, era or budget range.

Venus in Furs is a near masterpiece its so ahead of its time. A Virgin Among The Living Dead is better than 9/10 films you'll ever see. But many films (especially after the death of Soledad Miranda and the death of XXX theaters) are simply entertaining and well-crafted schlock and some are just tedious. No doubt they are smarter and more beautiful than other exploitation films and have more art than "serious" films, but there's an intense sadness in the fact that he made so many films but so few great ones. But again few directors make great films and this guy made a lot of good ones out of nada. Its almost its own genre of pure cinema. I understand his mournful disposition later in life and his own ambivalence to his own career, but I still cherish and honor his actual talent and resilience standing up to the degradation of auteurist filmmaking.

I'm at a weird crossroads where many films I once loved don't work for me now. Mainly because most films are either beholden to bland commercial or critic-serving scriptwriting or indulgent, distracting and stooge-fooling visual spectacle. They have no singular voices and certainly won't challenge the viewers out of fear of not reimbursing investors.

The Millennial reboot of Blade Runner is not a favorite film of 2017 for me but it unsurprisingly has a diehard cult of defenders who are calling it superior to the original and attributing meanings and accolades that aren't there. I'm not even too bothered because the cult is made up of 20 year old's who haven't seen anything outside of modern Western film or anime. I haven't seen any serious lovers or critics of film buying BR2.

We're in an era of Gen X filmmakers and Gen Y audiences who have inherited so much powerful technology, secondhand knowledge and inflated sense of Self, that EVERYTHING is deemed "art" so long as its of the moment and rejects the past and offers a predictably dark but hopeful view of the future. Its so... phony. This is a perfect reflection of the post-Obama, post-Trump mindset. "The majority is evil but WE select few will save the world by destroying it and remaking it in our image". This Us Vs Them shit. Everyone is so distracted, distrusting and maddened by the 1% that they don't see THAT is the game. Media wants us all to hate each other and pay to see simulated violence against each other and hand over control to politicians and corporations and keep being zombified consumers. Oh, technology will save us!

Its time for a real radical voice of social revolution and individual responsibility. Films for the people and by the people. A return of INDEPENDENCE! They've taken every platform we have for getting the message out: the press, TV, film, internet. Whats left? The real fucking world. Let them have Virtual Reality. We live in the here and now of physical space where they can never rule. Ok, they can monitor us, brainwash us, embarrass us, harass us and leave us disenfranchised. But there's still more of us than them. We can't all sell out.

BTW, John Carpenter's "They Live" is one of the real classics of the 1980s and should be a manual going forward not only for independent filmmakers and artists but all of humanity. We are waking up and our enemies are scared.