A Rainy Day in New York (2018)

Woody Allen films are definitely either hit or miss.  This film is no exception; I found myself feeling as if every male character were an impressionistic representation of Allen himself in some way: Roland Pollard -- bored with his creative life and looking to reinvigorate himself both spiritually and creatively, Ted Davidoff -- paranoid and insecure that his wife is cheating on him, when he's really just feeling aimless in his art, as he plays second tier to Pollard's chicanery, Gatsby Welles -- way too much the embodiment of Holden Caufield to be anything but insufferably self-involved.  Ultimately the film was very disappointing, but to her credit the Dakota Fanning character Ashleigh was right about Gatsby: he probably does have Asberger's (high-functioning autism).  There was no clear explanation as to why he chucked the blonde and ended up with Selena.  Indeed I understand the attraction, but -- WHY?  Unfortunately Chalamet's Gatsby is named ironically here; he's not an outsider working hard to prove himself worthy of great society.  He's an insider, progeny of the one-percent, who dreams of something inappropriate to shake up his life.  The fact that he finds what he's looking for does not humanize him.  He could've ended up with anyone who struck his fancy.  His fancy or whim being the operative word.  He seems to fall in love or be interested in taking action with a woman based on how he feels in the moment.  Talk about emotional dysregulation.  The film takes place in present day, but it could have easily taken place fifty years ago.  There's a staticness to the highfalutin social circle of Gatsbsy; the old soul of the film's backdrop, wardrobe and luxurious sets, is a way of saying that all money is old money.  Rich people act as they've always acted, enjoy the privilege they've always had, unless you're Diego Luna's Francisco, and then you can literally afford to discard young college women, even if her dad owns a bunch of banks.  No skin off your back. 

Woody Allen: try harder in making art that strives to be more than a formulaic exercise in solipsism.  On the plus side: I feel motivated to hit the Joe Goldberg reading list, so that I can pretend to be cultured, too. ;)

Doctor Who: Orphan 55

The part that really did not make any sense to me was that we already have life forms that thrive on CO2 rich atmospheres -- plants. So the fact that prokaryotes were not the dominant life form in this episode as they were at the beginning of the Earth, when the composition of CO2 was similar, made no sense to me at all. The planet was deemed "uninhabitable," just because humans and other animals could not survive there. How oxygen-breathing-centric.

Side note: entirely possible to create a drinking game with the number of times Vilma (Julia Elizabeth Fogel) says, "Benny!".

I Am Not An Easy Man (2018)

After watching a few reviews on this Netflix film, I have to chirp in.  I definitely did not interpret this film to be a science-fiction while I was watching it, or now.  I interpreted it to be a sociological fiction.  The women were no more stronger than they are in real life, they simply thought they were and acted accordingly.  My interpretation was that it was just a placebo effect of the attitude of everyone being that women have to be stronger.  In this way, the movie was kind of like The Man In The High Castle, in the sense that the author says he wrote the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy because it was the truth, and that's why PKD wrote his book.  The film is not all irony, that is.

No Beef With Star Wars : The Last Jedi (2017)

I'm noticing a pattern here:

• Snoke has a huge scar due to some kind of unexplained blunt force trauma or accident that caved in his skull.
•  General Grievous is a cyborg because he only has his brain and a few organs left after an explosion. 
•  Vader loses his limbs and needs artificial limbs to function after a severe burn incident. 
•  DJ who is a traitor to the rebellion has a lisp or speech impediment. 
•  Luke loses a hand when he starts to get in touch with the dark side of the Force. 
•  Jabba the Hutt cannot even move without a wheeling device. He needs everything to be brought to him, due to his immobility. 
•  Darth Sidious retains physical disfigurement of his face after being electrocuted. 

The pattern: characters with special needs or disabilities are the villains in this epic. . I like Star Wars as much as anyone, or probably more than anyone, but the narrative suggests a loss of physical body parts or mobility also represents a character's loss of humanity (or in Jabba's case, a lack of mobility evokes a loss of character).  We have to look at that.

