RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yes, you’re right. The best way to deal with today’s Hollywood community is to try to ignore it. The Oscar ceremony is a parade of mostly dimwitted narcissists whose fame and wealth have convinced them that their inane parroting of received elite opinions amounts to thoughtful political expression. And the nominations and awards themselves, especially in the documentary and foreign-language categories, are often based less on artistic accomplishment than on identity politics and other PC considerations. This year, it was widely assumed that the annual festival of shameless self-celebration would also be an all-out attack on Donald Trump, and that we would all have served ourselves, our country, and our culture best by tuning out. Plus a fact, I, for one, had nothing to root for, since I’d seen only one of the nominated pictures: Silent Nights, a nominee for best short film that happened to have aired on Danish TV immediately prior to the red-carpet nonsense.

But in my case, curiosity won the day. Would the winners, presenters, and host Jimmy Kimmel actually go after the president, and thereby alienate half the country (and bore much of the other half), thus continuing the show’s yearly slide into low ratings and cultural irrelevance, or would they do the smart thing and leave politics out of it? It didn’t take long to learn the answer. Preening statements about walls and religious bigotry and international brotherhood abounded. So did tired Trump humor: Kimmel kept flogging that dead horse, and each gibe was worse than the next – but that didn’t keep the glitterati from laughing reflexively at each lame gag. (It was interesting to note that when Kimmel, in reference to the winning feature documentary, O.J.: Made in America, actually cracked an O.J. joke, the audience response was one of discomfort – so much so that Kimmel commented on it, joshingly serving up a faux apology for having mocked “our beloved O.J.”) Also worth mentioning is the winner of the short documentary award, whose director, upon accepting his statuette, piously intoned that ubiquitously misquoted line from the Koran, “To save one life is to save all of humanity.” The audience, of course, applauded lustily.

But the highlight, or low point, of the whole preposterous pageant was the presentation of the award for best foreign-language film. A couple of days before the ceremony, the directors of the five pictures nominated in this category signed a joint declaration in which, presuming to speak “[o]n behalf of all nominees,” they expressed their “unanimous and emphatic disapproval of the climate of fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the U.S. and in so many other countries, in parts of the population and, most unfortunately of all, among leading politicians.” Subtle, huh? Speaking up for “the diversity of cultures,” they decried those who raise “divisive walls” that categorize people by “genders, colors, religions and sexualities” and celebrated the power of film to offer “deep insight into other people’s circumstances and transform feelings of unfamiliarity into curiosity, empathy and compassion — even for those we have been told are our enemies.”

Who were the signers of this pompous document? Martin Zandvliet of Denmark, Hannes Holm of Sweden, Maren Ade of Germany, Marin Butler and Bentley Dean of Australia, and – last but not least – Asghar Farhadi of Iran. Farhadi ended up winning the trophy, but didn’t show up. In fact he may have won precisely because of his announcement, some days before the big night, that he wouldn’t be showing up. His motive: to protest Trump’s temporary ban on travel to the U.S. from his country and six others. When his victory was announced (it was his second in the category, after A Separation in 2011), the audience cheered, and it cheered again, quite fervently, when an Iranian-American woman read aloud a statement by Farhadi in which he explained that he’d stayed home “out of respect for the people of my country and those of other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S.”

Yes, Oscar wears a burqa.

“O Prophet! Say to your wives and your daughters and the women of the faithful to draw their outer garments close around themselves; that is better that they will be recognized and not annoyed. And God is ever Forgiving, Gentle.”

— Qur’an, Surah 33 (Al-Ahzab), Verse 59

The Hollywood version of that Islamic winding sheet hides the true soul of Hollywood. Nay, disguises it. Big screens and TV screens are no longer venues of “entertainment” but places of subtle brainwashing, or subliminal auto suggestion. Hollywood would never admit it. It wears a burqa to deter recognition and annoyance by anyone who questions the identity of the entity it sheathes. And what is it that Hollywood wishes to hide, lest its audiences flee from the theater as though someone had shouted “Fire!”