People online are treating Kylo Ren's assassination of Snoke as a foregone conclusion.  I don't think it's that simple.  Do we absolutely know that Kylo Ren killed Snoke?!  I have rewatched this scene three times in the theaters just to analyze exactly who pulls the strings in that moment, and it doesn't look like Kylo is.  I doesn't look definitive that Rey is either, but she does take complete control of the light saber right after that.  Normally in these films we only see one person take control of one lightsaber at a time.  This film seems to break that rule by having Kylo and Rey work in cooperation with one lightsaber during the fight scene they have together: she throws him her light saber, and he catches it with the Force before turning it on to kill a Praetorian Guard. [That reminds me, I need to cosplay as a PG for an upcoming party.] . So do we know that Kylo killed Snoke?  No.  There is an argument for it being a joint action.  There is an argument for Rey killing Snoke.  There is an argument for Kylo killing Snoke, as Snoke says that Kylo would kill his greatest enemy, i.e. Snoke, not the enemy Snoke thought of, but an enemy nonetheless.  I liked the poetry of that the first time I saw it, but I'm willing to accept that I might've been wrong in thinking it were Kylo the first moment I saw it. My focus was on Kylo and what he would do.  But on seeing Rey take the saber, I reflected it could've just as well been her.   Hell, it could have even been Snoke's hubris backfiring or a collaberation of both Kylo and Rey.  Perhaps they learned to communicate with each other telepathically.

Now this movie is plagued with vinyettes and episodic moments, I would've liked to see more of.  I'm not going to lie.  Kylo and Rey are apparently dating each other through the Force or at least having some form of Force-infused tantric sex.  You can call it whatever you want, but I'm going to call it Dark Side Flirty Fishing for today in honor of The Family International.  Kylo is undergoing mico-surgery during the beginning of the film, whilst General Hux, the COO of the First Order is busy raging about, "What is the point of all of this if we can't blow up three tiny cruisers!" while a Yorkshire Terrier-sized droid straggles at his feet.  This line got me thinking about why the C-level executives of the First Order are even doing this.  You really have to question the corporate resources of the First Order.  They have their top executive people-- Kylo Ren, Snoke and General Hux on one ship-- leading an assault against a tiny band of rebels.  Is this really necessary?  How smart is this choice from a business perspective?  Wouldn't the First Order have people for this expedition?

We need to talk about General Leiah's use of the Force to get back into the ship after being propelled into space.  Umm . . .  after being in space one would die instantly.  There wouldn't be a two-minute time gap after which she could live, even if she could fly using only the Force back into the space ship.  I know this is science fiction, but that moment didn't seem probable, which makes me think maybe it didn't happen.  Maybe she's now a Force ghost like Luke.   Why does Kylo hesitate to kill his mother, General Organa?  She is much more important to the Resistance than Kylo's father, Han Solo.  She is a political figure.  Why not kill her instead of Han Solo?   Why not kill General Organa if you're going to kill Snoke?  Isn't she the head of the operation of The Resistance?   See, this shit doesn't make any sense.  At that moment, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo starts crying on seeing his mom and thinking about her death, which I can argue makes sense from the standpoint that he's fractured in terms of his loyalties.   But from the standpoint that he wants to destroy everything and start afresh, it doesn't.  If he's really committed to ruling the galaxy without any old political structures in place then he wouldn't have all these ridiculous sentimental ties or would he?

And while we're on the subject, since when did Kylo Ren become such a nihilist?  It didn't seem to be his preoccupation until Snoke died.  Quite honestly he appears to kill Han Solo in The Force Awakens so that he can impress the Sith elite.  So when did nihilism become his agenda?  It seems like an opportunistic agenda he adopted after he and Rey defeated Snoke and the Praetorian Guards, which of course goes right in line with Kylo Ren's narcissistic character traits.  Like a classic emotional abuser he tells Rey, "You are nothing.  You came from nowhere.  You have no part in this narrative.  You're no one but not to me."  I'm paraphrasing what Kylo said, but that line to me felt very much like what a manipulative twat would say to you in an emotionally abusive relationship. Red flag there, Rey!  Might want to stop dating him through the Force now.  He seems like trouble or just troubled.