This column begins with a shoot-down of the latest TV offering of Hollywood in Sharia compliant, anti-American cinematography, featured on Fox News.

‘Incorporated’ canceled By Oriana Schwindt

Published February 27, 2017

Syfy won’t be ordering another season of thriller “Incorporated,” Variety has confirmed.

The news comes a little more than a month after “Incorporated” finished its first season on the NBCU cable network. Deadline first reported the cancelation.

“Incorporated” came from executive producers Matt Damon, Ben Affleck,

Set in a future where corporations have unlimited power, “Incorporated” revolved around Ben Larson (Sean Teale, “Reign”), a young executive who concealed his true identity to infiltrate a very dangerous corporate world to save the woman he loves and quickly found he wasn’t the only one in this world with a secret. Dennis Haysbert, who just booked a lead role in NBC’s pilot “Reverie,” also starred, along with Julia Ormond and Eddie Ramos.

The series debuted to mostly positive reviews. “‘Incorporated‘ is an energetic and watchable science-fiction thriller that posits that a climate apocalypse will be followed by a swift division of survivors into haves and have-nots — all by the year 2074,” Variety‘s Maureen Ryan wrote. “Right now, that date feels like a somewhat optimistic estimate.”

Echoes of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) in which the Time Traveler journeys almost a million years into the future to discover the Eloi (the upper crust, the “elite,” the “beautiful” people) and the subterranean, hideous, subhuman Morlocks, who support the Eloi and then cannibalize them.

“Same ole, same ole”: bad corporations take over world, in echoes of “Rollerball” and “Soylent Green” and other science fiction apocalyptic movies, in which corporations impoverish everyone in the world, in conjunction with the “greenhouse effect,” but whose executives live the high life and wield power. No imagination. Hollywood is obsessed with smearing business and even technology. This mindset dates back to Fabian Socialist author H.G. Wells’s “When the Sleeper Awakes,” (1899, revised 1910) and Fritz Lang’s film “Metropolis,“ (1927) and “Looking Backward: 2000-1887” (1888) by Edward Ballamy, a 19th century Progressive.

A friend sent me a book about movies published in 2005, Movies and the Meaning of Life, edited by Kimberly A. Blessing and Paul Tudico (302 pp., including the Index). After discharging myriad other writing chores, I finally made time to read it, taking a break from my “Islamophobia, with a tentative eye to reviewing it. It is a collection of essays by college professors on the “meaning of life” as they interpret some nineteen recent – that is, modern – movies. All of the movies were produced and released in the 1990’s or later.

Modern movies that purport to dramatize the “meaning of life” – unless it’s a comedy (such as Monty Python and the Meaning of Life) — whether or not the directors or casts have a conscious, fixed idée about it, leave me cold. Many of the movies featured in Blessing’s collection I have seen. Others I have not because their subject matter repelled me or produced body-shaking yawns. Some of them I’d never heard of until now.

The nineteen movies are arranged under such topics as:

What is reality and how can I know it? (Contact,The Truman Show, Waking Life)

How can I find my true identity? (Boys Don’t Cry, Being John Mallkovich, Fight Club,Memento)

What’s the significance of my interactions with others? (Chasing Amy, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Shadowlands)

What’s the point of my life? (American Beauty,Kill Bill, Life is Beautiful, The Shawshank Redemption)

How ought I to live my life? (Groundhog Day, Minority Report, Pleasantville, Pulp Fiction, Spider-Man 1 & 2)

In large part, the essays are written from a Critical Theory standpoint, or as Post-Deconstructionist textual jigsaw puzzles. These terms have “traditionally” been applied to examining the printed word in fiction and nonfiction, but branched out into “film theory,” and their presence in these essays demonstrates that they can be applied to cinema, as well. Critical Theory, notes Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School…. Critical Theory when capitalized refers only to the Frankfurt School….

From Encyclopedia Britannica:

Deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson, among other scholars. In the 1980s it designated more loosely a range of radical theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including—in addition to philosophy and literature—law, psychoanalysis, architecture, anthropology, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, political theory, historiography, and film theory. In polemical discussions about intellectual trends of the late 20th-century,deconstruction was sometimes used pejoratively to suggest nihilism and frivolousskepticism. In popular usage the term has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought.

This is Part II of “Lights Dim on Reality in the Cinema ” from February 22, about the reviews of several movies in Movies and the Meaning of Life, edited by Kimberly A. Blessing and Paul Tudico (302 pp., including the Index). I chose not to create a longish column about all 19 essays by the university professors about these films. In this column I will cite just a handful of those movies and touch on their contents and what the writers said about them.

To iterate, all the essays (written by college professors) are written from a Marxist, Critical Theory or Deconstructionist standpoint. As I noted in Part I, these essays, if they are Marxist – and Marxist interpretations of any realm of art, in the printed word, in the visual arts or sculpture, or in film are written from a “sociological” point of view, as opposed to an objective, rational one – they’re automatically suspect because they are root, branch, and twig divorced from an objective, rational perspective. In short, reality is a creation of the mind, and reality can be anything one wishes to make of it, governed by one’s own personal experiences and subjective prejudices. Critical Theory and Deconstruction both work to unplug one’s mind from reality, and lure one into a critic’s universe via the hypnotic appeal of a degree holder’s “authority.”

The essays in Movies attempt to answer the questions:

What is reality and how can I know it? (Contact, The Truman Show, Waking Life)

How can I find my true identity? (Boys Don’t Cry, Being John Mallkovich, Fight Club,Memento)

What’s the significance of my interactions with others? (Chasing Amy, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Shadowlands)

What’s the point of my life? (American Beauty, Kill Bill, Life is Beautiful, The Shawshank Redemption)

How ought I to live my life? (Groundhog Day, Minority Report, Pleasantville, Pulp Fiction, Spider-Man 1 & 2)

I say attempt to answer the questions, but instead they crash into rational epistemology and metaphysics, or rather create the disastrous centrifugal force of the out-of-control the merry-go-roundat the end of “Strangers on a Train.”

The professors provide brief teasers of concrete actions in each film, and then extrapolate them into their own exercises in creating (not recreating; art being the selective recreation of reality as defined by Ayn Rand; Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness . . .) the reality of each film’s philosophical or moral meaning. The essayists’ exercises in interpreting the “meaning of life” in any of the discussed films typically go beyond any definition of rational observation; we are only presented with their unsupportable assertions.

When we watch a documentary film, we assume that we are seeing a true story and that there will be sufficient information for us to contemplate its veracity. In this film about a former leader of Hungary’s far-right, anti-semitic, holocaust- denying Jobbik party, there are huge blocks of missing information that would have helped to put the main character in better context. Csanad Szegedi is the protagonist whose life is upended by the discovery that his grandmother is a Jewish woman who was deported to Auschwitz and bears the tattoo which she has concealed until now. Not wanting to relive the horrors that she had already experienced, she married a non-Jew and raised her daughter without any reference to Judaism. Similarly the half-Jewish daughter followed in her mother’s footsteps and never mentioned it to her son, Csanad.

When he is kicked out of his political party because even a drop of Jewish blood can contaminate a barrel of water, Csanad seeks out Rabbi Oberlander, an ultra-orthodox rabbi who undertakes the task of bringing this anti-semite back to his religion – including circumcision, putting on tefilin, davening with the congregation and speaking out about his past transgressions in an effort to atone. Here are some of the myriad questions that occurred to me:

Why didn’t Csanad remain a secular Jew? Where is the family of this seemingly middle-aged man – wife, children, brother – and how does this orthodox conversion sit with them? We meet his mother and grandmother – is he single, divorced, gay? How many Jews are there in Hungary, where do they live and what is their demographic? Is the English-speaking rabbi an American sent to Hungary by Chabad? What is the current Hungarian attitude towards Israel? Are they one of the pro-Palestinian European countries who boycott Israeli products as well as their artists, scholars and athletes? The filmmakers follow Csanad to Auschwitz because the grandmother was imprisoned there. Bobby, another woman survivor who speaks Hungarian but seems to be American tells the chilling story of children forced to climb into the toilets and use their caps to clean out the contents, then put those caps on their heads. Just ponder this plan – no comment would be sufficient to characterize its cruelty.