Rey's journey during this 2.5 hour-long drama was one that I think a lot of people can relate with.  We all, even if not orphans search for our parents in a somewhat metaphorical way, even as adults, we search for our connection to the environment, to humanity and to something that ties us to humanity.  The scene underneath the island when she searches for her parents was very effective at demonstrating her situation, which is a someone universal one.  We might not all be orphans, but we do look for our connection to the human race.  We do look for something to stabilize us and give us a sense of origin.  The audience sees an infinite stretch of Rey's reflected back to Rey in the mirror.  The scene uses a mirror, b/c with it we can see recursively forever.  Each fascimile of Rey passes the buck to the next fascimile of her, until the last one, or so she thinks.  As Rey says, "I knew it could not go on forever."   This imagery reminded me of how some people claim that G-d must exist b/c there must be an original cause.  (AON: I don't believe that argument, b/c I don't believe that an original cause is necessary, regardless of whether G-d exists.  Hence, of course, I was not surprised when it turned out not to be the last Rey.)  This feeling Rey has that she wants to know who her parents are has to end, she says. The "last" Rey looks into the mirror and sees two figures joining in front of her.  When they come into focus as one figure, and the fog clears on the mirror she sees once again herself staring back at her.  She is her own parent.  She is her own original cause.  People say they're looking for an originator.  She is her own molder, her own person.  But we are all like that.  We all must reparent ourselves as adults and be our own parents.  Her being an orphan does not make her unique: we are all persons unto ourselves.  We are ALL people who don't need to rely on our lineage or family history to make us self-actualized.  This quest of Rey's is an internal quest to reparent herself and finally acknowledge herself as her own parent, which is true in her case in two ways: she is her own family of origin, but as an adult she now has to reparent herself, just as we all are responsible for ourselves, when we aren't children.

Star Wars is literature.  I loved the film. 

ex insanite : Ex Machina (2014)

I still haven't gotten to see Ex Machina.Saw it. I predicted almost every single turn of plot. The scenes where Kaleb codes in Python (?) are well-nigh hilarious, b/c it looks like he's just counting prime numbers or something, when he's supposed to be opening files. Uneventful and extremely predictable, though the ending was utterly heartbreaking. Ava is the worst pretend girlfriend ever! If I had Domhnall Gleason all to myself I wouldn't leave him to die in a secluded "research facility" in the woods[*]. That's messed up. Even in Michael -- a 2011 German film about a pedophile and the boy he keeps locked in his basement -- the kid gets to leave at the end, so why not the programmer dude in Ex Machina? Relatively speaking, he did f*ck all to contribute to the psychopathy going on in that household. And what's with the almost-suicide scene?! If you slice your wrist so that your blood runs like Cool-Aid out of a punch bowl, you certainly wouldn't be waltzing around the next morning drinking shots and flirting with Oscar Isaac's Shel Silverstein beard. I wanted Domhnall Gleeson to be Robocop in this film. I kept thinking tha'd be a great explanation for why he spent a year recovering from the car accident that killed his parents: he had no idea that he had unbeknownst to him been a cyborg for the past fifteen years. Now the REAL test is whether or not he's aware of his own consciousness. That's a movie I want to see. [Oh yeah, "SPOILERS!"]

[*] - I just saw Star Wars VII. General Hux can kick the bucket. That First Order speech scene looks ripped straight out of the archives of Hitler's Closing Address To The Nazi Party Congress (1934). I reckon that was the point --

An Excerpt from Dave White's Seminal Review of 27 Dresses (2008)

"Welcome to 2008, an enlightened time when women aren't obsessed with weddings and willing to waste years of their lives secretly pining for male-genitalia-having blocks of wood; a time of assertive, interesting, vibrant women who've absorbed the lessons of their hippie feminist mothers and realized that no man who uses them and lies to them and publicly humiliates them is worth one more second of however much time he's been given. Except in this movie, which takes place in Crazy Backwards Shallow Values Land and where everyone's a moron."
 -- Dave White

See, romantic comedies can teach us something.  You can read the complete review here. He wrote this review seven years ago, but it's equally true in our time.

Birdman (2014)

I regret that I cannot give this film props. I know I'm in the minority of people who can't appreciate its trite imagination. The dual personality (or alter ego) of the actor/creator/director intrigued me; and the dream sequences were almost entirely impossible to distinguish from the real, which is I suppose, how it ought to be for the main character, a latent megalomaniac, whose internal mental drum turns into a real drumming, which makes us question the surreality of music in cinema to begin with. Emma Stone has rightly earned her Oscar buzz with this flick. But then there were side-tracking elements like straight women sharing a meaningless kiss that carried no narrative weight whatsoever, and the confusing unmotivated hook-up of Stone and Norton's characters, which left me wondering whether either of them meant anything they said. But to all these things I have to wonder -- to what END?!