The organizing principle of “The Great Wall” is Lots—lots of Chinese and American money lavished on a remarkably dull spectacle in which lots of medieval Chinese soldiers, plus a European mercenary played by Matt Damon, struggle to repel successive attacks from lots—and we’re talking in the zillions now—of ravening, slavering beasts that behave a lot like zombies. The Great Wall of China wasn’t built to keep out the Mongol hordes, as we’ve been told, but to keep out these digital hordes (who were not, as far as we’re told, asked to finance its construction). That isn’t a bad idea for a fantasy, but the computer-generated monsters, like the film as a whole, are numbingly repetitive, and devoid of any power to move, scare or stir us.

And what, you may ask, is Mr. Damon doing here? Mainly providing a star presence for an expensive movie that was produced, with extensive English dialogue, for the international market. He also seems to be channeling his inner Charlton Heston—his character, known only as William, is stolid as a fence post, except for occasional moments of fugitive charm. But William, who came to China in search of gunpowder, is a formidable archer and a good soul who can’t resist helping the soldiers who captured him, especially since their anti-monster campaign is being led by the lissome Commander Lin (Jing Tian), a young woman warrior of unlimited courage, if limited interest in a hot love affair. (The culminating mood is one of human commonality and international solidarity.)
Jing Tian

Jing Tian Photo: Universal Pictures

The director was Zhang Yimou. He’s a seminal figure in Chinese film, the man who directed such small-scale masterpieces as “Red Sorghum” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” then made a different sort of name for himself with lavish spectaculars like “House of Flying Daggers” (martial arts as MGM might have staged them) and the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. There’s no lack of spectacular sequences or fancy weaponry in “The Great Wall,” the most expensive movie ever produced in China: syncopated drums, incendiary arrows, giant harpoons, explosive grenades, aerial balloons that predate the Montgolfier brothers by several centuries, and an elite battalion of female fighters in gorgeous blue uniforms who swoop down on the monsters like aerialists in a circus designed by Busby Berkeley. Yet there’s not a lot of levity, let alone exuberance. Even the 3-D effects are flat, though I did enjoy dodging one wayward discus. CONTINUE AT SITE

When a blockbuster titled “The Great Wall” opens now at the beginning of a new political administration that pledges to “build a wall” as U.S. border protection, it’s a delirious coincidence. Hollywood’s storytelling and money-making impulses collide with the industry’s professed political leanings, seeming to mesh with stated White House policy. But the truly spectacular result achieved by director Zhang Yimou is more delicious than political pundits and moviegoers deserve in this destabilized social moment. It may even be unifying.

The Great Wall itself uses the history of China’s partition, built in the seventh century b.c. and measured today at 55,000 miles, as the source of a fantasy narrative. A band of Western mercenaries, including Matt Damon as William and Pedro Pascal as Tovar, sneak into China, searching for black powder (“the weapon of my dreams,” as belligerent William describes the explosive that “turns air into fire”). They encounter a monster that attacks the Wall and the imperial court of the Song dynasty, whose elite military unit, the Nameless Order, is headed by Commander Lin Mae (Tian Jing) and Strategist Wang (Andy Lau).

Bordering on Hollywood’s conventional, fact-based Oriental historical epics (55 Days at Peking, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, The Sand Pebbles), The Great Wall adds a supernatural monster element that also respects Asian sci-fi and supernatural conventions (Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West). The film is a model of that longtime business practice, the international co-production, which was common for several decades after World War II, as Hollywood sought to rehabilitate the European film industry and expand its own global market. The decision to co-produce was politically ingenious. East-and-West histories and antagonisms are resolved in the diplomacy of legend.

Protectionist ideology, older than any U.S. president and with ancient, global precedents, gets personified and made into a metaphor. The Tao Tei are mythic creatures whose rapacious claws William first severs and presents to the Chinese as evidence of a conquerable opponent. The Tao Tei are like Ray Harryhausen beasts, updated with digital technology reminiscent of other sci-fi ogres, from Godzilla to Alien. But the green-skinned and green-blooded Tao Tei makes for a wonderfully nightmarish foe, a political analogy that could have been envisioned by a wartime global economist: Its jaws and claws attack first, while its eyes are set back (foresight and reason recessed). The Tao Tei are explained as mutations from outer space (from the gods) sent to punish the emperor, but in fantasy movies monsters are always a reflection of one’s inner conflicts.

The monster-movie script by Hollywood hands Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, and Tony Gilroy (from a story by Edward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz, and Max Brooks) reflects a humanist agenda: The only thing that stops these masses of savages in their rampage is a magnetic rock that William claims for use as a compass. A symbol of what draws East and West together, it also holds all dangerous opposing forces in equilibrium.

As a hybrid of historical, fantasy, and political genres, The Great Wall requires a certain equipoise from viewers. The best thing about this hybrid is the decision by producers Thomas Tull and Charles Roven (who also produced Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) to enlist director Zhang Yimou, best known for staging the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a spectacle still unsurpassed. Zhang is also a true cinematic master (Hero, Curse of the Golden Flower, Coming Home, Raise the Red Lantern), who raises this film to a level that transforms its politics into pure vision and emotion. When the Nameless Order prepare to fend off the Tao Tei, the military phalanx, from drum corps to aerial soldiers leaping from towering parapets, are dressed in an array of colors that recall Kurosawa’s Ran, but perfected. Underground scenes of the army traversing caves dug by the Tao Tei combine the atmospherics of Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal with the tense pursuit of Alien. Images of the army’s hot-air-balloon squadron rising into dark skies for a nocturnal offensive are also dreamlike.

This era’s degraded movie sensations are part of our degraded social perception. Zhang’s deployment of realism and abstraction is a reminder that Peter Jackson’s standard-lowering Lord of the Rings F/X had no beauty. Zhang achieves visual splendor worthy of silent movies — Griffith’s teeming crowds, Fritz Lang’s geometric patterns — plus digital intercutting that makes images seem to burst before your eyes.

We first see Sergeant Rasmussen barking orders at a line of young, dispirited German prisoners of war. The Second World War has ended and the Danes have ordered German soldiers to clear the Danish coastline of millions of land mines planted there by the Nazis. Rasmussen’s reaction to seeing one of the POW’s carrying a Danish flag is to beat him to a merciless pulp, revealing the pent-up frustration and fury at the German occupation of his country. With his mustache and shrill shrieks, we get a subliminal reference to the Fuhrer who started WW II and we quickly understand that this is a movie that will unsettle our certain feelings about winners and losers and heroes and villains.

The 14 young soldiers under Rasmussen’s command are teenagers, obviously drafted by the Nazis towards the end of the war. Their adjustment to the brutal demands by the Sergeant has been seen before in other war films, most recently in Hacksaw Ridge. Despite the familiarity of this set-up, we feel our own tension mount, not letting up until much later in the film which is as much about the conversion of Rasmussen as it is about the fate of his charges. Their job is to clear the beach of thousands of mines after which they will have earned their discharge and be sent home. His job is to regain his humanity and relate to these German boys as people, not the hated enemy.

The success of this film resides in writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s ability to transcend the sanctimony of the previous sentence and manage to bring everything down to a very differentiated and personal set of relationships between the young men and the Sergeant, the young men among themselves and the Sergeant and his Commanding Officer. The very real tension of live mines capable of exploding at any moment adds a layer of suspenseful fear and tragic ramifications of the war even after its conclusion. No matter how many WW II movies you have seen, this is a searing and original story that most of us were not aware of. Zandvliet deserves enormous credit for sustaining the drama of the individuals as well as the moral and humanistic issues that resonate from their predicament. Land of Mine is one of the Oscar nominees for best foreign film – I give it my vote and hope it wins. Don’t miss it.